FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Midday Mobile - John Sledge on The Clotilda controversy and Sean hosts Time For A Checkup - July 8 2024
There will be no personal nor direct attacks on anyone and I would ask that you please try to keep down the loud cheering and the clapping. There will be no booing and no unruly behavior. With that, this is painful and it will be for a long time. After all, these are a couple of high-stepping turkeys and you know what to say about a high stepper. No step too high for a high stepper. This is Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 1065. Well, Sean's a tough guy. I mean, I think everybody knows that. You know, Sean, he took some licks, he hangs in there. Yeah, what's wrong with the deal we got? I mean, the deal we got drank pretty good, don't it? Did you hear what I said? So this is a baby council. I had no doubt about them. That doesn't suck. If you don't like it, you're bad. Last question. Were you high on drugs? Last question, kiss my ****. Right away we go. FM Talk 1065 at Midday Mobile. Glad to have you all along. 3430106 gets you through on the telephone line and the text line 3430106. And if you have the FM Talk 1065 app, you know, it's like a multi-tool. It's like one of those leather mitts, but it's on your phone. You can do all kind of stuff there. Stream the station, get all our podcasts or social media feeds for the breaking news on their traffic maps, weather information. In addition, though, you can call and text from the app and you can also leave us a talkback message. If you look at the microphone icon at the bottom of the front page there, if you press that, let's your recorded message, emails it to the show and I can play it back here on there. All right, a fan favorite and most importantly, as I rule this thing as a tyrant, a Sean Sullivan favorite on the show, getting him back on. It has been way, way too long. Author, historian, all around good guy, extraordinaire, John Sledge joining us now on Midday Mobile. John, good to talk to you. Likewise, Sean. Thank you so much. How's your summer going? Do anything cool? Well, we got a grandbaby first. She's going to be a year old next week. So we're going to fly over to Orlando on the old breeze airway, which has been great. And celebrate her first birthday. And just start spoiling. Just what level of spoiling are you planning on? Well, we don't want to be too bad about it, but that's our job. Very good. Talk about family too. Of course, talking about this Wall Street Journal story, but the story I saw last week and really special for me reading it, but I can imagine for you as a Marine Corps named or rebuilt landing strip there, this is, I guess, story came out last week. I don't know when it was announced, but I saw it on CNN last week that they named the airfield at Pella Lou for your dad. Yeah, incredible story. Very moved by that. Dad would have been completely bold over by it. Obviously for those who read his memoir with the old breed at Pella Lou in Okinawa or even who saw the Pacific on HBO will be very familiar with that airfield. The Marines, dad, was in the first Marine Division. They had to charge across it completely in the open on their own power. They weren't at Amtraks or tanks or anything like that. And you know, dad wrote, they were under artillery fire. He talked about shells going off like giant firecrackers. They could hear the fragments growling and humming around their ears. And the ground seemed way back and forth. It was filled with dust and smoke and noise was terrific. And he said that through the haze, he could see Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. And then as he said, then I looked and either left nor right but straight ahead. And the first further we went, the worse it got. They finally got across it. They got into the bushes over through the Japanese opposition. And because the heat there was so incredible, like 115 degrees, he lifted up his boondocker, which was they're lying for their shoes and sweat poured out of his boondocker. And one of his buddies said, "Sledge him. You've been walking on water." Because other buddies said, "Maybe that's why he didn't get hit coming across that airfield." It was bad that he was at that point, just glad that the last cracks had started back up. They couldn't believe that they had survived that. So he said it was one of the worst combat experiences just because of the level of exposure. But he said, because of their excellent training and esprit de corps, it never occurred to them that the attack might fail. And happily it didn't. But so that was a very, very moving story. It's an amazing thing. I mean, just hearing you tell it, your dad's words. I mean, his ability to paint this raw and horrible picture of warfare at the same time that come rotary between guys, you know, that made it so. It's just, it's always taken me back. And people don't know what John's talking about, too, in that I'd be 1,500 U.S. troops killed in that. And with 70% cash relief from the first Marine Regiment. Yeah, really, really terrible. Yeah. And the thing about Pella Lou was that caught the Marines by surprise was at Pella Lou the Japanese chain, and the battles before that, like Guadalcanal and Bougainville and Keggoster, the Japanese would fight for a few days and then they'd pull these big Benzai charges and the Marines would mow them down and it would be over. And that's what they all thought was going to happen at Pella Lou. But at Pella Lou the Japanese decided the Benzai charging work in. So they switched to what they called the Fence in depth. Pella Lou is a Carl Allen. It's two by five miles and it's all these ridges and caves. And so they built all these mutually supporting positions. There was no front line. There was just this dense mass of dug-in fortifications. So they had to go in there and just root them out one by one. And they would not surrender. And it made for a month-long battle and they thought it would be two or three days. It's a amazing thing. We've talked about so many times, if y'all have not read, with the old breed, you got to do it here before the end of this month and read it. And then you understand the significance here too with this airfield being named for John's dad. So I just, when I read that, I thought about you immediately and it's just a great thing. It's a great thing. No, it's nice. It's really nice. Hopefully they'll send a picture, right? If they have a sign up there or something like that, we can get that posted. That would be cool. As we talk about mobile history, you are genetically linked to mobile history and also academically linked to mobile history as being a historian and a writer here. So I thought about you pretty much off the bat when my phone... I was trying to do Fourth of July stuff, man. Extended weekend stuff, right? Goofing off, boat stuff and all that. And it's my band. My phone is ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sean, did you see this Saturday? Into Sunday? Sean, did you see this? Did you see this? And this Wall Street Journal story, it was the last slave ship to reach the US or was it a hoax? And I mean, I stopped from doing like boat goof off stuff to read this story. And I was... I had some issues here. How about you? Most definitely. I knew the piece was coming because we had talked to the reporter and the man that he's writing about who claims it's a hoax, a hoax, rather, Eric Colonia. I had come to town and I had met with him. So I was familiar with what was coming down the pike, but of course, did not agree with it. So the parts here, and you don't talk a little bit during the news break, but you're much better versed to do this. Reading through it for me, one of my first issues was it was like a straw man argument. They picked some things to talk about, and he just doesn't talk about a whole bunch of history here that would push back on this narrative. Yeah. Well, for the listeners who aren't, who aren't read in, Eric Colonia, who's alleging this, is a South Carolina. He's a former Wall Street Journal reporter himself, as well as other magazines and papers. And he wrote a book about 10 years ago about the wanderer, which he titled the last slave ship to come to America. And the wanderer was a ship carrying about 400 Africans that landed in either Georgia's, South Carolina, I forget. In about 1858, there was a spectacular federal trial, and it was a huge story. One of the things that bothered this guy, I think, was that he's calling it the last slave ship to come to America, and he missed the whole co-tilled in it, which, as far as we know, was the last. Co-tilled is July of 1860, so a little bit later, it's also closer to the Civil War. So things are more disrupted, Alabama is less than a year away from secession. And this guy, you know, part of what I think's going on is just wounded proud on his part. He wants to say, "Well, it is the last ship. I'm going to prove it." And so he started looking at the co-tilled as story, and he found some things that were inconsistencies, and it troubled him, and he wanted to bring these to the fore. So that's a little bit of the history of where this guy is coming from. When Gloneys comes in here and says, "It is peace," in his take, that this was a hoax, right, that the whole thing was not just misunderstood. This was fabricated from the whole cloth of hoax. How does that sit with you? I mean, how do you discount that? Well, it's a good question. It's a fair question, and he does raise some points, and I think if it moves the ball on scholarship all to the better, he makes a great deal of the fact that there was no federal trial, in the case of the co-tilda, as there was with some wanderer. They never found the slaves. They never found the ship. Of course, we know the ship was burned. These are either wreck itself. He's just saying that could be anything down there, so he doesn't necessarily accept that the evidence that has been found that would strongly imply that it was killed is necessarily true. Fair enough, let's investigate more, find out more, but I've read the full archaeological report. It's fairly convincing to me, but beyond that, Say the Timothy Mayer, who commissioned the voyage, hid the slaves up in the river cane, got the federal searchers drawn so that they couldn't conduct a search, and he was good buds with the federal judge in Mobile, who wasn't about to prosecute him. So the only formal prosecution of the crime was William Foster, who was the co-tilda's captain, was fined for not declaring cargo. The cargo, of course, being the slave. This guy makes a big deal out of the fact, well, there was this big trial with a wanderer, but there wasn't a co-tilda. For the very good reasons why there wasn't a co-tilda. Yeah, well, one year out from secession, one year out, you pointed out this one year out from secession, it's not like the people here in Mobile, the whites here in Mobile weren't exactly all about doing what the feds wanted them to do. No, and I will also say that that Colonius is not the first person to allege that it was a hoax. He knows that Booker T. Washington didn't think the story was true. Of course, that's in like 1999, 1910, but even at the time, the original newspaper story in the register about the ship landing was just a couple of sentences, and then that got repeated around the country as was typical during that day. It was also another snippet in the paper saying, "Okay, this nonsense needs to stop. Everybody stirred up about it. This is all, you know, some wags put this out there. It's all a hoax." Well, so there have been people that have argued that, knowing what I know about Timothy Mayer, who was an ardent, even though he was a new Englander, a mainer, he was an ardent proponent of slavery. He did everything he could to further it and advocate it, and he put his money where his mouth was. He financed filibuster expeditions down into Nicaragua, like William Walker, so-called Gray-Admen of Destiny. The people who wanted to establish a slave empire in Central America. The name of Mayer's riverboat was the Roger B. Taney. That was the Supreme Court justice who decided the Dred Scott decision. That said a black man had no rights, that a white man was bound to honor. Mayer had another boat called the Southern Republic. He was a blockade runner during the Civil War. You know, he helped finance Confederate naval vessels, so it's perfectly within character for him to finance a voyage to bring back slaves, even though it was illegal, just to prove a point and to make an argument that the slave trade should be reopened. So he was not a bluffer, and it doesn't make any sense to me that he would just put this out there as a fake story to go to the government. That wasn't his nature. His nature was to act on these things, and this is perfectly in keeping with what we know about his character. You know, John, from subjective to objective, back to the Clotilda itself, maybe I've gotten something wrong, but conversations I had with Ben Raines too, he had the shipwright's drawings of the Clotilda. So when they found the second ship, first one went right, the measurements have been taken. And I mean, maritime history, I'm going to defer to the king here talking to you. I mean, these were not, these weren't mass produced. I mean, a ship would be pretty dang unique, right? Very true. In the case of the Clotilda, the measurements are exact, the type of wood, and where that wood is, is what the record shows. Also, the fact that it had a 13-foot centerboard, they found the centerboard. Also, they found the slave timbering that they used to build the slave bedding beneath the deck, because a lot of the hole is intact down there in the mud. So no, you're not going to find a board that says Clotilda on it, but we know a lot about the Gulf Coast schooner as a type. We know how many were built, where they were built, and the Clotilda has been well documented in that regard. And everything about this wreck screams, you know, it lines up perfectly. But sure, I would argue that further archaeology is merited and can certainly tell us more, given the momentousness of this subject in American and world history, we would love to know more. So I hope they'll go forward and continue to investigate that wreck. But not only that, but the descendants themselves, the stories and the oral traditions within their families, Cujo Lewis meeting with Zora Neale Hurston. He never mentioned the wanderer. We know there were wanderer slaves in Mobile, who eventually made their way here. I don't dispute that, but not 110 of them, and not enough to have this kind of a coherent community with these traditions that go all the way back the way they do in Africa. In the stories being, of course, over time is one thing. But early on, if you were telling some story that did not happen, there were so many else in Africa town that was said, no, but they didn't. They had the same story. Yeah, no, it's remarkably consistent. And now, of course, there have been people up there that did, you know, for various reasons, people coming from all different directions may not have wanted this to be true or may doubt it. You'll always have that. Everybody's not going to agree on everything all the time, but the preponderance of evidence, documentary, oral, physical, archaeological, you know, points to this being an actual case. And I like you, if this warrants more investigation, I'm for that. I'm for, you know, do more work. I'm not. I don't want to block anything like that. But I felt like this article wasn't saying, hey, we need to look into it. It was just kind of matter of fact. No, it didn't. No, it didn't. It's it was wondrous, not the Clotilda, not saying, hey, maybe we looked into it. Yeah. And as a scholar and historian, I think it's incumbent on colonial to bring his argument to the table, either, and he's been, you know, the people in Africa would love to have him come address them. I think that would be great. As Aaron Patterson said, you know, to feel the community, I think that would be valuable for him. But I think he needs to develop his arguments and present them in a formal scholarly way, footnote them, so that others can evaluate them and let's have that discussion. But just to say, well, I don't, you know, you have to prove it. It was because you can't prove that it, you know, I just, I think it's incumbent on him to come with more and make his point. Absolutely. John, I was saying before we wrap up too, people will check out the new issue of Mobile Bay Magazine. You, an author of so many, many books, have decided to recommend other people's books to us, you know, with the spirit of your father here for summertime reading, days by the sea. These are some cool selections. Well, thank you very much. No, Dad was a great, the article is called "My Father and the Sea," and it's just about Dad's love of, he grew up in Mobile of the Bay in the ocean, the Gulf, and of course, his Marine Corps service made him intimately familiar with all weathers. He never suffered from sea sickness, which was a blessing, but he, he loved, you know, sea stories, maritime stories, sailing ship lore, and these were just some books and movies that, that we bonded over when I was a child, and things like Richard Henry Dana's "Two Years Before the Mask," which was written in the 1840s. Marvelous book, "The Bounty Trilogy," about the mutiny on the bounty, and then of course, movies like "Captain Blood," and "Poratio Hornblower," and "The Pressure Island," with Charlton Heston, the 1991 version. Just all those things really conjure for me, both his spirit and the sea itself. When I saw that, when I saw that come up with Mobile Bay Magazine, I started searching for Pirates of the Spanish Main. I've heard, you know, so much discussion of the Spanish Main. I never knew there was a book of Pirates of the Spanish Main, so it is like, that's all my to read list, so I am interested. >> The great book. Yeah, no, it's a fun book, and I still have my copy. It's over 50 years old, and it's just great. Pictures, the illustrations, all, all powerful stuff. Good material, you know, just, but the thing about Dan was he was such a reader, and he, he would tell you these stories, not in a pedantic way, but in anecdotal, for instance, I used the example of, you know, water spouts threatening a ship, and he knew about accounts where sailors would actually fire cannon into the water spout, so that the cannonball would break the suction, and it wouldn't hit the ship. >> Wait a second, John, does that work? >> Fantastic. >> Well, it's a good question, because I got caught in a water spout last year on the Blakely River Bridge, and it was probably, you know, a fairly weak one as they often are, but it was still a very, and I thought, if I had a 12-pounder cannon, maybe I could work, but, yeah, I mean, supposedly it did. It was a method to interrupt the second and make it fall apart. >> So when you see this ledges driving to go see, you know, going to see grandkids or do whatever, and there's a 12-pounder on the vehicle, you know, it's just for the purpose of, of, of, decum, whether, decum pressing motion. >> Perfect, there's nothing to see here. >> No, it's so cool. It's mobile. Welcome to town, y'all. John, it's always a great pleasure to talk with you, and hopefully we'll get you back on sooner than later. >> John, I really always appreciate it so much. >> There he is. >> Thank you. Thank you. John Sledge, and, you know, of course, I talk about the number of books. The Mobile River, my favorite, but, of course, those recent Gulf of Mexico maritime history, books about the Civil War, books about living here, books about even, even gets me to look at architecture in a different way. Check out John Sledge's books. I'll put a link up on our social media as well. And we'll be right back. More of Midday Mobile. >> This is Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 106-5. Right, on 128 FM Talk 106-5, Midday Mobile. Of course, we went a little late in that segment. It's all right, because it's John Sledge. Always a pleasure to get him on the show. And, yeah, tomorrow coming up, more discussion about what this author had said in the Wall Street Journal story about the Clotilda. We'll talk to Ben Reigns about that, and lots more, because he's been busy. As always, my man's busy, and doing cool projects. He lived in the life, and, you know, with his association with the University of South Alabama, he's teaching the children, too, out there. So that's good stuff. We'll talk with him more about that tomorrow. Coming right back, more Midday Mobile will get your text and phone calls at 343-01-06. You're listening to Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 106-5. Right, Top 135 for FM Talk 106-5 for the Midday Mobile. Check in with my buddy David McCreary from LCM Motor Cars, but he's on assignment, right? That's what they say in the news business. He's on assignment buying vehicles. Where are you, man? I'm in Orlando. Last weekend, last week we was down here at Disney World of Boys in Jennifer, and then today we're down there buying cars, so I need a place to stay down here. This is full time, because you're getting, and that's the thing you talk about, that you go, you cast the net wide to find these great cars at LCM. Well, we're at a private sale right now. This is a big conglomerate down in South Florida. They've got, I mean, I don't know how many dealerships they've got, but they're having a sale today, and sell more. I'll hit both of them, and I'll fly back tomorrow evening. But we've bought five so far. I'll probably miss them a couple while I'll talk to them. But there's like 500 cars will run through this one today, so we'll pick out which ones we won't. They've all been inspected. They're all guaranteed. So if I don't like them, when I get them back, I can send them back. So that says something about who I'm getting them from. We'll have a great inventory next week. And so people can check out online and in person now, but to know that there's even more vehicles coming very soon to LCM. Yeah, they'll all be put on the website probably tomorrow afternoon. James will get them all over there, but we won't have pictures until we get them there. We like to take our own pictures. We don't like to use theirs. And then we'll figure out if, you know, if anybody missed anything, and we'll go from there. So, yeah, there'd be some nice inventory. We've got a good inventory right now. If you want to go out and check us out, but it's, we'll have some more coming in probably Friday at Monday. All right, give them directions. We're at Highway 90 and Plantation in Theodore. It's one mile south of I-10, exit 15A. You can give us a call at 25-137-500-68 or just go to the website LCMMotorCars.com. If you see something on the website that doesn't have pictures, call us. We do have the shots from the sale here. I can send you some of those if you need it. All right, good stuff, David, and we'll talk soon. All right, you too. David McCrary checking in from Orlando for LCM MotorCars. Oh, check in on your text as well here. A lot of these to get to here. Let's see. I don't know. Sometimes with these pictures, y'all, I've got to have enough time to open those up. But thank you. We'll get to your pictures here shortly. T-bone. Let's see. All right, this unnamed texture. Okay. Oh, wait. T-bone, your pictures come up here. Let's see on the, on the text line here. And it looks like somebody's sleeping it off downtown on one of the benches. Well, is that supposed to be? He said, "I just took this photo, a life filled with questionable decisions. This might be the worst." You're drunk and sleeping outside when it's 110, maybe? I don't know. Let's see. Unnamed texture says, "It's all a story written by Marxist Jewish." I don't know what that means. What story is, give me clarity, unnamed texture. Let's see. This one, unnamed texture again here, or from GC. Okay. Wrong. Maybe 1983 Mobile Bay Cultural Resources Survey Commission by the US Army Corps of Engineers documented 282 shipwrecks in Mobile Bay. Both builders generally built duplicate ships because they're designed with sea-worthy. Okay. And the shipwreck list, whoever your texture, is cool stuff, isn't it? If you go look at the maps and John Sledge and I've talked about that, the number of shipwrecks in the bay and how, from stuff that just sunk in the last couple of years to things that are hundreds of years old, they did build close ships away. I understand it. And we'll get into this with Ben tomorrow. But the way I understand it, the shipwright, the design by that shipwright for the Clotilda was so specific to the Clotilda. Now, there were scooters and I think there were a lot, they were very similar. You're right. You make one that runs this good. You're going to build another one like it. But back then, because availability of products and then suiting them out for what they were doing, it was pretty specific. But I'll try to keep your question in mind, I'll ask Ben about that tomorrow. But I think it's specific enough that you can say and look in these drawings, say that was the Clotilda. And Dirt Digger said, "If a cannonball can kill a waterspout, then why can't we take a ship, pump water from ocean floor to the surface to kill or weaken hurricanes?" I don't know, Dirt Digger. And I don't know the veracity. He's just saying a story. His dad, E.B. Sledge, used to tell him about historically the pirates or people in the ships. It wasn't the Marines doing it. Would shoot a cannonball into a waterspout? You didn't see any. Usually by this time of year, I've seen a few waterspouts. I've not seen the waterspouts this year. Thank goodness. I was out in the Gulf a bunch over the last few days and did not see that. The weather was pretty decent. Not bad at all. Looks better than it does over in Houston. Of course, watching that, I just talked to Leanna, who has family over there. They're getting their power back on from Hurricane Now, Tropical Storm, barrel. The flooding they get over there. It's something that I've talked about in the past. When people come here, we have a hurricane coming in here and they're like, "Oh, the water will go this far inland." I go, "The Gulf Coast is not all the same." We have pretty substantial topography along the coast. It's not Louisiana. It's not the Texas Gulf Coast. We have topography that's not far from the water. There's area of South Mobile County, low, flat, but then you have ridge lines and all that. The Houston area, they've had such flooding in past storms out there, and they're pretty darn flat, not that there's not some relief, some contour relief, but not near like we have around here. They get that rain and it just lays in there. You can get rainwater pollen up and then, of course, storm surge. They can have a storm that's not just, I mean, it's a category of water or something and they can get flooding like we might see from a tour or three. It says here, Galveston Island, and the area was three to six feet of storm surge and rainfall from five to 10 inches. I imagine they have a lot of flooding down there in that flat country with barrel. We'll see what comes to this. This is, of course, supposed to be a very, very busy hurricane season. Dr. Bill has told us that. We'll keep our eyes on it. We've seen a little bit kicking up so far, but we're at least just at the B storm, but then again, it's just July and it's just early July. Let's see. Another one on weather. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. We don't have another, not another name storm that I know of right now. Dr. Bill, we'll talk about that. I'm sure in the morning, so get those texts to him. All right, before we run out of time here too, you see this today. So Boeing is pled guilty. Thank God. Whoever this is, Jack Burl at the Washington Examiner, going old school. So I was trained up where we'd say pled guilty and then the style book changed it to pleaded guilty. It always felt weird to me. So this person going to old school, Boeing to. Oh, okay. It's not. It's, it's, it's in the tent. So he didn't do it. Okay, Boeing to plead guilty. Dang it. In the 737 max crash lawsuit as part of the settlement, according to DOJ. So this was something that we're talking about Dalton. I earlier today. This says right here, the agreement would include a guilty plea after the DOJ alleged Boeing had violated a 2021 settlement and an additional $243.6 million fine. Also requires company to make a $455 million investment into improving its compliance and safety programs. So they got a fine of 243.6 million, then they're forced to spend money on improving the compliance on that. So it's a bigger ticket item, but we were pointing out earlier that the fine against Boeing and the max jets with the deaths and the crashes is less than Donald Trump was fined for, for in the New York case, but I will add to that. You have $455 million of investment into making the planes not fall out of the sky. I guess the agreement is over the lawsuit involving Boeing 737 max eight planes. So there you go. We'll update on that. All right, coming back, it's time for a checkup right here on the day mobile phone number, text line three, four, three, zero, one, zero, six. This is midday mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 1065. Welcome back to mid day mobile and time for a checkup and good to see Dr. Reese Jones from Southern Cancer Center back in studio. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. I got this one here. We've talked to over the last few weeks about the just so many different ways you can look at cancer. It could be called this cancer, but it reacts this way in one person this way in another person. Let's talk about the confusion on how cancer is treated once it moves in the body. So now we're in one person. But for example, this question of woman's breast cancer moves to her lungs. Is that still breast cancer or is that lung cancer? Yeah, the cancer is still always turned by the side of origin. So a breast cancer that moves to the bones is metastatic breast cancer to the bones. It's not a bone cancer. Okay. So there's a lot of a lot of misnomer. So does it look if you took a sample, you know, that cancer, somebody who had bone cancer started without breast cancer and you looked at that and then you looked at breast cancer that went to the bones, would they look similar? Or would it still have the signature of that breast cancer? It's still has some of the signature. So if you take, let's say you have a metastatic breast cancer. So if you take tissue from the primary breast and then tissue from the bone, there will certainly be similarities, but there could be differences as well. Okay. Because as cancer spreads there again, we talked about it mutating. And so it will acquire mutations and change. But if some if it moves to the bones and but it's still metastatic breast cancer, it's in the bone. Yeah, it's just stage four breast cancer. Wow. So lung cancer that spreads through the brain is lung cancer. Okay. Because it's always the point of origin. How and is that? This is kind of a strange question, but if you go into somebody that has cancer in multiple places, how can you figure out where it started? Most of the time, just based on the clinical scenario, you know, and the imaging helps the tumor tissue most of the time by the staining pattern pathology will get the tissue and stain it and do various studies on it. And most of the time the stating pattern will point towards a particular cancer or this one was first and that it was or at least it can rule out a few and then you have to combine that with the imaging. So if I have a cancer, let's say they're not quite sure if it's a lung or a bile duct cancer, I use that. If you get a scan and there's a 10 centimeter lung mass, you're like, okay, this is a lung cancer. You get a scan and there's nothing in the lungs, but you see a mass, say in the pancreas, you're like, okay, this is probably pancreatic cancer. So sometimes they do they grow at the same pacing like cancer in the bile duct and the cancer in the lung would they, if you started them on day in an individual, I know individuals are different, but in one person that cancer starts the bile duct, the cancer starts in the lung. Do they pace grow at the same time? Most of the time a bile duct is going to be one of the more aggressive cancers, bile duct cancer, pancreatic cancer. So it would grow faster, even if they started on day one, growing in the two places it might get. No, there's, that may not always, let's say lung cancer, one of the way luckily it's the least common, but a small cell lung cancer grows fast. Okay. So a small cell lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, I mean, I don't know exactly what the growth rate would be. So they would grow faster than that in that same person, another kind of cancer somewhere else. And we see people with multiple cancer. Right. But back to our initial question, because of how we look at it. And I don't know what this does for treatment. Does it matter where it started? Like if you're going to treat that cancer now that's a bone cancer, but it's metastatic breast cancer that's in the bone, you treat that differently than if it was just a bone cancer on its own. Yeah. So but let's say the term bone cancer as an oncologist, if I hear bone cancer, that would imply a primary cancer of the bone. And there are certainly sarcomas and different things that can arise within the bone. Those are not very common, but we do see them. But a breast cancer that metastasizes to the bones is treated as a breast cancer. And we have algorithms that we know are effective for that disease. So the look where it is, exactly it is, doesn't matter all that much. It's just a matter of where it started and what the stage is. Okay. So as you look at this, you still have to go back and say, this is a breast cancer that's moved into the bone. So there's certain things that were true about treating the breast cancer that go into that algorithm of how to treat it now in a bone. Correct. And so, yeah, we have we have standard first-line treatment you treat until the disease progresses. Now, because of we're able to do next-generation sequencing on cancers now. Explain that to me. What does that mean? So, cancer research has really gone into, we talked about the growth pattern of cancer. And if you look at the steps of growth, there's mutations and other things that are gained along the way by the cancer to stimulate its growth. So now drugs are being developed to target those individual steps. Okay. Okay. And so, what we're able to do a lot of times is take cancer cells and this gets into a whole another discussion, but actually you can do liquid voxies too. You can take the blood and if the cancer is shedding enough cancer cells into the blood, you can pick up those mutations on the blood itself. So, but let's just use the cancer tissue because that's still the most reliable way to do it. You run what we call next-generation sequencing and it does a full molecular panel. And so, there's a lot of mutations that it picks up that we don't know what to do with, because there's not been targeted drugs against those. However, if it has one of those mutations that we have a drug targeted for, it's going to tell you that. Okay. And then that will guide your treatment as you move along through- Because you now have this chink in the armor or something with that cancer, right? You know, okay, we've got something that can deal with that specific mutation. Right. And then we talked about immune therapy, like there's something called a PDO1 level, which predicts your response to immune therapy. If you have a PDO1 level of 80%, you have a very good chance of responding to immune therapy. If it's 1%, you have less of a chance and don't mean you won't, but- So, is there, in layman's terms, when you look at PDO level, what shows somebody having a higher than- What makes it- What makes you go, this person's going to respond better to immune? Well, let's take a lung cancer. A lung cancer with a PDO1 of over 50%. You can treat those patients with immune therapy by themselves without chemo. Okay. So, which is, when you get that number, though, you take a- How do you get the data that gives you that PDO1? Yeah, you just send- So, you take the tumor tissue. There's different labs that do this next generation sequencing. And so, we order the tests. The labs are mostly in California. We tell them we want the tests. They contact pathologies. At one of the hospitals, they get the blocks sent to them, the tissue block. Okay. They take the tissue, they run the testing, two weeks later. And it tells you that this person, because of what was in this sample, we know that this person has at 50%, 80%, 1% chance of- So, they'll look at the PDO1 level, and then they'll look at these specific mutations that potentially have a drug that can target them. And so, then you'll get- I get a sheet of paper that has a list, and it just tells me what they have. And it tells me what they don't have, which is important as well. Okay. And so, then, that helps me determine what's going to be the best treatment for- Well, the best treatment for that cancer now, there again, that doesn't necessarily apply to the patient sitting in front of the issue. You've got to do that. You're looking at that data, and you know the patient as well. So, you have to combine the two. So, you've got to make sure you're going to give a treatment that's not going to make things worse and settle better. But yeah, that- and so, the other thing I'll mention is I talked about cancer changing. So, let's say you have a metastatic breast cancer, and you do this testing, and so, you have a front line treatment that works for some period of time, and then quits working. All of a sudden, let's say, uh, they develop a lesion in the liver. Okay. And that's still there again, the same- Still metastatic breast cancer, breast cancer. Yeah, and the liver. Still breast cancer. However, what we try to do is rebop, see that. So, you want to- Do you think I'll show you a different mutation, or something that may be different? And that you might have something that could- Right. And so, something that was not there previously can become there, or vice versa. Something that you were targeting, you can lose that. Right. So, then if you use a drug to target that, it's no longer there, so it's not going to be effective. But there may be this new thing because of that move to the liver that gives you a chance to treat metastatic breast cancer in the liver. Right. So, we always like to rebop, see. Right. And then I mentioned the liquid-bopsy thing. You know, that's easy. They can come in, you can do a blood test, because if you- if the cancer is spread to the liver, you may be shedding enough cancer cells into the bloodstream to pick it up that way. So, what I'll typically do is send the liquid-bopsy and do the tissue testing. Because if it's not there on the liquid-bopsy, you can still be there in the tissue. Now, most of the time, if it's in the tissue, it's going to be there in the liquid. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And- But the cancer is ever-changing. And so, it's important to know what it is at that moment. Right. That's why, as I heard you talking to Dr. Jones, it's like you're getting an update. Yes. You know, briefing. You're getting a briefing. Right. On the cancer in a way, because that changes as you go through this treatment. Now, when not 20 years ago, it didn't matter, because all I had was- It was just the most part. It was just give them chemo and see what happens, because we didn't really have that target of therapy. And we didn't really have the ability to do the next recent sequencing, but that's all changed when, you know, DNA was sequenced. It changed, though, everything. And we think about how many things we talk about, it changes, but it just watching, you know, from you, your Patriots, Dr. B. Shad, the things in Southern Cancer Center, it seems like every year or two, you've gone through a quantum leap in the technology. Really, nowadays, every month or two. Wow. Yeah. If you're not keeping up, you're getting behind. Yeah. I mean, it's ever-changing. And that's, you know, that's the fascinating thing about the field. You know, it makes it fun. It's not the right word. But more rewarding to practice oncology now than it was when I first started, because not only- You have more tools that you have more tools that are, you know, they work well. They're better tolerated. And then, you know, to see a lung cancer patient that- And that's all they did the other day. She had stage four lung cancer. She's six years out. Wow. You know, and you don't- And then 20 years ago, she wouldn't be- No, 10 years ago. Wow. You know, 12 to 18 months. And so it's just fascinating to see, and it's rewarding to see. It's rewarding for your patients. I know that in their families. Aren't they the most important part of this? I have to get you to come back soon, because if we wait two weeks, it sounds like there'll be a whole bunch of new interventions. There's probably just half. All right. Good stuff. We'll have a date for you to come back and do it again. I'd love to. All right. Dr. Reese Jones from Southern Cancer Center, right here on Time for a Checkup.