Special Guest Interview With Rob Dunn Author Of Never Home Alone & More

The Dude Grows Show

Home & Garden, Leisure

4.8 • 605 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Scotty Real Is Hanging Out With Rob Dunn. He is a biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University. He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He is quickly becoming known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists in arthropod surveys and bacterial flora studies. His projects include studies of belly button biodiversity, mites that live on human faces, ants in backyards, and fungi and bacteria in houses. Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009) The Wild Life of Our Bodies (HarperCollins Publishers, 2011) The Man Who Touched His Own Heart (Little Brown, February, 2015), a biography of Werner Forssmann Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future (Little, Brown, 2017) Never Home Alone (Basic Books, 2018)

Transcript

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0:00.0	What is up, y'all?
0:11.7	And I am super psych today.
0:14.8	You know, I love reading.
0:16.2	Actually, I won't say reading.
0:17.9	I love falling asleep to my audible books.
0:20.1	And these authors become my
0:21.7	heroes. They teach me things. They get me thinking. They get me excited about new things. And my
0:27.8	latest hero, Mr. Rob Dunn. What's up, brother? Oh, great to see you, Scotty. Thanks for having me on.
0:34.2	Thank you, man. I really love your books. I love them because the overall theme or what I get
0:41.9	out of them at the end is it hasn't all been done. I know a lot of people like to think it's all
0:47.3	been done. Everything's been discovered. It hasn't. As a matter of fact, with all like, with what
0:52.9	we're going to talk about microbes and even just the environment in general, it's a very new field of study. And there's so much to learn.
1:02.9	Yeah. I mean, I think that when I was a, when I was a college student, I imagined science was kind of done.
1:08.9	Yeah. But if I was lucky, I would get, you know, to go, I would keep studying science and I could work out some of those details. Right. But other people hadn't figured out. And it took me a decade to realize, like, most of the big stuff is not figured out yet. And we have just like these little, you know, little lighters to light our way. And most of it's
1:28.2	totally unknown. And the more I study, the more obvious that becomes to me and my colleagues
1:34.8	that we're still pretty ignorant. Yeah. I mean, I like Paul Stammett's. And I've heard him,
1:39.9	I think I was listening to him on Joe Rogan. And he was saying, yeah, man, you can go out to
1:43.1	the backyard and just go digging and you're going to find something new, something that hasn't been cataloged yet. So we did this study with Noah Fierer, who's actually, he lives, he's not far from you. He's in Boulder. Oh, nice. And we studied the dust and houses across North America. Yeah. So it's like CSI dust.
2:02.4	And so, you know, you take a swab in your house and we tell you everything we can know about it from the DNA and the swab.
2:09.1	And so like we've got bacteria DNA and fungus DNA, insect DNA.
2:14.2	And when we did that, we found 40,000 kinds of fungi in houses.
2:19.8	And that's almost double the number of named fungi.
	...

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