The Science of Dating
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Hello, hello, hello. It is me, Jan Arden. You're listening to The Jan Arden Show and Podcast. I'm here with Caitlin Green. Our engineer, Adam, is in Toronto. Caitlin's in Toronto. I cannot believe I'm home for a couple of days. In the middle of this tour, flew back from Ontario yesterday and just got in the house and sort of collapsed. Put the TV on, fiddled around with my internet as you do.

Trying to figure out how does everything get hooked up again. I got new internet. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am using Elon Musk's Starlink internet. Oh, cool. You are not. Oh my gosh. I am. I just thought my internet is so terrible in the country and I was using a different company, which I won't name. I've used them all and they just didn't ever give me what they said they were going to give me, which is a measly $30.

MPSs or BPRs or BUMs, whatever they give you. It's nothing. So now with him, I can go like over 200.

Ooh, I like how we're saying with him as an Elon, as if he's like typing in your internet. I think he did personally. I think he saw, oh my gosh, that girl from Springbank really wants this. But I made it in just under the wire. We're going to kind of have a science-y date here, folks, so get ready. I made it in just under the wire because I ordered my Starlink kit three months ago.

And then I got it in and then I had to get a couple of other little parts that weren't expensive to adapt to my home, which is not any fault to do with them. It's because I didn't know what I was ordering for the dish part of it. So I had to get a couple of things done.

which was another $79 all in. And then my tech guy, Stu, and another guy, Darren, because Stu said I'm too old to climb onto roofs anymore. So he hired a younger man. I don't blame him. I look up there and I'm like, who's going to go up there? So he hired Darren, his young friend, and they got it going. So now I'm on the most souped up internet I've ever had out here.

So I had to just figure out because Starlink requires you to have a password. I've been sitting here for 15 years with no password. So if you drove close enough to my house, you could hop on my internet, my really crappy internet. Anyway, I know it's a lot of people will be like, I don't know why you support him. But listen, his whole Twitter thing has fallen through, correct? Yeah.

Well, I don't know if it's official, but I will say that it's definitely in the weeds now because it doesn't really seem like he can afford it. It was like offering all this money. And then he tried to back out by saying, oh, what I'm really worried about is the bots. I wish I knew that there were bots on Twitter before I tried to buy it. Are you kidding me? How can you even? Most of the people that replied to him are bots.

And the guy lives on Twitter. So like, girl, we know that you know. And the bots were there. And so he's like, they misrepresented this. Anyways, so what really he's looking for is a legal loophole that will keep him from having to pay, I think it's something like a $1.4 billion penalty on canceling the deal. So,

Still, though, $1 billion is a bargain basement price compared to the $45 that he's offered up to purchase it. And Tesla stocks are not doing well. Tech stocks in general just not performing. It's a crummy time. We're probably heading into a real nasty recession. We want to go back to the old days. We don't want any of this fancy stuff. Gasoline used to be $0.89 a liter.

I'm like, can we just go back to the great recession of 2008? Because I feel like that's going to be preferable to what we're dealing with soon. Let's gas like a million. Caitlin, there's going to be growing pains. There's going to be growing pains. I'm not thrilled because I feel like we're growing in a weird direction. I feel like previously we were like growing up and now we're growing like a branch out of our rib

cage and I'm like this wasn't how I wanted to do it. You Ontarians just voted in the Doug Ford people again by a landslide. First of all I will say 43% of people voted in this province so that's an abysmal number and of that 43% what like 30% voted PC so really this is not

Like this isn't like, Oh, Ontario loves it. People become apathetic to just be like, I don't care who gets in. It's the same crap every day. Yeah. Because the liberal party in the NDP has been shoving candidates down everyone's throat. That doesn't galvanize voters. I mean, I didn't even know who was running for the liberal party in my riding. They only knocked on my door the day before the election. They're nowhere to be seen. It was you, Jan. Hey, I'm not, I'm not running, but I just wanted to knock on your door and say, Hey,

Hi, it's me. But yeah, so I think that's the biggest problem that I see is, you know, same thing that happened with Kathleen Wynne. Her poll numbers were terrible. Everyone knew that people didn't want to vote for her. Whether or not you agree that she was a good or bad candidate didn't matter. The perception was gone. Her day had passed and the Liberal Party just said, we're going to force her on the ballot anyways. Quote unquote, no one will vote for Doug Ford. Yes, the heck they did. And anyone with eyeballs knew they were going to and that

Nobody was galvanized behind Kathleen Wynne anymore. And so the hubris of the Liberal Party, in my opinion, results in them picking candidates that don't do much for people at the polls. I mean, Stephen Del Duca, he's the Liberal in our province. He didn't even win in his riding. So he's going to go. Andrea Horvath has had, you know, she's a seasoned politician. Four goes. She's had four goes at it. She's had four goes. Like, can we just all...

Like, can we all accept that you don't, it's not working? And that's fine. You can still stay in politics. I'm sure these are intelligent, kind people. But just, it's enough. Like, you don't get the chance to do that in the real world, right? Like at work, you're not like, this isn't the way a job works at a company. Right.

So anyway, so I think that's what happened. And, you know, look at, Doug Ford has a lot of support. He does, you know, he has a lot of supporters and people have varying degrees of priority in their politics.

And if the last however long wasn't that bad for you, if you don't have someone in long-term care, if you didn't have major health issues, if you don't have, you know, someone in your life that has disabilities or autism, you don't rely on funding for those types of things, then a lot of the problems that you hear about on the internet, like that hasn't touched you personally yet. But health is coming for us all. Healthcare is the one that got me. So I'm a little worried about that, if I'm going to be honest. Well, we have the same issues here. We have...

a very similar vibe. Can I just put it that way? And as we know, well, some of us know, I mean, I don't follow provincial politics all that closely and we certainly don't follow that in other provinces. I think a lot of the rest of Canada doesn't really know what happens in Ontario and we have no business sticking our noses into provincial politics. We just don't. So I'm not going to sit here and go, whatever. Uh, we have our own, you know, ship we're trying to sail here, but,

Jason Kenney had to step down from leadership or, you know, he just didn't, I think he got it by like a less than a percentage. So that's not a great showing from your own party. Anyway, we'll see what happens. I, I,

I always vote whenever I have a chance to stick my hand in the air and go this. I'm voting now. So it is that that's the most disappointing part of that, I think, Caitlin. But it has nothing to do with my Internet. So I don't even know why we're talking about Doug Ford because. Oh, can I just say one more thing about Elon Musk's Internet? So I ordered this kit three months ago. I started getting bills immediately from my monthly Internet charge.

So it was sitting in the garage. I was going to Europe for that, the jobs that I have over there. And then I was in to tour mode. So this stuff was sitting in my garage and I phoned Stu and I'm like, Stu, you got to go get your young counterpart, get it up on the roof there. Cause I'm getting bills for $129 a month to pay for internet that I don't have on my roof of the house yet.

So they were in there, right? And I probably didn't read the small print. Like when you receive your kit, you are going to start being dinged because we don't know any other way of tracking you, which I think is a bunch of malarkey. Anyway, welcome to the Jan Arden podcast. That was a really long intro episode.

Caitlin has, she sent us some nerdy stuff. I don't know if anybody saw her social media, but this past week she was at the Toronto Zoo and she took a selfie with a giraffe. I did. And this nerdy stuff also comes from our friend, science expert, Dan Riskin. I'm not sure. He used to co-host a fabulous show on Discovery with our other friend, Zaya Tong. So,

soft spot for scientists on this show in general. And what Dan does is he sends out these little mailers and just a cool rundown of science topics for every week. And just so happened that he sent in this really interesting fact about giraffes. Like the second I walked in the door from meeting a giraffe in person. Let's start there.

Yeah, so had a chance to hang out with some giraffes and giraffe necks, as it turns out, may very well have evolved not so that they can eat tasty high branches off of trees, but for fighting. Really? This is crazy. Oh, typical.

So this isn't fully conclusive, but when I was, so the reason I took a selfie with a giraffe is because I had a behind the scenes tour of the Toronto Zoo, got to get up close with some real animals, hang out with zookeepers, learn lots of interesting stuff. And one of the zookeepers who was handling the giraffes and the other one who was with the rhinos talked a little bit about how the animals that we see today are the evolutionary result of so many other types of

of species. So many other giraffes, types of giraffes, led to the giraffes that we see today. So there was previously hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Now we have like a homogenized few. So they found...

fossils of giraffes in China. And they showed this giraffe had a giant bump on its head and a short neck. It suggests that the ancestors of giraffes we know today were smashing heads back in the day, like a, you know, bighorn sheep. Yeah, yeah. Clonk, bang. This is why they had this like big bumpy scalp thing. You mean the two Frankenstein knobs? Those two knobby things were once horns? Well,

This is a single projection on its head. Welcome to our science show. All science talk. Yeah. So it doesn't disprove the reaching for leaves hypothesis, but they said that as time went on, their necks became longer. And giraffes engage in a behavior today called necking, where they use their heads like wrecking balls and they whip their big necks around. It is really hard to watch. It is vicious. If you've seen, and they are just...

Beat up real good time, but it's all about getting laid, isn't it? It's all about who gets to jump on that fine looking lady right there. Well, it ain't going to be you because my neck is four inches longer than your neck. And isn't that just something that is...

Cross the board with all the male species. And before we go to break, one more thing. We learned that the males like to drink the females' urine when they are in mating season. So there's another cool thing about giraffes. Science. Jan Arden Podcast. Don't go away. We've got so many science-y, fantastic things for you. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Jan Arden Podcast. When I say science-y, Caitlin Green, Adam, is with us as well. It's not just me, folks. It's never just me. No one would want to listen to that. So there's so many nutty things on the internet. I mean, what we finished off with drinking...

um, the, the male giraffe drinking female giraffe pee during mating season. I mean, there's, there's, there's no end to the stuff that you see, especially when it comes to mating and that's across the board with every species. I mean, if someone is to look down, if aliens were to look at the human mating rituals, I mean, come on the lines that people use Tinder, all the apps, um,

I mean, I went down a street in Toronto after one of my gigs one night. Chris and I had driven home from like Kitchener or something. And the route that we took was like right downtown, going past the mating rituals of the young Torontonians. And just it became homogenized somehow because I felt Chris is like, is everyone wearing the same outfit? And we both burst out laughing because...

He said it looked very uniform. You know, the girls, like five or six, eight girls together in a group had very similar hair and very similar outfits on. I mean, that was our observation as 80-year-old people going down the street. We were making that observation. Well, it's always the look of the day. It is the look of the day, but it's really interesting just to see the...

They're all posturing in these lineups, getting ready to go in and have drinks. And, you know, some of these people wait in line for two hours to get into these clubs. I don't ever remember waiting in line. Toronto has...

Toronto has a nearing, a borderline sexual fetish for line waiting, which I'll never understand. I'm convinced that there's some form of masochism underlying here because they'll wait in line, and I've talked about this before, for brunch. They'll wait in line for an ice cream. They'll wait in line for a cookie. They'll wait in line for anything. I think that they get some sort of sexual gratification from it because I hate it. I don't understand it. I've lived in the city my whole life. I'm not waiting for any of it. I hear you. Okay. Well...

I don't think you should have to wait in the line. I'm just trying to figure out how my headphone works here. I'm so sorry. I feel like a loser. Well, I do think when I see the photos, because I only see it on the internet because I don't leave the house. But when I see how...

everyone has these homogenized looks. I always think back to the photos from back in the day when all the men in New York City or Boston or wherever would get off the train and they were going into work and it was just a sea of suits and hats just getting off the train. And I'm like, you know, we don't really change that much. That's right. No, and I think there's still a huge desire to fit in

I mean, you still hear that story time and time again where kids come home where they feel like they haven't fit in or they don't have the right clothes or the right sneakers or the right jeans. Thank God I went to a school. You know, there wasn't a lot of kids. I know some of you guys probably went to school and didn't know who graduated with you until graduation.

Until you saw people go up and get their diploma, you're like, never saw him before. He's cute. But for me, it was 42 kids and we knew each other so well because we'd been on the school bus pretty much every day for a decade. But just that whole idea of fitting in, I didn't have to go through that, fitting in.

And they talk about people on their phones. It's funny that you bring this up, Caitlin, because I know exactly what photographs that you're kind of referring to of that era, whether it's the 1850s or the 1920s, there's kind of a vibe going on. Remember top hats at one point were like the thing to have.

But anyway, I just remember, you know, somebody was making these vile remarks about kids staring down at their phones, which we all do. I do. I'm not a kid. I stare down at my phone four or five, six hours a day. Well, they showed these people on a train coming into Boston to go to work and they all had newspapers and you couldn't see them because of their newspapers were flipped open wide and people were just like, it's a fad. It'll go away. Well, it just turned into something else.

Yeah, I mean, that's why I never understand. But there is just, you know, people always want to vilify a different generation than their own. And so this just kind of persists, I'm sure. I'm fascinated to know what I'm going to be doing. Like, what am I going to be thinking when I'm older? Like, what kind of behavior from younger generations...

that is not even a thing now or close to it is going to make me go, what in the world is happening? Yeah. And a lot of it's cyclical because we see things coming and going in rounds. I mean, we all used to make jokes about mom jeans. I remember this SNL skit Kristen Wiig was doing with Maya Rudolph and they were killing themselves like mom jeans.

And it was the high waisted great that every young person is wearing because they've got a little waist, they've got a flat tummy and they're in the mom jeans. And by God, if you wore hipsters, they'd be like, oh my God, I can't believe she's still wearing those. Sticking with the mating thing, male frogs. And this is from Riskin's Weekly Report.

of people that go into the music business, and I've seen this happen. Guys, why are you in a band? To meet girls. Simple as that. Well, he's broadened that idea of

Frogs, like frogs join a choir. They basically, when you hear that ribbit, ribbit, ribbit at night, that sing-songy, like when you're at summer camp and you hear that, that chorus of frogs from a distant pool, well, they're mating. They're trying to get girls. And Riskin went on to say from stuff that he'd looked up, they isolated the frog calls from

And they're performing laboratory playbacks to female frogs to see what it was signaling. And it's that very same thing. They felt like they had way better chances of singing these songs and getting the girls in. So it was basically a frog version of a boy band, which is super cute. That's funny. When the group is hitting the same notes...

the females are more receptive to all the frog sounds. So it's like a barbershop quartet or, you know, or it's like BTS. And so when they're all in harmony, the female frogs are listening. They're like that one guy in pitch doesn't really do anything for me, but the group of them together over there on that pond, I might go take a look. And so again, it all just comes down to mating. It's like walking through a waft of cologne on game street. Yeah.

It's like five different guys together that have all these. It is something else. It's like going into a, what's that store? We've talked about that before.

that always says they used to have the cologne in the store? Abercrombie? Yes, Abercrombie and Fitch. They intentionally sprayed so much cologne because I had a friend who worked there. And they would have to go through and circulate the store with like an aerosol spray of their super cheap cologne or perfume. And then they would push it with fans out into the walkway of the Eden Center. And when you walked past, you just got hit with it. And it was a huge turnoff for me, but people liked it back in the day.

Well, it's never going to end. But I do think the way that people, human beings especially, meet girls or meet guys or meet girls, meeting someone that you're attracted to,

I think there's always going to be some confusion of what works and what doesn't work. I don't know. We've all kind of heard lines. We've all had drinks bought for us. Those four guys over there. I remember being in my 20s and we would just be in disbelief that somebody was looking at our table at the Westgate Lounge, just on the fringes of downtown Calgary, sending us over, get this,

those three gentlemen there. And we'd look over and you'd see these three guys like looking at you with their glasses and you get a pitcher of draft beer. Yeah, they sent you a pitcher of draft beer. Oh my God. Thank you so much. And we were actually drinking Mai Tais, but I guess...

You guys did your research. What's the weirdest line you've ever had, Caitlin? Have you ever had, I mean, you had to have had in university some classic. Yeah. Like, like, I mean, the worst that I heard consistently would be like guys asking you like where you worked out as a way to like, like an opening line to try to compliment your figure. I've never heard that. I wonder why.

I'd be like, where do you work out? And then you'd be like, I don't work out. I don't believe you. And you're just like, I just want to kill myself right now listening. Like, it's just so bad. I, as you might imagine, was not terribly receptive to those types of advances. And I was not shy to let someone know that this was not going to go anywhere. Right.

Um, so that was kind of like, I can, that I remember hearing a few times and being like, this is awful. You're embarrassing yourself.

Kyle and I were friends, so we already had like a bit of an inroad there. I'm terrible. Like I make fun of like roasting someone is my love language. So I'm like, if I'm making fun of you, then we have a good chance of hitting it off. And if you can take it. Oh, I get it. Yeah. I love it. Well, you're listening to the Jan Arden podcast. We're going to talk about trees when we come back because they think they found the oldest one in Chile. So, and I love trees. So we're going to talk about that. Don't go away.

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Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. You're really good at that. I know, it's kind of unsettling. It is unsettling. I loved that sound. It reminds me of summer camp and it reminds me of laying in a tent. My mom and dad had a tent trailer, which for some reason no one really ever figured out how to put up. Like my dad, they fought every day.

every time, you know, three kids, a tent trailer, those wing things come out. The stove is somehow underneath one of the beds and the plastic plates are there. And you've got your little Coleman Bunsen burnery thing. I don't know. It just was always a fight. Anyway, it brings me back.

to those sounds at night and to the, I don't know, it's a, it's a fond memory, even though they fought, it was fun going camping, getting back to human rituals. And I was talking to Caitlin about, you know, what's the weirdest thing being sent drinks or whatever. My friend, Teresa and I, yes, Teresa, I'm telling the story.

For some reason, our parents let four of us go to Maui after we graduated high school from Springbank Community High School. I remember the flights and the accommodations being just over $300. I kid you not. 40 years ago, right? 42 years ago. So we looked 12. We looked so young. I look back at pictures and I'm like, Teresa, how did they even service in the bars? And we were old enough to be served drinks in Hawaii. It was 18 years old.

So these guys, we didn't get drinks brought to us. This guy came over. He was older, probably 19 or 20. And in front of Teresa, who was tall, blonde, so pretty, puts this line of cocaine in front of her in this restaurant. We were sitting in a restaurant. Oh, wow. And he's like, yeah, let's do it. Come on. She took the back of her hand. She goes, I'm just going to...

And she swept it off onto the floor. And he, you know, just flipped out. He just thought we were... You guys are idiots. Oh. Oh, my gosh. And what year again is this? 1980. 1980. Okay. So, you know...

Of the time, in my mind, I'm like, yeah, Hawaii, 1980. Okay, maybe this all kind of like in a dark way checks out. We still talk about it. No pun intended, on the nose. Well, I just remember how upset we were for the rest of the night. We were so naive. I don't think Teresa and I had seen anything but people hot knifing at home.

John Bushel's house parties, you know, people wrecking their mother's silverware. And I, John...

and just, you know, putting that little chunk of hash, welcome to the science show, and using like an old plastic pop bottle to make sure you encapsulated all the smoke billowing up from the hot knives. But anyway, there is some strange stuff going on. I have to say I'm glad that it has sort of gone to apps, but we're moving on, as promised, before the break.

I do think that that is, I'm happy that he did that though, because this is a story that you have for the rest of your life.

Well, it was unsettling. It was upsetting. We didn't know what to do. We wouldn't have known to snort it up. And then Teresa said afterwards, "Was that cocaine?" I said, "Yeah, that was cocaine." And I really didn't know much about it either. But yeah, he wasn't doing it to be mean. It was obviously a pickup thing. Of course. And he'd obviously had success with it before.

He'd obviously had a lot of it himself. This is a decision fueled by the very substance that he put down on your table. But if someone was to do that to me now, I'd be like, 911. I would laugh so hard. Although I have seen it left behind in washrooms very frequently. Left behind? So I will say that.

Yeah, like I think I couldn't tell. I think somebody, I think a guy tried to leave that for me in a bathroom that I was heading into because we had been waiting in line for the bathroom so long. This was at a very popular... He was timing it out for you, Caitlin? Yeah.

Well, it was a popular club in New York that I was at and it was there on the counter when I went in to the bathroom. And it was individual stalls, right? So it's not like a men's room and then a female's room. Everyone's waiting in line for these stalls. And the stalls have their own sinks in there. So it's a very self-contained room. I'm going to say I don't mind that.

Same. Very considerate. I like it. But then when I left, like when I'm going in, I ended up going into the same stall that he was going into just because of the way the line was sort of like stationed. And he kind of winked at me and I just was like drunk so I didn't really pay attention to it. And then I went in and there was sitting there and I was like, oh, someone forgot their nose present. And I just like went pee and left. Nose present. And then I told my friends and they were like, I bet he left that for you. Yeah.

And I was like, oh, really? And this is a very, again, very popular glitzy nightclub in New York. And I was like, this is such a New York moment for me. Like, I feel so cool. What a cool time for me to have. But I just saw it and went, yep, that's sitting there. And then I just went to the bathroom and kept on moving.

Well, I'm sure somebody else came in behind you and was like, oh, cool. I don't know. Maybe drugs were actually what they were back in the day. But I'm telling you right now to anyone listening to this, I highly do not recommend drugs.

doing any kind of drug left for you in a bathroom counter. I mean, folks, we are dealing with some dark, dark drug days right now. And people are cutting things with everything under the sun. So anyway, just as a disclaimer, we're not co-signing on this, but it's great story value. Yeah, these were for many a year ago. And we were talking, if you've just joined us, about kind of

mating rituals across the board, human beings probably being the strangest. It makes giraffe's necks look kind of tame in comparison to

to what people will go through to have sex with somebody else. Jan, did you ever have someone give you like flowers in a bar or nightclub? Yes. I got flowers all the time. Yeah. So this is a weird one to me because the man comes in with like the big green bucket of roses, right, to nightclubs. And then people will buy you multiple flowers or one or whatever. And then you carry it around for the whole night. Right.

And if it's somebody who you didn't want to buy you the flower, it's this like sad reminder that like this person came up and you had this awkward interaction and now they're watching you carry this flower around the bar. It's awful. It's an awful decision. Never do this people. If this is still a thing that happens in nightclubs, men, women, whoever don't buy someone one of these flowers unless it's already. I haven't seen that for years. I haven't seen it for years. The white, the white industrial bucket is,

With all the individual flowers. They were a bucket at the time because I remember the hippopotamus club in North Shore Vancouver, North Vancouver. And, you know, if you were chatting to a fella most of the night and they figured that this rose was going to be, this was going to be the thing that tipped the scales.

It's this $1 flower. Yeah. It's crazy. So now you've got it. You've poked yourself in the thumb three times with the thorn and you're like, okay, now I'm bleeding and I'm really not going to go home with you. So there you have it. Someone bought me like a few of them.

And then I was kind of like, thanks. And then I gave them to a bunch of my girlfriends because I'm like, I'm not going to carry around like five of these things at this bar. And then confronted me. And I was like, well, you can have them back.

I was like, you just gave them to your friends. I was like, it is early. This is not last call. We confronted you. Yeah. I was like, he gave them to me at like 11. That's like the start of the night. So what I'm saddled with carrying around these five damp flowers until two in the morning. Like I'm not doing this.

it's very just logistically this was not good so i was like you should please take these back and give them to someone else you think this is going to work on because it's not me oh my god it's awkward it's all so awkward and that's why i think i recall it's the recall that i that i'm i i just i can't get past someone coming up to you and saying well i can't even believe you didn't keep them gave them to your friends

He kind of thought it was like a funny follow-up, but he was like, you just gave it to all of your girlfriends. I was like, what did you think I was going to do with them? Carry them around until two in the morning? Like what is going on here? We're just on our way to home since to buy a vase, but thank you for asking. Yeah.

I should have said that. Oh, Jan, I should have said that. Well, you can use it now. Well, we are going to talk about the oldest tree. Like I swear to God, this was important that people knew this. This was a public service announcement. Thank you. You're welcome. You're listening to the Jan Arden podcast. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Jan Arden Podcast. Caitlin Green, Adam, we're all here and we're so happy to be here. It's episode 1770 and still season one. Something like that. Okay. World's oldest tree. Enough of dating rituals because that could be a whole season of ridiculous, ridiculous

Ridiculousness. Because, you know, we're all guilty. We've all made errors in thinking that we were wanted and it's a tough thing. So anyway, oldest dream. Approaching people cold at a bar is hard work. So shout out to everyone who's done it. And that's why you drink. That's why people drink.

It's like, I mean, my Teresa and I going back to the cocaine on the bathroom, we stood at school dances, a whole dance and no one would dance with us. No one ever asked us. So we would always dance together until her dad cut his way through the small crowd and forced us into the pickup truck to take us home because it was nine o'clock. So anyway, she's been happily married to the greatest guy, two great kids. I am still alone. So scientists in Chile, we're just moving on.

But it's self-inflicted. It's my choice. My choice. Ribbit. Scientists in Chile think they may have found the oldest tree in the world. This interests me so much. Caitlin brought this story in.

It's about 30 clicks from the west coast of South America. So it would make sense. It's down there hiding away. It's not like sitting in New York because God knows someone would have cut it down for a coffee table by now. Chili's Alerce Costero National Park. If I've said that wrong, please forgive me. It's A-L-E-R-C-E. It's an Alerce tree. It could be Alerce. Yeah.

See, go with Caitlin. Maybe an alert shade tree. No, I probably don't know. I've just added an accent. It's estimated, drum roll please, Adam, to be 5,400 years old. As old as when humans invented writing. Whoa. What? 5,400 years old. Yeah. Trees are the superior beings. The end. Oh, God.

So imagine writing was just being invented. People weren't communicating in the written language. This tree has seen it all. It's in a cool, damp ravine, which is where we all want to be most days. It's been protected from fires, obviously. And it has the current title holder for it's the Methuselah.

um of trees no it's it's the current title holder for oldest tree is methuselah a named tree it's a bristlecone pine located in eastern california that was previously recorded at just over 4800 years of annual growth ring so that's how they tell and then they found this big boy down in chile and uh methuselah was dethroned oh no so i know

But it's pretty cool. So yeah, this specific tree is, they said it's partly dead, which wouldn't you be at 5,400 years old? With a fallen crown and even some new trees growing out of its nooks and crannies, making traditional growth rings tricky to line up. So it could be even older. Yeah.

That's just, it's unreal. It's just unreal. I really think they're so beautiful. You know, you fly into Alberta and you look down at thousands of kilometers of just dirt, prairies, like obviously they're growing things. But at one point, this entire country was covered in trees. We've talked about this before many times.

years ago on this show, just clearing trees, what our grandparents and great-grandparents had to do to farm here. They had to clear trees. It just about killed them. It just about killed them and killed their livestock to pull stumps out so they could fricking plant oats and wheats and all that stuff. So to see a tree like that, that has survived, I live in a forest. I'm grateful for it every day. I worry about fire every summer. I am surrounded by

you know, choking smoke at some point in the summer, part of British Columbia is on fire or part of Alberta is on fire. Um, I just, it's, it's scary to think of what a fire would do coming through here. And I'm sitting, I always saw it. It was like so cool. Cause I had a, an arborist that came to look at trees around my house. And he told me probably 10 years ago that I had a couple of trees here that he felt were like 180, 190 years old. And I was like, what?

He goes, yeah, they're Douglas fir. And he said, they can live a long time if they're just left alone. Yeah. But then you think about these ones. What? You think about these two trees, 5,400 years old. See, now you've inspired me. I want to go down there and look at this tree, Caitlin, and I'm not kidding you. Yeah, I bet. I would take a trip to go look at this tree.

The Methuselah is a little closer, like Eastern California is a little closer to you. So I would say maybe start there with 4,800 because you could just, that's a hop, skip and a jump. Well, I've always wanted to see the redwoods. I mean, I see pictures from the 60s of people standing beside their car and camper next to a redwood tree and it looks fake. It looks like, how is that possible? You know, trees that are,

I mean, you hear about people camping up there to try and keep old growth forests from being cut down. And we do have some of those trees that are sort of inching up towards a thousand years old on the West Coast of Canada, like on the island of...

And there's some really, really old trees. Oh, I wish we would just stop cutting them down. I was just going to say, I might send you a book, actually. It's called The Overstory. I've read it. It is my favorite book of all time. You did? Yep. Oh, is it really? You're making a series. I love it.

No, they are not. Yes, they are. They are presently do a good job. Caitlin, the first thing that came into my mind was how are they going to, it's, it's eight or nine stories that converge and it's all about to do with a tree. Uh, one in particular just pulled up my heartstrings about this family living on a farm and this tree being planted and all the generations watching this tree in the backyard grow.

And how difficult it was, you know, for finally that last generation to lose this farm, to have to move and to leave that tree behind. That was, you know, a great grandfather's tree that is now 160 years old. Yes, please read it, folks. The Overstory is a fascinating book. It's beautifully written.

And you're giving me the final... Do I have to say goodbye, Adam? No, you have two minutes. Two minutes. Yeah, they're making a series. How are they going to do it? I'm so excited. I have no idea. I don't know how you... It's just going to be so hard to capture the way that that book was written because it's not a short book. What triggered that when I said people living up in the trees trying to keep them from being cut down? It was all the...

No, it was just really talking about the age of these trees and the fact that when you read the book, I mean, I was already inclined towards like loving trees anyways. But you really, you notice them in your life and you notice that we share a ton of DNA with trees. You notice that they have their own little community, that they share information with each other through their root system. They hold hands underground. They hold hands.

They share nutrients and, and, you know, they're kind of just these perfect wise old creatures. And if you ever watch time-lapse cameras of plants moving, moving towards sunlight, moving around, you know, like there's way more going on. And that's why it's called like the overstory because it's the difference between the overstory and the understory, what we see, what we don't see. Zaya Tong's been on with us before talking about the reality bubble, like how we live in this one view world, but there's so many other worlds that we occupy. Like,

It's a very, very interesting book, both philosophically and just what's actually happening in it as well. So they have a lot to undertake. That's a difficult, I wouldn't want to be in charge of that series. It's going to be a tough one. I can't imagine them doing it justice, but fingers crossed. Plant a tree. I need to find this out. Plant a tree. And you know what they say, the best time to plant a tree is 15 years ago.

So just before we wrap things up, I planted 16 fruit trees over where my parents' house was. And six of them have not made it due to the deer ripping them apart, weather. We had a crap winter. They were young trees. Anyway, I now have an orange snow fence around them.

And I went and checked them this morning. As soon as I got home, I put on my slippers, beelined it out there. My rubber boots, actually. I took my slippers off. I don't want people to think I'm a crazy lady. And yeah, they're still, they're growing. They're going to make it. Anyway, Jan Arden Podcast, Caitlin, Adam, and thank you for listening. Subscribe to us. This is a potpourri show today, folks. Dating, trees, giraffes, science. Cocaine. Giraffe urine. Oh my God. We'll see you next week. Toodly-doo. Toodly-doo.

This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.