Rowan Jacobsen

speaker

1,919 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jul 2022 last heard 26 Jun

Rowan Jacobsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Joe Rogan Experience · #2516 - Rowan Jacobsen · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

How important is skin cancer compared to these other things?

If sunlight reduces your risk of other diseases, how does that weigh against the risk of skin cancer?

So it's not the type of thing that can be done in a 30-second PSA.

So ultraviolet light, which is the most energy intense part of the solar spectrum, when those photons of light hit your skin, they go inside.

We absorb all wavelengths of light to a greater or lesser degree.

And that super high energy ultraviolet light, if it hits a DNA molecule, it can mess up the DNA molecule.

And then that can lead to mutations and skin cancer.

Then it can also indirectly cause skin cancer by creating what are called reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals, basically.

So it energizes these atoms that start to steal electrons from other atoms and cause a little chain reaction, which is what a free radical is.

So ultraviolet light can increase your free radicals and it can directly damage DNA.

So that's why it can cause skin cancer.

So it was basically that learning that one fact back in like the 40s and 50s that made scientists start to say, uh-oh.

Light skin cancer, maybe we should think about how much sun we're getting.

Yeah, that was an important part.

And it's a big part of the story, I think, because that was really back in the 20s that we figured that out.

And then even a little earlier, we realized that sunlight could prevent rickets.

Rickets?

Yeah.

So rickets is like soft bone disease.

Like if you don't get enough calcium in your bones when you're a kid, when you're a baby, you get soft bones, you get rickets.

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