Episode 30: Transcript

""Nobody can want what you want them to want." - with Doug and Magda

Doug: Yes, that doesn't mean better or worse.

Magda: Oh, okay.

Doug: See? I love the way you infer the best in a tactful situation. “I didn't know theater like that was possible.”

Magda: “Now that's a baby.”

<music>

Doug: <slurps coffee> This slurp brought to you by the number “-6.”

Magda: It's really cold.

Doug: It's strikingly cold. How is it at your house? Were you able to heat the place up again?

Magda: Yeah, I was. It just took a while. You know, when I'm not here, I leave the temp at like 52.

Doug: Ooh. I guess that's fine.

Magda: Well, I mean, you know, what do I need if I'm not here?

Doug: I know. I mean, yeah, you shouldn't turn the heat off. You got to keep the heat on something.

Magda: Yeah, I mean, I don't want it to fall apart. And so I think, like, what's a decent temperature for it to be? Still, though, when I come in here, when it's really cold outside, when I first walk in, the floorboards creak more when it's been 52.

Doug: Isn't that still weird for you to be keeping your house for three years with nobody in it?

Magda: It would be weirder for me to just sell the house. Like, I don't want to be a Massachusetts resident. I'm only there because my husband lives there and has to live there until his kid is done with high school. So why would I leave my home?

Doug: Cash.

Magda: Well, okay, if we want to talk about that, because of the way real estate is in this country right now, I think that there's a lot more value for me to just hold on to this house now than it would be to sell it for what I could get for it now. If I had sold it three years ago, maybe it would have made sense.

Doug: Yeah, and you'd probably have to put a little bit more work into it. 

Magda: Yeah, for sure.

Doug: What are we listening to?

Magda: I'm turning off all the apps on my phone so I don't get notifications. Although I just shut down my weather app and I should have left it up. It is currently negative two here.

Doug: Negative two? It's balmy where you are.

Magda: Feels like negative eighteen. So when I left your house yesterday in our child's car, Hot Lips, I got about ten miles away and then the low tire pressure light came on. And I was like, oh crap. And clearly it's because of the cold, right? But the question is, was the sensor sensing low pressure because of the cold or had the tires deflated because of the cold, right? Because I mean, that's the thing. Everybody who lives in a cold climate knows you have to put more air in your tires over the winter because of the cold. And I didn't want to take any chances. So I pulled off and found a gas station and tried to put air in the tires, but I was not wearing a coat or gloves.

Doug: It was four degrees, which is so typical Michigan. You see people out in shorts in all weather yesterday.

Magda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and the other thing is like I had just come back from a few weeks in Massachusetts, and I leave a winter coat and stuff here in my house in Detroit, but I had been at your house without it. So when our younger kid picked me up at the airport, I just got into the car that was warm, then I was in your ,and then got in the car to drive here where my coat and gloves are, right? So in the car I didn't have a coat and gloves and so I got out and you know those air machines are like, they're a rip-off now. You used to be able to put two quarters in and get a ton of air, enough to inflate all four tires. Now you have to use a credit card and it costs $2.50 for air.

Doug: Aha, that's what you'd think, but I have found the secret place. There is a filling station near me that takes three quarters.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: Which is monumental on two fronts. One, it's cheap, and two, it still takes change. Yeah. They don't make you use Google Pay or some shit.

Magda: If only I had had this problem near that one, because I put in the 2.50 and then I picked up the hose to inflate it and realized there was no thing on the machine. You know how on the machine you can set it for the tire pressure that you need? So you don't have to have a gauge to check the tire pressure yourself. You just set it for whatever you need the pressure to be. And I, before I got out of the car, I looked up what the air pressure was supposed to be in the tires, but there was no way to either sense or adjust. So I just put air in the tires sort of blind, just kind of like tried to inflate them. The light did not go off, but I had looked at the tires and it wasn't, I wasn't in danger of blowing out. But in the meantime, my hand got so cold while I was out there, I'm actually, it still hurts to the touch the next morning. Yeah, no good.

Doug: You can't get frostbite in 10 minutes, can you?

Magda: Oh, yeah, you absolutely can. I mean, this isn't frostbite, like it would be discolored if it was frostbite, but there are degrees. You know, my grandfather didn't have any feeling in his feet. I don't know if you knew that.

Doug: He didn't have any feeling in his feet?

Magda: Yeah, he had cancer a whole bunch of times and the first or second time... 

Doug: Which grandfather?

Magda: Appapa, my dad's dad. He was exposed to something when he was in World War II. We don't know what it was. But he ended up having six kinds of cancer over 25 years and it was the sixth kind that eventually killed him. But he had gone through treatment for one right before I was born and that was, you know, in the 70s, early 70s, and they gave him, he did chemo, and then he did radiation, and they didn't know enough about radiation, and they dosed him too high with the radiation, and he lost feeling in his feet because of it. There was a while in the middle of it where I guess he couldn't actually walk, so he would have to kind of crawl around his house. He eventually regained his ability to walk, but he never really had full sensitivity in his feet back anymore, and I remember as a little kid being told that if it was cold outside and you went outside with Appappa, if you got too cold you had to tell him because he wouldn't be able to tell if his feet were too cold and he could get frostbite.

Doug: Oh man.

Magda: Yeah. Just weird

Doug: Plus he can't pick up his car keys off the floor.

Magda: With his toes. Right. Exactly.

Doug: So you bring up a good point because we spent all day yesterday and we could have done great things with that time. And what did we do?

Magda: Nothing. We sat around and watched Northern Exposure and forced Thomas to watch Northern Exposure.

Doug: Thank you, Amazon Prime. We knew that Amazon Prime and Northern Exposure would rob all our productivity in January. 

Magda: I know.

Doug: But you and I could have been sitting next to each other recording this episode.

Magda: I know, we could actually have.

Doug: Which I do think recording next to someone, it brings a little extra spark to this. So we have to definitely figure out how to do that again when you're here next, just because it's amazing the entropy that happens when you and I come together. Because we just sat there and it was two degrees out, and we were together and we were enjoying ourselves, and like, oh, crap, it's 4 p.m. and I gotta go home.

Magda: Well we've been drinking coffee now for six hours.

Doug: You've turned me into a full-fledged Lutheran just drinking coffee all day Sunday.

Magda: I know. Um, yeah.

Doug: And we didn't go to church. We could have gone to church and we didn't go.

Magda: It was so cold. Oh my God, it was so cold. Like, Jesus doesn't want us to go out in that kind of cold.

Doug: Did Jesus know that that level of cold existed in the world?

Magda: Could he have? The actual, like, okay, are you talking about the metaphorical Jesus? Like the Spirit of God who lives in all of us? Or are you saying the guy who lived?

Doug: The guy who lived in the Fertile Crescent, way back in the day. Was he aware the Earth was even round?

Magda: I don't know. Do you think it mattered?

Doug: And that there was a polar area, the two polar areas that were full of icebergs?

Magda: I doubt it.

Doug: So how do we assess his level of knowledge of the human spirit and the human condition if he didn't even know the conditions under which half the world lived?

Magda: Well, aren't they different?

Doug: Do they have four seasons in the Fertile Crescent?

Magda: Do you have to have first-hand knowledge of what somebody else's conditions are like to have empathy for them and care about them as other living creatures?

Doug: He may have been a really extraordinary person who could perceive such things.

Magda: I think he was.

Doug: Without the empirical experience, evidence presented in front of him.

Magda: I don't think it requires that much, like you don't have to be extraordinary to be able to empathize with people if you haven't lived their lives.

Doug: Right, but you can't empathize with trying to pump your tires full of air when it's negative two degrees out when you spent your life in sandals.

Magda: See, I don't believe that's true.

Doug: Interesting. All right, here we go. Here's our first topic.

Magda: Okay. I mean, I think that the same thing that makes people able to read or write, for that matter, sci-fi and fantasy, makes people have empathy for people in situations they couldn't possibly imagine.

Doug: But science fiction is just extrapolation. I mean, that's why they brought in all of these science fiction writers after 9-11 to help us get in the heads of these attackers. Where are we headed?

Magda: Who brought in science fiction writers?

Doug: The Bush administration.

Magda: The Bush administration.

Doug: The Bush administration brought in a bunch of science fiction writers. After... 

Magda: To help them get in the... 

Doug: Yeah, help them figure out the trajectory of where this was going after the attacks.

Magda: Okay. Alright.

Doug: But that's what I think. I mean, everybody who's written really compelling science fiction, like Philip K. Dick, or even something like Her. It's a documentary now.

Magda: So, you're actually proving my point, right? Because my point is you don't have to have lived something to be able to identify the humanity in a situation that is speculative, right? And what is the difference between...

Doug:  So you think Jesus speculated that someplace in the world people wear closed-toed shoes?

Magda: No. I don't think Jesus did, but I think Jesus could have empathy for any kind of human beings, no matter what kinds of shoes they wore, right? And I mean, the idea of an automobile just wasn't even something that was possible or necessary back then. But that doesn't mean that Jesus couldn't identify with my fear as I was speeding down M14 yesterday when it was 3 degrees or whatever, worried that my tires were going to blow out.

Doug: Right, but this is just my fundamental problem with the Bible because it was written by primitive people thousands of years ago and has since been translated into four or five languages and people who go by it by the literal translations of things are just

Magda: Okay, but that's not a problem with the Bible.

Doug: It can't possibly apply to where we are now.

Magda: That's not a problem with the Bible. That's a problem with stupid people. I mean, like people who are trying to be literalists. Are you gonna get mad at the people who passed down the oral histories of the things that were turned into the book of Genesis? Are you gonna get mad at those people for telling stories? Are you gonna get mad at the people who wrote down the Gospels as they had been told them? Like, are you going to get mad at that? Or are you going to get mad at that?

Doug: No, I'm going to get mad at dummies who cherry-pick the Bible for stuff that supports their own agenda.

Magda: Right, exactly. But, I mean, there are people like that who do that with any kind of text or any kind of source material that they can find. But that doesn't have anything to do with it being cold and me saying, “Oh God!”

Doug: But these are the conversations, right? This is what Chris In The Morning would spend three hours talking about.

Magda: It's true.

Doug: And what we'd all sit and listen to in The Brick over our eggs.

Magda: I know, I know. So, I think the big victory of yesterday was not over the sloth that you and I caged in by just sitting there.

Doug: That was a victory. We definitely conquered the day by refusing to do anything within that 24 hour period.

Magda: The real victory was that we got our younger child to watch the first two episodes of Northern Exposure with us and he actually enjoyed it.

Doug: He's interested. He's sat through two of them. He never sits through two hour-long episodes of anything.

Magda: No. Well, and he's, you know, he's a budding screenwriter. And so I think it was interesting.

Doug: We gotta let him, though, assess whether he believes, as you do, that our older son is Chris Stevens.

Magda: I think he might be. I think he's pretty close to Chris Stevens.

Doug: But Chris Stevens meets a little bit more Hunter S. Thompson.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: Chris Stevens is a much sunnier disposition, or at least... I mean, granted, he's a product of the 90s, whereas Robert is a product of the 2020s, which is an entirely different vibe.

Magda: Right. Okay, so... 

Doug: I should count the times you tell me I'm right, by the way. I really enjoy it.

Magda: I can't imagine. Can you imagine 15 years ago, me ever telling you you were right?

Doug: It's a great feeling.

Magda: Time heals all opinions, apparently.

Doug: This is the Snowcapped Summit of self-satisfaction.

Magda: So here's what we were talking about yesterday that I thought we should have been recording the whole time. I feel like when you are in your 50s, you have an interest in resolving health issues that are kind of borderline subclinical. I'm not talking about like you get diagnosed with cancer or you get diagnosed with something that requires like actual medical treatment. I'm talking about how you just start to kind of feel like a big pile of shit and you figure out things that you could do to try to make yourself feel better, right? And I feel like people who are assigned female at birth, like we have kind of a shortcut in this because going on hormone replacement therapy or as it's now called menopausal hormone treatment is kind of the shortcut, because it's going to make you feel better in almost every way even if you have other problems going on but the hormones are just gonna make you feel better in general, and dudes don't have that. So what's your new routine?

Doug: My new routine with what? I mean, my new routine is wondering what the hell brain zaps are.

Magda: Oh, okay. Do we want to talk about my brain zaps? I thought we wanted to talk about your kombucha.

Doug: This is why, yeah. I mean, do I want to defer to the judgment of someone who has brain zaps?

Magda: Right. So, I mean, all this is new. I mean, the underlying problem is I'm in perimenopause, and I'm in year eight of perimenopause, so

Doug: For anybody who has not listened to anything that we've said over the past eight, nine months since we started this, Magda happens to be in perimenopause. She's approaching year 36.

Magda: Year 37, I think. You know, like everything kind of just goes wrong. And I've been on menopausal hormone treatment for two years now, two and a half years. Changed formulations a couple months ago to keep up with the times.

Doug: Speaking of which, I know you don't feel in danger of breast cancer because it doesn't run in your family and because that study was debunked, but at the same time, do you keep extra care in terms of mammograms and stuff and just keeping an extra eye out in case there's a glimmer of a chance you might be diagnosed with it?

Magda: Well, I mean, I get mammograms, but no, I'm not worried about it because it turns out that MHT, hormone treatment, is actually preventative of breast cancer.

Doug: Again, that's the prevailing wisdom now, and I hope that's right.

Magda: There was that big Women's Health Initiative study that came out in 2002 that was like, “oh, hormones are going to cause breast cancer.“ The whole thing was just completely 100% fucked up. They didn't even start studying women who were in perimenopause. They suddenly put women who were 10 years out of menopause, suddenly put them on estrogen, and then they crunched the numbers wrong. And so it looked to them like going on estrogen 10 years after you went through menopause, never having been on it before, was causing breast cancer.

Doug: Well, they recanted everything, right?

Magda: Basically.

Doug: Right, so and that episode exists and you listen to that.

Magda: So basically, that's why I'm not worried about like, I mean, am I worried about breast cancer? Yes, I'm a woman in 2024. I mean, I guess I'm worried about it the same way I'm worried about everything. The things I am worried about are largely alleviated by my being on MHT. A thing that I'm very worried about is Alzheimer's and MHT is protective against Alzheimer's. MHT is protective against hip fractures and other osteoporosis. It's preventative against heart disease. It's preventative against a bunch of different kinds of cancers. I feel much more relieved being on it than I did before I was on it.

Doug: See, but that's the thing though, my main worries are like, as you say, Alzheimer's, dementia, lack of cognition, forgetting things, persistent numbness in my hands, aches in my hands, whether this cat will ever decide he wants to go out or not, because it's negative six degrees out. I don't know if you can hear him, but he is our guest today. And I'm also aware of you got to check the balls, you got to watch the prostate, make sure you've got steady flow there. These are what men in our 50s are looking at, but I'm not getting brain zaps. And I want to know what brain zaps are. I want to know how they came about, and I want to know whether they're related to anything cognitive, or it's just one of those weird MHT things that's just the side effect of being protected by everything else.

Magda: Alright, so they don't have anything to do with MHT. They don't have anything to do with taking hormones.

Doug: And you've talked to people about brain zaps. Have you commiserated with others who also have brain zaps?

Magda: Yes.

Doug: Or are you the sole victim of these afflictions and are you there for a special... 

Magda: Oh come on, if I was the sole victim would I have called them “brain zaps”?? No, I would have given them some better name.

Doug: Yes, of course you would.

Magda: Oh my god, “brain zaps” is a... 

Doug: You would exactly make that up.

Magda: Okay, so I first heard about them years ago when I knew people who had been on Effexor who were trying to get off Effexor who were describing this.

Doug: Oh, yeah.

Magda: So if you look up brain zaps, what you're going to find is that they're a symptom of people who are trying to get off of antidepressant medications. 

Doug: Or they're a breakfast cereal. Brain zaps.

Magda: Peanut butter brain zaps.

Doug: Part of a balanced breakfast, yeah.

Magda: So here's what brain zaps are: What they feel like is in the back of your head, sort of, you know that region where the your skull kind of meets your neck so there's that like little scoop and the back of your hair, the kitchen area of the back of your hair? Anyway, it's right there but on the inside of your head, and it just feels like a little bit of like tingling or electrical current that just kind of goes zzz! and it feels like it's reorienting your brain inside your head, kind of.

Doug: That's not worrisome at all.

Magda: It is really really freaky. So what happened to me was a couple weeks before Christmas I got what I didn't know what it was, right? Is it a cold? Is it virus? All I knew was it wasn't COVID because I tested every day for like eight days and never tested positive.

Doug: Oh, this is the RSV that you eventually gave me, which I gave my father.

Magda: Right. So in hindsight, I think it was RSV. The reason I think it's RSV is because it came on over the course of about four days, slowly. And that's a characteristic of RSV that it comes on you slowly. And RSV was surging. So it might have been RSV. I think that it was a virus and then it turned into a sinus infection, whatever, and so I ended up... 

Doug:What I had was a virus, yeah. I don't know if you gave it to me or not, but what I had was aches and fever, but no congestion.

Magda: Right, so I didn't do a whole lot about it. I was taking old school Sudafed to try to clear myself up and then that didn't work so I eventually went on antibiotics and prednisone for a couple days that knocked it out. I started feeling better, but in the meantime once I was feeling a little bit better I was just having these episodes of dizziness. And it was very much related to when I was turning my head, it didn't feel like the kind of vertigo where you feel like the room is off-center, which I've had in the past and that's been really disorienting. And then I noticed that it was kind of centering into like when I would look in a different direction. So if even if I was holding my head still, I would look and it kind of felt like my eyes would go one way and my brain was still stuck in the other place. And that was really disconcerting. And then I started noticing I was having these brain zaps. So even when my eyes were closed, it was like my brain would just go and kind of reorient itself. So then there were a couple of days when it was happening in the middle of the night and waking me up. And then I started really... 

Doug: Brain zaps woke you up? You didn't mention that yesterday.

Magda: No, the brain zaps were waking me up. So I think there were a couple nights when I didn't actually get into REM sleep at all because I would fall asleep and then would just sort of feel this like... I mean, it doesn't have a sound associated with it, but it's just this like certain tingling feeling.

Doug: But I so want it to. It makes much more sense if it does.

Magda: So then I started... 

Doug: If Mike would wake up in the middle of the night, “Your brain's buzzing, honey.”

Magda: I know. I know, super weird. But then I started getting freaked out because I'm like, okay, if I don't go into REM sleep, I will genuinely be crazy within a couple of days. And also do I have brain damage? And also, you know, like, what does this mean? And the kind of stuff that you would just find an annoyance when you're 23, like, oh this is weird now, at the age of 50 I'm like, “What if i'm dying? Like what if this is glioblastoma? What if, you know, like what if I'm not getting better? What if this is like adult onset schizophrenia?”

Doug: That would be kind of cruel. You just married the man three months ago and to have a psychotic break during your first winter with him.

Magda: Well, I was thinking that, too. I'm like, oh my God, he just married me. Like, what if I become an invalid and I'm not even myself anymore? And like, you know, all of this stuff. I feel like I've also had a lot of conversations with people recently about my grandmother having Alzheimer's and how she wasn't herself for those last 10 years. And so, you know, now I'm kind of thinking about that, too. And like, I, of course, just relied on my medical degree from Google U, and just started doing some research on it. And the stuff that pops up about brain zas is mostly stuff related to getting off antidepressants. I've never been on antidepressants. And so that wasn't it. But the other thing seems to be, sometimes it's viral.

Doug: Viral Brain Zaps

Magda: I was talking to some other women who also have brain zaps. They feel like it's very related to migraines, also maybe related to shingles. I was like, okay, so now I'm putting this all together, because recall when I had COVID in 2022, for nine months after that I got every illness that came down the pike, including getting shingles. And so

Doug: I mean, you are Montgomery Burns. You have every disease and perfect stasis in your body.

Magda: COVID disarmed, you know, that thing when Montgomery Burns was, he's got all those illnesses so that they all balance each other out. Like they can't fit through the door in the little display that Smithers does for him. Like the COVID allowed them all to fit through the door sequentially. I was sick nonstop for nine months after I had COVID.

Doug: And then now serving number 36.

Magda: Exactly. And then suddenly nine months after having COVID I stopped getting sick.

Doug: It was like a butcher shop full of disease.

Magda: The shingles felt like the night before I came down with chickenpox when I was 12, which was weird. And then I started putting together that these brain zaps kind of feel like having shingles, but on the inside of my head. And that's really weird. Apparently it goes away. I've been able to sleep through the last couple of nights. It hasn't been waking me up, but it's a little weird.

Doug: Now tell me you didn't get that from like WebMD.

Magda: No, I got it from the lived experience of the people on this menopause group, who think that it has something to do with it.

Doug: Alright, because you know now we can't listen to a thing WebMD says because you've seen that video from their parent company.

Magda: No, I don't know what you're talking about.

Doug: Oh my god, it's the worst.

Magda: Is it like they hired a bunch of like 10-year-olds from some place to write?

Doug: No, no, it's like it's this ridiculous cringy rah-rah video urging people to come back to work because we work better together.

Magda: Oh, no.

Doug: Oh, yeah. I'll link to it. I almost want to just let you pause this and have you look at it.

Magda: What do I do? 

Doug: Go Google Internet Brands.

Magda: Oh, “WebMD Return to Office.”

Doug: Right. That's the one.

Magda: Alright. Oh, I'm seeing a whole bunch of stories about how this is… Oh, yeah. This is horrible, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to actually find the... Oh, okay.

Doug: Oh, it exists. Yeah, I mean, they took it down as quickly as they possibly could, although they're doubling down on it, even if it's horrendous.

Audio of this WebMD video: Bob Briscoe, Too Big of a Group hasn't returned. We're getting more serious about getting everyone back into the office for the simple reason that we're better when we're together. We move faster, we get better results, and the executives are going to tell you more about that right now. We need you ready and present, and we need it now. Working together face-to-face helps us create ideas faster and better so we have new products and new offerings for our customers. We're able to collaborate and help each other to be better leaders. We all know when we spend more time together, we end up creating better solutions for our clients. It encourages organic breakthrough moments of creativity, specifically across teams who haven't worked together in person as much before. It propels us into meeting our business goals, and we definitely have big goals for 2024, and we need your help to accomplish those. We're better when we're together, and we need to be our best to crush our competition. 

Doug: “We need your help.” “Implemented and tracked.”

Magda: Oh my gosh, and they have people dancing at the end.

Doug: Right, but then it gets a little grim. It gets a little ominous. This is... Then it says, like, “don't mess with us”

Magda: Yeah, we mean business. Or don't mess with us. What the hell? This is nuts. Oh my god. Wow. Well, okay.

Doug: And as someone who traffics in workplace mechanisms, I would think this would be especially entertaining to you.

Magda: Oh, it's horrific. I mean, I wasn't a huge WebMD person before, but I'm never looking at that site again. Come on. That's bullshit. I mean, it's completely wrong. I mean, it's completely wrong. There have been studies about this for decades since before the pandemic. There's value in certain situations of working together. But I mean, people have figured out what the optimal situation for in-person work is and the market has been going in the absolute opposite direction from that. So my fight before the pandemic was all these jackasses who were putting in place open office situations or even worse, hoteling, when we know there have been studies that show that people work better in almost every situation in an office that's set up so people have their own little individual offices, like their own little warrens, where they can get work done individually, but then are forced into some common areas sometimes, right? Like bathroom corridors and kitchens and central places with machines that they might need. So that people do get the chance to talk to each other during the day, but they're separated and they're individual to do their own individual work. There have been research studies showing this, which means that it ought to be pretty easy to replicate that with people being dispersed. But there are also multiple companies where people have been working dispersed for decades, and they do just fine, too. So there's no reason for anyone to force people back into the office unless they're A, control freaks, or B, are just trying to get their return on their investment in real estate, which is just, oh God, it's incomprehensible. So anyway, there we go.

Doug: So I look forward to your Substack rant on your own Pecsenye Substack.

Magda: Yes, seriously. Seriously.

Doug: So there's a good Monday morning, you know, incredulity for you.

Magda: Right, talk about brain zaps, like really? Okay. So yeah, that's what's going on with me is brain zaps.

Doug: And recognizing that you wouldn't want to work with anybody in that video.

Magda: I would not want to work with anybody in that video. They just, oh boy, that was awful. Okay, so, but really I just wanted to talk about you drinking kombucha now.

Doug: Okay. Well, I finished the stuff that tastes like a pond. I got rid of that. I had to go through it first and I knew it. It looked sickly algae green, but I bought a bunch of different flavors because I gotta try them all. Trader Joe's only has two or three flavors, but this other store has like eight or nine. So I bought the whole spectrum.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And I'm like, all right, I'm gonna finish this marine greens version first. And it was revolting.

Magda: Have you never had greens juice before?

Doug: Not that tasted like a pond with no flow.

Magda: I feel like spirulina kind of tastes like a pond in general. Anybody who's listening who's never had kombucha, what does kombucha taste like?

Doug: Well, there's good kombucha and bad kombucha. It's essentially, you know, fruity vinegar.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: Or in this first case, pond scum vinegar. And basically you drink as much as you can without tasting it. You know, the taste doesn't come in until after you've had a chance to swallow some. So what I would do is I would chug it as much as I could because I couldn't taste it while I was chugging it. And then wait for the onset of, oh my God, oh, I'm going to throw up and then eat a dozen cookies.

Magda: Okay, so why are you drinking the kombucha?

Doug: Because I felt, as you know, our kid worked at a bakery and he bought a bunch of bread home and pies and amazing carbo-laden stuff that I ate a lot of. Probably had more bread in the past six months than I have in the previous ten years. And I was feeling it.

Magda: So you're trying to chase out all the carbs in your system with kombucha.

Doug: Well, plus I'm also much more aware lately of gut health, of probiotics. And recognizing that the health of your colon dictates the health of almost everything else.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Just in terms of how well you digest food. And again, because I'm a person of a certain age and I'm getting marketed to in a certain way, I'm seeing a lot of advertising now about impacted poop.

Magda: Really? That's not something that's coming through my feed.

Doug: Well, I was watching Alone. That show that you lasted four seconds with, right? Thomas and I watched about three seasons of it. And there was one series when one guy just stopped pooping. You know, and he hadn't eaten much, but the bottom line was they were saying it's a problem if you don't poop at all because it becomes impacted and then you start reabsorbing the toxins that your body is initially trying to get rid of. And I don't know if that's part of it. I don't talk about it much, but the bottom line is now Instagram ads sending me a lot of recommendations for impacted poop. I learned a lot about gut health. And even before that, I was eating a lot of Greek yogurt, experimenting with a lot of interesting cultures just to see if they made me just feel better. And drinking kombucha makes me feel better. It makes me feel like I've had a colonic. That's a great feeling.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Because healthy BMing is one of those things you don't care about in your 20s, but when you're in 60, a healthy BM is the golden egg, baby.

Magda: Oh, God.

Doug: Can you imagine we'd be talking about this in this scenario when we got married?

Magda: “You find out the bottom line.”

Doug: In April of 1999.

Magda: “Golden egg.” Like, it's just a lot of metaphors here.

Doug: April 24th is this year. That's our 25th wedding anniversary. I just realized that.

Magda: Oh, wow. That's amazing. Think about how miserable we would be if we had stayed together. Oh, God.

Doug: People think too much about the alternate universe.

Magda: We would be longing for the sweet release of impacted poop if we had stayed together.

Doug: See, that's funny, but you don't know that. It's entirely likely, but you don't know.

Magda: You don't know.

Doug: By the way, do a Google search now for the sweet release of Impacted Poop. We are the podcast that gives you unique SEO opportunities. Please advertise with us.

Magda: So I just want to say that I think most traditional cultures have some kind of fermented or probiotic foods in them. Like people just knew that it was good to eat, right? Like that's why people eat sauerkraut.

Doug: Like when I lived on kimchi for those years after I got back from Korea.

Magda: That’s why people eat sauerkraut. That's why people eat kimchi. I went through my first kombucha phase in New York City and I don't believe it.

Doug: Yeah, but you tried to make it.

Magda: Oh, I’ve made it three times! I’ve gone through three big phases of making kombucha. It’s very, very easy to make kombucha. And it’s very cheap.

Doug: Yeah, but you don’t drink it, though.

Magda: Well, ‘cause I’m afraid to drink it.

Doug: And that’s the funny part. The funny part is that you made kombucha, but, like, no, I’m not going to drink it.

Magda: It’s one thing–

Doug: And then went away for like 10 years and came back and were like, okay, this time I'm gonna drink it.

Magda: You pay four dollars for a bottle of kombucha and you're like I just paid a lot of money for this fermented thing. You can make it by just brewing tea with a couple of tea bags and putting some sugar in it and then dumping a bottle of kombucha with the live mother strands in it and then just covering it with a tea towel and just letting it sit there for two weeks and then you come back and it's fermented the way it's supposed to be and it's got this weird mushroomy thing on the top that has grown that's turned it into kombucha. The process is fascinating but then you're supposed to pour all that into bottles and add fruit juice or whatever flavoring you want to it and then let it sit for a couple more days in the refrigerator and then drink it. I was always afraid to drink my own kombucha.

Doug: And I don't blame you. I'd be afraid to drink your own kombucha too.

Magda: Yeah, I mean

Doug: I mean, I saw The Last of Us. Fungus is going to subsume the entire human race. I will pay $4 not to have to look at fungus staring back at me while I'm trying to eat it.

Magda: Right, so before I tried to make my own kombucha, when I was initially going through my first kombucha phase, it happened to coincide, do you remember with the big kombucha scandal in the bodegas?

Doug: No, there was a kombucha scandal?

Magda: This was, remember when Bloomberg tried to outlaw 20-ounce sodas? 

Doug: I remember that, yes. He wanted to outlaw big guns.

Magda: Yeah, I know. It was like, okay, so I'll buy two 16-ouncers, and then are you happy, right? Anyway, you know, a lot of the bodegas would sell this kombucha, and I think it was the GT's brand. It's whatever the brand that dominates the kombucha market.

Doug: Yeah, it's GT's. I have like eight bottles of it in my fridge now. I used to have nine, but I vanquished the pond scum. Goodbye. One and done baby.

Magda: So it turns out that the company that had been delivering GT's kombucha to all of the bodegas in Manhattan and I think Queens had not had proper procedures for it. So this was the summer and they were letting all these bottles of kombucha just sit on this hot truck and while they were delivering it, they would be letting them sit in the sunshine. And it was, you know, it's like New York City, it's like 95 degrees and humid in the sun and just like, you know, nuts. And this had been happening, the delivery route would stop at all these little bodegas. So it wasn't like it would go from the kombucha factory and be in the bodega, like three hours later, sometimes it would be on the truck for a couple of days. And so somebody discovered, and it was like one of those exposés, right? It was like, you know, hard-hitting journalism. They discovered that the kombucha had been sitting around in the hot sun for long enough that it went from fermented to over-the-line alcoholic. So the concern was that it was being sold as a non-alcoholic beverage, but had actually become alcoholic in the bottles while it was sitting there waiting to be unloaded from the trucks. And you know, like, the bodega owners had no idea. They were selling it in good faith. The kombucha company had no idea. They were vending it to their suppliers in good faith. And so then people started rushing out to buy whatever was in the bodegas because they were like, hey, hey, I can get drunk at work and nobody can say anything to me because it was just kombucha. I think now like they put some label on it that's like, hey, “this may be alcoholic”, something like that.

Doug: It is. It's like, you know, fermentation often involves the creation of alcohol, so your mileage may vary.

Magda: Just so funny. They were getting the good probiotics and a slight buzz at the same time.

Doug: And if you do work in internet brands, I do recommend you stay as drunk as possible. Show up to the office. And then WebMD might say, “being drunk at the office has many healthful uses.”

Magda: Right.

Doug: Well, anyway, I am feeling better about my overall walking through the world because I'm drinking kombucha regularly, I have to say.

Magda: Well, good.

Doug: Because I think people who age well have got clean colon walls.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And I'm not aging well, so maybe more kombucha will make me look less like I'm 78. That and moisturizing.

Magda: Right. Right.

Doug: I got two rights.

Magda: Awesome. I think this is just the age in which we start doing things to try to make ourselves feel better because weird stuff is happening.

Doug: Can you do anything to alleviate the brain zaps?

Magda: Well, if they're related to migraines, then they're hormonal, right? And so the fact that I'm on MHT is probably helping prevent them, but it also may just be cyclical. If it is related to shingles, then I may just have to let my body calm down again because I had that sort of viral disruption that I'm coming off of. And you know, once you've had a virus, it stays in your body forever, which is why people get shingles, right? Because it's the chickenpox virus.

Doug: Well, you already had shingles. Is there any reason to get the shot now that it's already expressed itself?

Magda: Yes, absolutely, because you can get shingles an infinite number of times and apparently it just gets worse every time it happens. But also, the shingles shot, which is a series of two shots, people often have really horrible reactions to and feel just sick and laid out for a couple days after they've–

Doug: I am one of those people. Yes. The first single shot knocked me out.

Magda: I just haven't felt like I've had the time to do it because remember I was doing all this business with like moving to Mike's house and then getting married and all this kind of stuff and the dust has really just sort of cleared on that so I think now it's time to

Doug: Well, you will always invent something to avoid getting a shingle shot, though. You could have gotten a shingle shot.

Magda: Well, having gotten shingles, remember how mad I was when I got shingles?

Doug: Yes. Because you had to wait until your 50th birthday. You had a shingle shot scheduled after you turned 50, and it came up before you turned 50.

Magda: Yes, and then I couldn't get the shingle shot right then because it had been so close to when I had shingles, right? So, I don't know.

Doug: But this is what my concern is, too, because I have to get my second shingle shot. But I have to pick out like a two week period where I can be laid out flat and recover from it. Also recognizing that a flu shot will knock you out and another COVID booster will knock you out. Right. And these inoculations, you have to set aside a month.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Where you're useless.

Magda: Right. Right.

Doug: I mean, how could we podcast?

Magda: Right.

Doug: How could we? That was five rights, by the way, just then, I think four or five.

Magda: You know why I say “right” all the time? It's because I'm married to Mike now, so I'm just trying to answer “right.”

Doug: Also, I think one of the phrases I learned from you... Okay.

...was, “what can I say to end this conversation?”

Magda: You did, in fact, learn that from me.

Doug: I did learn that from you, and so I think in many ways just saying right is a way of saying, there's no reason to discuss this further, I agree with you, or at least I'd like you to think I agree with you, let's move on.

Magda: Well, but I mean, the thing is, when we were married, me saying “right” didn't end the conversation. That's why I had to say, “what can I do to end this conversation?”

Doug: Yes, I do think that one of the goals of maturity is to take right for an answer.

Magda: Yeah, I think so.

Doug: And I've had conversations with you and with other women where I will say, yes, I agree. And she will say, I don't want you to agree. I want you to want to agree. Well, I know you're just saying that to agree with me, but I want you to want to agree with me. I want to believe you when you say you agree.

Magda: “I want you…to want me,” right? I mean, that's what it always reminds me of. Nobody can want what you want them to want, right? If somebody is willing to tell you that you're right, like that's the peak human experience. If somebody else does actually think you're right, that is lightning in a bottle. It almost never happens.

Doug: That is a miracle.

Magda: I feel like people should be happy when somebody else tells them they're right, even if they don't believe it.

Doug: Human connection is an absolute miracle, and that's one of the things you learn in your 50s that you never appreciate in your 20s and that's what Northern Exposure is treating us to. Especially now, I'm so much more interested in Holling and Maurice and Ruthann.

Magda: Yes, yes.

Doug: Now that I'm watching it, I'm... because the old people are so much more interesting.

Magda: Absolutely. Well, that's the beauty of it. I mean, I didn't really care much about them when I watched it when I was 17, when it first started. You know, I mean, I thought... 

Doug: Yeah, you were just all into Shelley Tambo.

Magda: Oh, I was into Ed Chigliak.

Doug: Oh, really?

Magda: Oh, of course. Obviously. Tall, dark, handsome, super philosophical, like, wore that leather jacket. Of course. Of course!

Doug: Interesting. Even with that delivery of his, with his, like, teeth always closed? “Because you always talk like this.”  “Oh, Godard.” “Yeah, he was my favorite.”

Magda: He was... 

Doug: I mean, I'm not going to impugn your choices because you chose me for a brief period.

Magda: He was, he was not... 

Doug: And he and I are often mistaken for each other.

Magda: He was not quick, but he was constantly learning and constantly thinking. And I think that was attractive to me as a 17-year-old. And I mean, it's attractive to me now as a 50 year old, right? Like somebody, somebody who's curious, who wants to keep learning stuff. Like that's who you want to be around. And I mean, that's why the Joel Fleischman character was so annoying at the beginning of the series was that he was broadcast only. He didn't want to learn things about Cecily and the people in Cecily. And that's how they softened him and turned him into a real person as the show went on, was that he did learn things.

Doug: And he taught us to chill out, because he was the only one who was persistently bothered by things, because everybody else who lived up there–especially Chris In The Morning–he would just kind of write it off in some kind of philosophical context and just say “well this is what happens,” and when you talk about the travesties that beset us all the time and the vagaries of the human heart, there’s a certain rhythm, watching the show now as a 58-year-old. And you didn’t watch Fleabag, did you?

Magda: No, I did not.

Doug: Oh, boy. Well, you’ll watch it eventually, but I’ll tell you, there’s a line when one person is about to admit some unrequited love.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: “I love you,” you know, and the other person says, “it'll pass.” And it's just the most devastating line. You just want to fall out of your chair and be carried out on a stretcher. Anyway, what I really love about this show (now available on Amazon Prime) is the people there genuinely support each other. It's a community of people who love each other. And it seems fantastical at this point, but it's the kind of vibe you want to bring about in whatever size community you live in. Because you can't change the world, but you can do a little bit in your own little corner of it to try and foster that level of, hey, you need help, I can help you, and vice versa.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: That's it? That's all you got?

Magda: That's all I got, right?

Doug: Oh, okay. I was being the typical rose-colored boy.

I was expecting a, “oh, come on, really?” And by the way, you're not the first person to give me shit over my enjoyment of Paramore music.

Magda: It's okay. If anything, I would say that it's more millennial than I usually think of you as, you know, the millennials are big into...

Doug:  Well, Hayley Williams is now the ripe old age of 37 and she's seen some shit.

Magda: Right.

Doug: So, yeah, I can kind of move past the rocker girl “I'm so into you” stuff because now she's talking about living through a divorce and moving through the world and wondering what hope we have as a species. But let me ask you this. Now, you have a favorite band, let's say, and they're very popular.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And they're about to headline a concert series but then they erase everything in all of their social media. They erase every image in their Instagram feed. They erase every tweet in their Twitter feed. Each one has got millions of followers and they back out of this headlining thing. What would you think?

Magda: A big scandal.

Doug: Right, but it turns out... 

Magda: That's going to be revealed. 

Doug: You think that because, you know, all the Paramore fans freaked out.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: But it turns out they're just celebrating the fact that they have

fulfilled every obligation in their record contract. So they are burning it down to the studs and starting over. They've been doing this for 20 years.

Magda: Basically, like, they just erased everything and they're just going to replace it with Taylor's version.

Doug: How punk rock is that, though? Kind of awesome. They've been a band for 20 years and amassed this amazing following and they're like, I don't fucking care. It's all gone.

Magda: You know who would be really proud of them for that? Prince. Prince would be really proud of them. That's what he really tried to do. And you know who else would be really proud of them for that? George Michael. Because he went to court and nobody supported him to try to get out of his shitty, shitty contract. They would both be very proud of them for that.

Doug: So that was a cool thing. That struck me as something that even an older gentleman like me can enjoy. That they are like, you know what? It's just music. We have enough money.

Magda: Right.

Doug: We've been through enough stuff. We could just reinvent ourselves and start all over. I don't care. So it seems very Phoenician in that way. Which and again, that's another great reference to Northern Exposure, too, because I did see, ever watch the episode when Chris flings Maggie's burnt piano and Maggie's piano burns because her mother burns her house down and she's 58 years old and she's talking about how she feels cleansed? Because she shows up to tell her daughter she's divorcing her father and she's kept this alive for too long. She's lived up to appearances and lived somebody else's life and now she's out doing her own thing. And the moral of that story is if it's not working out for you, you don't owe your life to anyone. The only life you owe yourself to is yourself. So I am so happy now. It was worth the wait to wait 30 years for this show to come back because I'm getting so much more out of it than I did in my 20s.

Magda: That's good. On that note, let's go. I have to go to Hungarian class.

Doug: This was an experiment. You know, we're going to actually have a few more episodes this year where there is no guest, where it's just you and me talking. Yeah. Half the time, whenever you and I are just sitting around talking about whatever, like the constant conversation topics that this thing covered, I keep thinking to myself, we should just record this.

Magda: I know.

Doug: And I shouldn't have my voice crack when I say that.

Magda: I know.

Doug: So, uh, thank you for enduring this episode. This is Episode 30 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin, and me, Doug French. Our guest has been a very upset cat and the Arctic Circle which has still kept the temperature below zero. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com Please subscribe there for our weekly episode coming up every Wednesday and our newsletter Friday Flames which comes out every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please give us a review. That would be just stellar. We'll be back next week with a guest, our guest Bill, who had his hip replaced and by now is walking around like it's nothing.

Magda: It's another thing, right?

Doug: It's just another thing.

Magda: It's just another thing. Yeah.

Doug: See you next week. Bye bye.

<music>

Doug: So what do you think?

Magda: I think it's good. I think I revealed that I'm mentally ill. I don't know. I mean, I’m sitting there talking about it like, “do I want to talk about having brain zaps?” Okay, I gotta go.

Doug: All right, enjoy.

Magda: Okay, I'll see you later.

Doug: I'll try and edit this tomorrow. And I will succeed.