Listener Questions #18

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25:07Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners today. And the next question is about major animals. Major animals. I've never heard them referred to as major before. Majorly awesome. So I have never been to Spain. How would you pronounce this name, Daniel? Do you know? Adhemar? I've never heard this name before, but it looks to me like Adhemar. Yeah. All right. Anyway, fantastic name. And so Adhemar from Spain, let's hear your question. Hello, Daniel and Kelly. My name is Adhemar, and I'm asking this question from Spain. I recently learned that elephants seem to identify different human languages and react differently depending on what they hear, thus being able to know if a group of humans poses a threat to them based on the language they speak.

25:50Differently, rhinos seem to adopt a more aggressive behaviour whenever they spot a skinny ape like us, some suggesting that this could be a consequence of biological adaptation as they evolve in contact with humans for many many times, in fact since the beginning of the Aminets. What is most intriguing is that this could be the reason why great animals don't exist in any continent other than Africa. As our arrival, there was much more southern, and they didn't have time to evolve and adapt to us before we hunted them down to extinction. May Kelly give us a deeper insight in this matter? Thank you for having me, and congratulations for providing us with such an awesome podcast.

26:22All right, so my opinion on the matter is pretty much that Atomar was right, right on the money. And so we're just going to go ahead and talk about the science here because it's a really fascinating story, and Atomar seems to have a good handle on it. But I'm just going to go ahead and reiterate how cool all this stuff is. Yeah, Kelly, tell us the history. How much more awesome was the Earth 10 or 50 ,000 years ago? Before humans came along. All right. So there were a lot more large mammals on the planet. And by large, we mean greater than 44 kilograms. Why 44? Not 45? Not 40? Who decided? Was there some meeting the 44 kilogram threshold?

26:59I don't know who decided on the 44 kilogram threshold. No doubt it was arbitrary. Somebody must have looked at an animal and been like, you are too small. How much do you weigh? You are now our threshold. Oh, I hope they didn't hurt that poor animal's feelings. Well, okay. I mean, the good news, if you're below the threshold, it sounds like you were maybe less susceptible to extinction caused by humans. So maybe you'd be happy if you were under this arbitrary threshold. So tell us about these megafauna that used to roam the Earth. Okay. Okay, so this large megafauna includes things like you mentioned at the beginning of the show, like lions that used to be found much farther north.

27:37There were also giant ground sloths. There were kangaroos that were much larger. And there were mammoths. There were just lots of much larger mammals that were roaming the earth. And somewhere between 10 ,000 to 50 ,000 years ago, about 200 of these large mammal species went extinct. Wow. And this is called the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, QME. And is there a bigger trend here that like animals get bigger and bigger? Because like dinosaurs got really huge and then, you know, the biggest ones died out and then mammals come along and then they eventually got big. Is this some sort of evolutionary trend?

28:13Like eventually somebody finds the niche of like being too big to eat? I mean, I'm sure a lot of things go into optimal size for animals. Being big does make you too big to eat. But, you know, like T-Rex was a big predator and, you know, blue whales are also big predators, but they're going after krill. So it's not they don't have to be big so that they can be vicious and take down large animals. They're eating teeny tiny little creatures called krill, little crustaceans in the ocean. And so, yeah, I'm sure a lot of things go into being big, but it is a niche that sometimes makes sense to fill.

28:45Yeah. So about 10 to 50 ,000 years ago, we lost a bunch of these species. And the question is, why? And, you know, probably because it's biology. The answer is it depends. There's probably a lot of different factors. It could have been that climate was changing at the time as well. But there's pretty good evidence to suggest that one of the major causes of this decline in large mammals was the fact that humans were starting to move into new areas. So lunch, basically. Lunch. Yes, that's right. So, for example, about 14 of the 16 large mammal species that were present in Australia went extinct between about 30 and 50 ,000 years ago and humans showed up about 40 to 60 ,000 years ago.

29:28So the numbers don't match up exactly, but some evidence that humans show up and those species go extinct. In North America, humans arrived around like 12 to 20 ,000 years ago. And 83 % of the large mammals in North America, which was 34 out of 47 species, went extinct somewhere between 11 to 15 ,000 years ago. So we show up, 83 % of the large mammals disappear. And I guess it's easy to draw the dotted line to say like, well, humans probably killed them or humans maybe ate them or whatever. But it could also be more complex, right? Humans arriving could change the ecosystem and these megafauna could be sensitive to like the web underneath them that are changing.

30:09Maybe humans are eating something else the megafauna we're eating or something. It could just be more complicated, right? Absolutely. Or maybe we brought some disease that jumped from us to them or we brought some other domesticated animals along that killed them in some way. So, yeah, there's a lot of complicated. It's not just necessarily that we like ran after them with spears and we ate them. But we probably did a little of that, too. Yeah, no, I'm sure there's some fossil evidence that we did some of that, too. Yeah, we needed to eat. But anyway, so there is this like correlational evidence that when humans show up on a new continent, not that long after a large percent of their large mammals go extinct.

30:46And I guess another thing we should consider is there could be like confounding factors also, like something which caused humans to move there and could also cause the extinction, but which wouldn't put the blame on humanity really at all. Yeah, that's right. So if there were, for example, large climactic changes that made some areas bad for humans and they were migrating in search of new food sources or something, it could be that humans came at the same time as the climate changed. There have been people who have looked into this, and I think that they conclude that humans still probably played a role even after you control for some other stuff that we know was happening at that time.

31:19But it probably wasn't just humans. But it looks like mammals, large mammals in particular, were susceptible to death around this time. Not just because we were hunting them or whatever it was about humans that caused them to die. But in particular, large mammals tend to have – they live a long time, but it takes a long time for them to start making babies. And when they do make babies, they don't make a lot of them. You may remember our conversation about K-selected species that we had with Katie Golden. So large mammals tend to not have a lot of babies to begin with. So it's a little bit easier to kill them off because they can't sort of bounce back as quickly.

31:54Fascinating. And so the question really is, like, why didn't the same thing happen in Africa? It seems like Africa has more megafauna than the other continents. Why is that? Yeah, that is a great question. So during this same period, only 10 of the 48 large mammal species in Africa went extinct. And in Eurasia, they lost 9 of 26 species. So that's a much lower percent. The current hypothesis is that humans evolved in these areas. So as our species was picking up the skills for hunting and stuff like that, we were evolving alongside of these species. So as we got better, we didn't get great at this overnight, but as we got better, selection was sort of favoring traits in, for example, elephants to help them essentially stay away from humans and keep themselves alive in the face of this sort of growing super predator, which we would end up becoming.

32:46And so the idea here is that Africa and Eurasia, those animals evolved with us. And so they were just better able to escape us. But then when we went to somewhere new like Australia and North America and these animals had never seen anything like us, all of a sudden we show up with our spears and they are just no match for the super predators who just landed on their continent. Wow. Fascinating. So it's actually good luck to evolve together with humans, right? Rather than just have them show up at your doorstep. You want humans to be bugging you for thousands of years, not just showing up unannounced.

33:19When we show up unannounced, we are particularly problematic guests. And what about this other idea that Atomar raises about how elephants can, like, understand human language and guess our intentions? Is there anything to that? I don't think Atomar in particular was trying to say that elephants can understand language. They sent a paper from 2014 by McComb et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. and essentially what they did here was they tried to figure out if elephants, just from hearing an audio clip, would respond in a way that suggested that they knew that different kinds of people differed in the risk that they posed to the elephants.

33:56Yeah, for example, the Maasai people are pastoralists, so their grazing land and water holes are often areas that are also used by elephants and are used by the livestock that the Maasai are sort of walking around the area. And And so they often come in conflict. And sometimes the elephants will kill Maasai and the Maasai need to essentially defend themselves. On the other hand, the Kamba people are more agricultural and they rarely have run-ins with elephants. And when they do have run-ins, it's usually like a male elephant who has sort of invaded their field. And so the Kamba people are often leaving alone females and the groups of females with their babies.

34:36And additionally, human females, whether the Maasai or Kamba, are unlikely to kill elephants, and young boys are also unlikely to kill elephants. The people who are most likely to kill elephants are adult men. So they did this playback experiment where they had everybody read the same sentence. And the sentence was, look over there, a group of elephants is coming. And they said it in their own language. And then they looked to see what the elephants did. And when you played a Maasai man saying that sentence, the elephants would bunch together in a defensive like huddle and they would respond in a way that suggested that they were experiencing fear because a predator was around.

35:16Wow. Yeah, and they did less of that when they heard the Kamba people. And remember, these are people that often don't end up in positions where they need to defend themselves and their livelihoods against elephants. The elephants also responded more strongly to the sound of men than women and more strongly to the sound of men Maasai relative to boy Maasai. So the elephants do seem to have a pretty good sense that like humans are risky, but some kinds of humans are more risky than others. And so they seem to have this like nuanced ability to tell human risk and respond accordingly. I told you the elephants are listening.

35:48They got those big ears and they can tell when you're talking about them. That's right. That's right. And they never forget. And so you got to be extra careful. But it's worth noting that many animals respond to humans as though we are risky. And that's even in North America. In Europe, they've done playback experiments with badgers that freak out. If you play sounds at water holes in Africa, just about every species that hears the sound of a human, they'll respond more strongly to the sound of a human than the sound of a lion. So in general, just about any continent you go to, the animals know humans often mean trouble.

36:23We should leave town or get defensive. We're going to cause some trouble. So this is sort of an unrelated topic than the extinction of animals. This is more like what are animals doing in this day and age to respond to humans? And maybe elephants were doing this back in the past and that's what saved them from getting killed by us. They just kind of gave us space. But in general, humans can be devastating to wildlife. Well, let's say some nice things about humans to balance it out. You know, I think it's incredible that we can unravel these stories. Recently, Hazel made this comment. She was like, all science is basically stuff happened and we figured out why.

37:00And I was like, you know, that's a pretty good point, Hazel. And it touches on this incredible thing that we do in science, which is like gather these clues that are just like randomly accidentally left imprinted on the world to figure out what happened, right? to unravel this incredible story you're telling over tens of thousands of years about these huge animals that no longer exist and why and a complicated interplay between species. It's incredible to me that we can unravel these stories, that we can pull them out, sometimes literally out of the ground to learn the deep history of our universe.

37:32Yeah. And you are always a more optimistic and uplifting person than I am. And so that's beautiful. And I'll attempt to follow in your footsteps by noting that by understanding the damage we've done in the past, you know, we can try to ameliorate the damage that we might be doing now or the damage we might be doing in the future. And so, you know, the conservation movement has grown in, you know, the last couple of decades and we're getting better at caring about this stuff and trying to at least slow the decline of some of these species and in other cases turn around the decline of species. So, you know, if we can recognize our past mistakes, we can hopefully use that information to do better in the future.

38:12Well, can I say something controversial? Do you think that an individual species on its own has like inherent value? Like, should we be conserving every species? Or should we take a bigger, broader view and say, look, diversity is important. And that means that new species should be evolving and sometimes species disappear. It's just part of the process. Should we be trying to hold on to every individual species or should we be maintaining diversity sort of in a larger sense? Wow. All right. So that question deserves like a whole episode. But the short answer is, so there's a background extinction rate.

38:47So you shouldn't necessarily lose sleep if a species goes extinct, because that was going to happen whether humans were here or not. But I believe the extinction rate is something like it's at least 10 times higher than we would expect it to be based on background level. So we are really speeding things up for any particular species. I mean, there are some species that play less important roles in ecosystems. Losing them would have less of an impact. But that's still like a unique product of millions of years of evolution that is beautiful and well adapted to its environment and is being wiped out, you know, because of us.

39:25And that to me does feel catastrophic and really sad. And, you know, I feel like you have to be able to accept nuance in these conversations and weigh pros and cons and stuff like that. But, you know, I do feel like anytime we lose a species, it is sad, even if it's just a beetle that was present in only one place or something. Well, it is an incredible output of evolution. You know, it's like effectively billions of years of biological computation, you know, to design this crater that can do something amazing or has incredible chemicals in it. Anyway, stay tuned, everybody, for the upcoming episode where Daniel argues that extinction is good, actually.

40:01What? Like all the extinction or just like? I mean, this might be the last episode of DKEU's Extraordinary Universe. All right, well, we'll dig into that for another episode. In the meantime, let's hear from Adhemar about whether Kelly answered their question. Hello again, guys, and thank you for your response. It makes me glad to think that possibly we are not the only reason that those animals went extinct. And Kelly's context really makes me think in a wider spectrum. Like, for example, what if it was a disease? What if it was a glaciation, the same we were running away from? or maybe it was another super predator.

40:44Anyway, who knows? Thank you and keep up the woodwork.

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43:38All right. I'm still trying to decide if I can forgive Daniel for hinting that extinction caused by humans isn't always bad. But you know what? I'm going to distract myself with this insightful question from a listener. Hey, Daniel and Kelly. Really enjoying the podcast. Thank you. I have a question for you, and it's about black holes, of course. Black holes are usually described as unslakeable consumers of all matter and energy. But I know in some cases, the rate of consumption is limited by the energy pressure of that consumption process, pushing back on the gravitational pull and starving it of additional fuel.

44:09I would love to hear more about what this might be like on a more human scale. Would a tiny primordial black hole around the Earth generate a tiny accretion disk of matter spinning around the light speed, generating the same kind of pressure and shooting out x-ray lasers from the top and bottom? How big or small would a black hole be to have these sorts of effects? When we think of a black hole interacting with normal human scale matter, What would that look like? How long could the Earth survive with a little black hole orbiting around inside of it? Really looking forward to hearing more about this.

44:36Thank you. Thank you, David, very much for that question. And I hope that our answer is not going to help you build a miniature black hole to embed into the Earth. So we're just going to take it in good faith and answer your question anyway. That also sounds like a good topic for a sci-fi novel. Let's talk about black holes and start with the basics, because David's question involves a lot of sort of sophisticated black hole science. Remember, black holes are regions of space-time where there's so much mass, there's so much curvature that anything that falls beyond the event horizon eventually reaches the center.

45:09It can never escape. And something I think a lot of people don't understand about black holes is that the event horizon is not a physical surface. It's just a designation we make, a dotted line we draw. And actually, you never know where the event horizon is at any moment. You can only tell in the infinite future. Essentially, think about going to the infinite future and then asking the question, in what regions of space did particles never escape? We'll now draw that to be the event horizon. And so you can't ever really actually know. You can use GR to predict at any moment, but the event horizon is just like a categorization.

45:43We say beyond this point, nothing has escaped or can escape. And outside that point, things can escape. But this is just gravity, right? Black holes don't like suck with infinite power or anything. If you replace the sun with a black hole of the same mass, we would feel its gravity and the Earth would continue to orbit. So it really is just a gravitational object. Okay, so a black hole the same size as our sun wouldn't pull on us any more than our sun because they're similarly dense? If it has the same mass and it's at the same distance, it would have the same gravity. Okay, all right, I'm with you.

46:15It wouldn't be as bright and the Earth would be chilly and it would be bad, but not gravitationally. All right, I don't want that to happen. Does the event horizon always stay at the exact same spot, or does it shift over time if the black hole absorbs big things that make it bigger? Absolutely. The event horizon depends on the mass of the black hole and not just on the stuff inside the event horizon. This is why you shouldn't think about the event horizon as some physical barrier. As you approach a black hole, your gravitational energy contributes to the mass of the black hole. So the black hole's event horizon actually grows out to meet you as you fall into the black hole.

46:54So you approach the event horizon, the event horizon approaches you. It's like a little gravitational hug. Oh, yeah, we talked about what would happen if Zach was in a black hole. And if we threw him sandwiches, would they ever get to him? Exactly. And the reason we need to understand that black holes are not infinitely powerful is to think about the stuff that's orbiting them. Because that's what David's question was about, this accretion disk. When you think about the images of black holes out there in space, they look like a glowing donut with a black core. Or, you know, the visualization in interstellar or whatever.

47:24They have these luminous disks around them. What is that and why aren't they getting sucked in? Well, they're not getting sucked into the black hole for the same reason the Earth is not getting sucked into the sun, right? There's a lot of gravity from the sun. Why aren't we just getting sucked into the sun? And the answer is we have velocity. There are stable orbits around the sun. In the same way, there are stable orbits around a black hole because it's just a gravitational object. So if you approached a black hole, as long as you were outside the event horizon, you could orbit around it forever without falling in.

47:54If you were stable and, crucially, nothing bumped into you to knock you out of your orbit. That doesn't sound fun. I'll pass. And that's the same story for the Earth, right? Now, the accretion disk is very different because it's not just like one chunk of matter here, one chunk of matter there. It's like a huge hot disk of gas and dust that has a lot of internal friction. That's why it's glowing. The tidal forces from the black hole are massaging it and heating it up, and it's rubbing against itself, and so it's very hot, and it's glowing. So that's why we can see these black holes, these telescope pictures of black holes.

48:27Really, they're pictures of the hot accretion disk around the black hole. So the accretion disk is stuff that's orbiting the black hole, hasn't fallen in yet, is going too fast, probably will fall in eventually. because there's a lot of friction there. So you can't just like have a stable orbit, but it's sort of like on deck to go in the black hole, but not there yet. And what is that made out of? Is that just like the basic dust and junk that you find in space? It's made out of whatever you've been feeding your black hole, but yeah, the universe is mostly hydrogen. So it's always a safe bet to say it's mostly hydrogen because that's what the universe is.

49:01And so, yeah, there's gas and there's dust and whatever, but mostly it's hydrogen there. And here's where the black hole starts to work against itself because the accretion disk is so hot that it glows, right? That's where we can see these things. So it emits radiation pressure. So it pushes stuff away, right? We talked in a recent episode about how stars are a balance between gravity and radiation pressure. The fusion at their hot core is producing a lot of energy, and that pushes out on the star. And if the star is too big, it can actually blow the star apart. That's why you have like a maximum size of stars.

49:33Well, a similar thing is happening here. The heat from the accretion disk creates radiation, which pushes other stuff away. So the hotter the black hole, the bigger the black hole, the bigger the accretion disk, the more it slows down its ability to eat stuff. So black holes cannot grow infinitely quickly. There's no theoretical upper limit to the size of a black hole. But because of this process, this radiation pressure, there is an upper limit to how rapidly they can grow. You put a black hole in a blob of stuff. It can't just like slurp everything out really quickly because it's going to get hot and glow and push its own food away from itself.

50:11So what determines the size of the accretion disk? It's just how much stuff was there around it. Like if you put a black hole in deep space and nothing is there, it'd have no accretion disk. It would just be black. We could not see it except for its gravitational effects. You drop it in the middle of a really big blob of stuff, it's going to get a big accretion disk. So it just depends on what's around it. And this is a really interesting puzzle in physics right now because this limit on how quickly black holes can grow is one of the reasons why we don't understand supermassive black holes. We see supermassive black holes in the early history of the universe, like a billion years after the Big Bang.

50:48Already, we have black holes with like billions of times the mass of the sun. But if you do the calculations, the limit on the speed at which black holes can grow tell you that's impossible. So how did they get so big? That's the big question of supermassive black holes. Although we have some interesting hints that like if the accretion disk is asymmetric, then you can have what they call super Eddington accretion rates. It's fascinating. But David's question is about tiny black holes. And he's asking, can they also have accretion disks? And you told me that it doesn't matter how big a black hole is.

51:21What matters is the stuff that started. So could a tiny black hole have a huge accretion disk? So a tiny black hole can have accretion disk. And this Eddington limit of the rate at which black holes can grow scales with mass. So the limit is smaller with smaller mass. So there's like less radiation pressure from a smaller mass black hole because it can't heat up its accretion disk as much. But at a very small black hole, something else happens, right? Black holes don't just glow because of their accretion disk. They are themselves not totally black. We think they glow themselves with a little bit of Hawking radiation.

51:58This is this bizarre radiation that happens because you have an event horizon in quantum fields. And there's this hand-wavy story out there about particles and antiparticles where one falls into the event horizon. That's just cartoons. It's not really the physics of what's happening. But we do think that Hawking radiation might be real. And the crucial thing about it is that it's bigger for smaller black holes. Really big black holes, almost no Hawking radiation. Smaller black holes, dramatic Hawking radiation. So the smaller the black hole gets, the bigger the Hawking radiation. So this is actually going to be more radiation pressure than the accretion disk.

52:34For a small enough black hole, the Hawking radiation will be brighter than the glow from the accretion disk. Okay, so I'm picturing it now. There's a black hole in the middle. There's an accretion disk around it. And then Hawking radiation extends even beyond that. And if you were looking, do we have a kind of telescope that could distinguish those three objects? We have a telescope that can see black holes, and we've only been able to see supermassive black holes. And so those have essentially no Hawking radiation or unmeasurable amounts. We've never seen Hawking radiation. But if you had a small enough black hole and it was nearby, it would be very bright in Hawking radiation.

53:12So I did the calculation, and if you had a black hole with like 40 billion kilograms, which is about the mass of the Hoover Dam, then the glow from the accretion disk would be about as bright as the glow from Hawking radiation. So like pretty bright, but this is tiny, you know, this is like a tiny fraction of the mass of the earth even. So this is really a very small black hole. Like the gravity from the Hoover Dam is not very powerful. Remember we had that episode about like measuring gravity and like the Scottish guys climbing around that mountain. That was a much bigger effect because that's a much bigger mountain and still very hard to measure.

53:45Gravity is super a week. So a black hole with the mass of the Hoover Dam would not be very powerful, but it would be as bright as its accretion disk. So yes, David, small black holes can have accretion disk. It depends on what they've been eating. So if you have a tiny black hole out in the middle of nowhere, no accretion disk. You take a tiny black hole and you plop it in a huge bed of plasma and hydrogen and whatever, it will get an accretion disk as well, but it will also glow with its own hawking radiation. Wow. Okay. So then let's get to the last part of David's question. If you put that black hole in the center of the Earth, how long could Earth survive?

54:21Yeah, this is a fascinating question as well. And I thought it was a little unrealistic because we can't make a black hole the size of the Hoover Dam. We're unlikely to see one. So I thought, well, let's take it another step. Let's say we did make a black hole because, for example, at the Large Hadron Collider, we're trying to make black holes all the time. What? We smash protons together. Yeah, we smash protons together in the hopes that occasionally they will create a tiny miniature black hole. And remember, smaller black holes radiate faster than bigger black holes. So if we make a black hole at the Large Hadron Collider, it's going to have like 10 to the minus 24 kilograms of mass.

54:57It'll almost instantly radiate itself away. You hope. But it would be awesome because then we'd learn something about quantum gravity. It would be incredible. But if you did take one of these things and somehow was able to feed it before it radiated away, and you put it in the center of the Earth, and then you do a calculation of how long would it take to slurp up everything and consume the entire Earth, that would take about 10 ,000 years. All right. So I wouldn't be around anymore. So fine. That's right. That's all right. And you would have time to jump on that arc ship to Alpha Centauri. And we'd even have time to design and build it, you know, because 10 ,000 years is a good amount of time, even for space projects.

55:33But this ecologist feels like you probably shouldn't do anything to destroy the earth because there are a lot of species that would get left behind. And every species is important, Daniel. Extinction's not okay. Do you want to extinctify the mosquitoes? How about that wasp that bit you earlier? How's that thumb doing, by the way? It's about 30 % bigger than the other thumb right now. But I still think that the wasps, they're important pollinators in some cases. They control like other insect populations. I think it deserves to stay. I might get rid of mosquitoes. I'm glad we got rid of smallpox.

56:10I accept that there's some nuance, but your answer didn't sound like it was going to be very nuanced, Daniel. I was just trying to be controversial. Success. Thank you, David, for that question. Let us know if we answered it and follow-up questions are always welcome. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you so much for that answer. You did indeed answer the question. My only follow-up, if I were to wave my magic wand and create a Hoover Dam-sized black hole and situate it somewhere that I could watch it feed from 10 or 20 meters away, would I be able to enjoy the spectacle for the 300 or 400 microseconds it would take for the stream of gamma rays and exotic particles to shred my spacesuit?

56:48Or would it be a teensy little firefly I could enjoy until my oxygen ran out? Either way, I promise not to destroy the Earth anytime soon. Thanks again. Thanks everyone out there for joining us on this episode. We love hearing from you. Please send us your questions. It inspires us. It motivates us. It gives us something to do. Write to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

57:15Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. If you want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows, if you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Ice Cube's Big 3 basketball is heating up.

57:55Before the World Cup final, tune in to Big 3 this Sunday. Reigning MVP Michael Beasley and the defending champion Miami 305 play a must-win game against the undefeated Dallas Power, led by coach Nancy Lieberman. Then Dwight Howard and the L.A. Riot, coming fresh off a win, look to knock off the undefeated Chicago Triplets, led by coach Dr. J. The game played the way you love. Watch live Sunday on CBS at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. Aging is real, and so are the benefits of new Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Water. Because around the age of 30, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up.

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59:08From all-inclusive escapes to bucket list adventures, Apple Vacations makes it easy to create memories with the people who matter most. Start today at applevacations.com or contact your trusted travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. For 20 years, they had a friendship that was bulletproof. Literally. Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham star in Prime Video's hilarious, action-packed new series, Ride or Die. When Debbie is forced on the run because of her husband's corrupt dealings, only her fierce and lethal secret assassin best friend Judith can save her. What follows is a wild race across Europe, packed with action, laughs and danger.

59:50Don't miss the new series Ride or Die now streaming only on Prime Video. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.