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How the Deep Web Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-deep-web-works | Perhaps you didn't realize that when you search the web you're only skimming the surface. In fact, the types of web pages that turn up in your search engine results represent only a mere fraction of the total web. Immerse yourself in the Deep web and its | Perhaps you didn't realize that when you search the web you're only skimming the surface. In fact, the types of web pages that turn up in your search engine results represent only a mere fraction of the total web. Immerse yourself in the Deep web and its | Thu, 23 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=23, tm_isdst=0) | 30091881 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Howdy. And the mix of stuff you should know. That's right. Mine is Jerry, but with no that's right. We lose the Jerry gain and hold one step forward and another step forward. Oh, man. Fort Jerry. You've just been wailing on her. Well, I'm not going to say two steps back with Noel sitting 5ft away. It could be one in one step forward with no one step back for not having Jerry. You're saying it's a step forward not having Jerry, and a step forward having Null. I'm just trying to make everyone like me doing a poor job of it. You do a great job of it. Everybody loves the Chuck. Not everybody. Who doesn't? I have some mortal enemies. Mortal enemies? Yeah. They want to kill you. I'm trying to kill you. We'll Chuck. Yes. I will tell you what. If they did want to kill you, they wanted to hire Hitman. Yeah. The Deep Web is a good place to start looking. Yes. Quite a segue. It's been a while. I teed that one up. You did? Unintentionally unintentionally. Yeah, I spotted it and went after it. Yeah. This is about both the deep and Dark Web, which are two different things. The Dark web is part of the Deep Web. Thank you. But the Deep Web isn't necessarily dark. All dark. Right. Yeah. That's very well put. The Dark Web is the nefarious things that go on in the Deep Web. Not necessarily nefarious, but the purposefully hidden stuff. Yeah, that's true. Because there are some good things on the Dark Web I totally misspoke. Well, you know what? I think that it's great that you confess to it. You feel better. I do. Man, this is a really upfront kind of episode, isn't it? It's very honest. We're bearing it all. So do you have a fancy intro story? No. You think I would. Okay. My intro gets buried later on. It's a great intro, but it's just I'll use it as the intro. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Chuck. Yes. Have you heard of our favorite band, Iron Maiden? Yeah, sure. So, Iron Maiden is arguably the most awesome band of all time. Oh, dude. All right. I'm not a huge fan, but you wouldn't be like, I hate Iron Maiden. They suck. Of course not. No, because it would make you crazy. That's right. Iron Maiden has been around for a while. They're pretty smart. They know what they're doing, and recently, they figured out a way to maximize their touring dollars by flying their own plane. Well, Bruce Dickinson always did. Yeah, he's a certified pilot. It's got to be efficient, I would imagine. Plus fun. Unless Bruce was partying too hard, and then they got to fly to the next city that night. He wouldn't do that. I hope not, because that's dangerous. Yeah. I mean, driving drunk is bad enough, but flying drunk, I can only imagine. Sure. And it's probably not just drunk. You know what I'm saying? No, he's straight. Straight? Has he always been? I don't know. I can't verify that. Well, anyway, Bruce and the boys figured out that a good way to figure out where to tour, where to decide the tour would be to figure out where their music was getting pirated the most. That sounds reasonable. It does sound reasonable. It provides you with evidence of an established fan base and a fan base that is unwilling to pay for your record, but would probably pay to see you live. How does that reason? Well, they like your music, but they don't want to pay for your CD. So why would they go see you live and pay? Because it's different. Like, seeing a live show is way different than buying a CD. You can't get a live show. You could get a video of a live show. It's still not the same experience. The live show is a live show. Plus, everybody always knows that anybody involved entrenched in the old guard music industry. Any band doesn't make any money on their records. They make it on touring. So going to see a band live also is kind of a true act of fandom because you're contributing directly to your band that you like. Yeah. So what they did is they hired a company to look at BitTorrent sites and find the regions where their music was most pirated, and they created a tour map from it and went and played those regions. Do you have the number one Iron Maiden pirated region? No. Okay. But we're going to say Rio. All right. They're huge in South America. That's my guess. We'll look it up afterwards, I guess Rio. And so they were like, we're going to start our tour in Rio. Yeah. And it wasn't just that one place, but it was basically a tour that was built on the areas where the music was most pirated. It was a stroke of genius. But they couldn't have done it without harvesting the deep web. Because BitTorrent sites, when you search BitTorrent, the average search engine doesn't respond with the list of BitTorrent activity. It will just send you to a bit torrent site, which means that those pages of BitTorrent activity, which are web pages, and they do exist, they're part of what's called the deep Web. That's right. The surface web as we know it. And search engines that we all use, like Google and Bing, supposedly only have access to about zero 3% of what is truly on the World Wide Web that's like scary and weird and thrilling all at the same time. Right. Zero 3% and anything else that's buried is the deep web. And it's not necessarily the deep web is not when you're purposely trying to hide things, it just may not be cataloged and indexed. Maybe a password. Sure. Maybe one of those timed sites that don't let you access data after a certain amount of time. It could be anything with a captcha involved, anything that's not hyperlinked. There's lots of reasons that something could find itself buried in the Deep Web. Right. And you make a good point to separate the Deep Web and the Dark Web. So let me give you an example of Deep Web. Okay. Aside from those BitTorrent sites, there's this company called Bright Planet, and they provide deep Web harvesting, and they had this primer on what is the Deep Web. One of the examples they use was if you look up government grants on a traditional search engine, it will probably provide you with www dot grants, dot gov as one of the first returns. Right. Straight up, when you go on to grants gov, you can then search and find pages of all these different government grants. You can search by keywords, you can browse, but those pages aren't going to come up on your normal Google search. Right. You have to go to the site, which means that those pages of the actual grants are part of the Deep Web. Yeah. Your bank account, your checking account online. If you have mobile banking or online banking, it has a Web page all to its own right now. And if I searched Chuck Bryant's checking account, it would not come back. I would not get that because it's behind the password. It's a website page. It's a web page, but it's password encrypted. Therefore, it's part of the deep Web twitter until it index tweets. Used to be you couldn't search tweets individual tweets. Now you can. So that made them formerly a part of the Deep Web actual tweets. Yeah. Or every company on the planet has some sort of internal employee pages, like internal discovery that only we can access. And you can't Google search any of that stuff. Right. Or somebody could conceivably access it, maybe. It depends on the page, but you have to know the exact URL. So the idea is, if search engines are blind to it, it's part of the Deep Web. If search engines can index it and bring it back as return results, search results, it's part of the surface web. Yeah. Because that's all a search engine is doing. We might do a full podcast on search engines at some point. Sure. But the general thing is there is an index of data, and they use spiders or crawlers, because it is a web to crawl around and locate domain names and hyperlinks and basically index all that and what they think will be most helpful to what you're looking for. Right. So Chuck Bryant's bank account. Yes. There are some web pages out there that contain information related to that keyword search. Yes. So a search engine will keep an index with that keyword search with the URLs, the locations, the page content, some of the page content, the meta tags or the metadata and other very brief sketch information about those pages associated with the keyword for an index. Which means that when you type in Chuck Bryant's bank account, you got to quit saying that. Sorry. Thought about it. As I was saying at that last time. Yeah, but when you type in Birds of paradise bank account. Bank account, the search engine goes and accesses the index. It doesn't have to go all the way across every page on the Web that it can find. It just goes to its indices. And that's how search results are returned so quickly. It's not going across the Internet. It's already got the spider crawlers, the bots doing that constantly. This search engine is just going to the indexes that the bots have created from their searches. Yeah. And it is super shallow. I mean, we said 3%. Our whole job is researching online, mainly, and we run into this all the time where you feel like you're getting a very slim portion of what you're trying to find out. Right. Because so many of the best medical journals and things like this don't just pop up, as it's more likely to be some headline from CNN.com and not like a Harvard Medical Journal paper. That could really help you out. Yeah. You can get deeper and deeper with your keyword skills and your search skills. Sure. But for the most part, the first returns, the first results, depending on what you search for, are going to be, like you said, superficial. Yeah. But even if you're super sleuth a Google Master like we all think we are, how much can that be? Bumping it up. Yeah. Well, a lot of the problem, too, though, Chuck, is so much of science is behind a paywall, really expensive paywalls, too, which is like, here's the first eight lines of this awesome medical research paper. Exactly. If you want it, give us $1,200. Yeah. Which is a problem in and of itself. Not necessarily related to this, but with current search engine technology, you have, like you said, a superficial result from an inquiry on the other end of the spectrum, and this is kind of what search engines are dealing with now. The deeper you go into the deep web again, the surface web is zero 3% of all of the web pages on the entire Internet. So the further you go into it, the more data you have. And you eventually can run into the problem of what's called big data. Yeah. Not capitalized B or D, which refers to companies like Google and that can dig and harvest and maintain a large amount of data. Yes. It's basically data that's so much and so unwieldy, you can't even process and search it. It's not even helpful. Yeah. It's like a really bad Internet search. Yeah, pretty much. So the current state of search engine design or creation is balancing that, figuring out how to get less superficial without running into the big data problem of incoherent data due to just massive amounts of returns. And you might think that these search engines do a great job because I can always find out what I need. But you don't know what you're missing. Right. So it's sort of not even correct to say that I always find out what I need. Because you may even know you need it because it's hidden. That's true. And I mean, you're missing quite a bit. Okay. There's apparently 550,000,000 registered domains on the Internet. Yes. And I looked up just in 2012, I think they're only like 250 or something. I mean, it seems like it's doubled in the last couple of years. Right. So there's 550,000,000 domains, for example. A lot of them are garbage. Yes. But how stefworks.com is one domain. And I asked Tracy Wilson, who's the site director and runs stuff you missed in history class. It's one of the cohosts how many pages there are, how stuff works. She said roughly at least 50,000. So one domain out of 550,000,000 has 50,000 pages itself. Right. So you kind of get an idea of the scope. The Deep Web is anywhere from 400 to 500 times bigger than the Surface Web. And like you said, you don't know what you're missing because you don't know what's out there, because your search returns aren't bringing you back anything. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of important stuff out there. We talked about medical papers. Apparently there's engineering databases, financial information, a lot of things that could really help research, but you just can't find it. Right. Unpublished blog posts. Sure. Just basically anything that a person creates on the Internet, if a page is created, it's part of the Deep Web. Yeah. Unless you take this stuff down, it's living there forever, just gathering dust. Exactly. And it's not just necessarily engineering databases or medical information. Right. There's also a lot of shady stuff too. The Dark Web. That's the Dark Web. Yeah. The Dark Web is when these sites intentionally reroute you. Well, we'll get to how they do it, but basically it's intentional anonymity. It just happens to be buried on the Deep Web because it's not indexed. It is purposely hidden from the Surface Web so people can't track the person searching for something. Or the end website, I guess those are all just private, essentially. Right. And privacy advocates are way into it. You're not necessarily a child pornographer. Although there is a lot of that kind of stuff on the Dark Web. There's also a lot of good that happens on the Dark Web. Yeah. The anonymity and privacy and the desire for it isn't in and of itself proof of wrongdoing. Of course not. No. It's frequently pointed out as that, but incorrectly. Yeah. I don't want the NSA in my business. People like, well, what are you doing? Right, exactly. Nothing. Yeah. I just don't want them in my business. Precisely. That's an answer. That's good enough. That answer is good enough for a lot of people. They say, well, then I need to go to the dark web to maintain anonymity for the higher hit man. Right. To kill Chuck Bryant. That you could do. That's crazy. You could do. There was a site for a while, I don't know if you've heard of it or not. It's called Silk Road, which got shut down. And I teach Chuck. I know you've heard of it. It's like the most famous dark website of all time. Yeah. The Feds busted Ross Ulbricht, who may or may not be Dread Pirate Roberts, which was the online name that they said, he's the guy running this. And he is now saying, Actually, that's not me, but all those bitcoins are mine. Yeah. So you can't seize those bitcoins. And it's in courts now. They're trying to determine whether or not it counts as something that you can seize as an asset from a criminal. And they're saying that this is literally a case that no court has ever heard before. Yeah. It's never been questioned whether you could seize cryptocurrency. Yeah. And you should listen to our podcast on Bitcoins, by the way, from not too many months ago. That's a good one. But it's essentially just encrypted digital currency. And they have a really fascinating circumstantial case against Ulbricht, not just for operating the Silk Road site. That's where you could buy drugs and things, by the way. Right. Which being the operator of that in and of itself shouldn't be a crime. I'm sure that they would have prosecuted them for that if they had been able to get their hands on them for just that. But apparently they also have him for at least two hired contract killings. One, he, I guess, hired an undercover cop to do it, and the guy went to the person who he was taking the hit out on and said, this guy is trying to kill you. I need you to cooperate and I'm going to take pictures of you dead and send them to this guy. And old Bricks apparently gave him, like, 40 grand upfront and another 40 after he saw the photos. In bitcoins? No, I think in cash. Okay. Although, no, it would have been in bitcoins. You're right. Yeah. So who knows? It could have been two bitcoins at the time, or 5000. Well, Silk Road 20. Launched in November. Is it out now? It's out. And there are other copycatters, like the black market reloaded, which they went down for a little while after Silk Road went down, but then it went back up, I think. Yeah. I don't know, man. I hate to say you shouldn't try and fight crime, but you're not going to stop this stuff when one you cut off the head of one and another grows right out of it in its place. It's true. If the structure that's allowing for the anonymity can remain intact, which is the dark web. Right, but it's not just the dark web. It's like how you traverse the dark web. Like using Tor. Yeah, I guess we haven't explained the onion router. T-O-R is what it's called, and it is software that you use to access the deep web and the dark web if you choose to. And it searches for these anonymous sites for you, like a search engine, but instead of.com.org or net, they end in onion. Right. The idea of an onion has many layers, and that's how you access it through tour. You have to buy it and install it on your computer. Right. Well, you can get it for free. Yeah. Firefox had something that it was basically a Tour bundle. It was the most popular one, and you could download it for free. But it's not a web browser itself. It's like an add on to a web browser that allows anonymity. And it does two things. One, it bounces your trail all over the world from server to server, so it makes you and your activity extraordinarily difficult to track. Yeah, it's not just like this computer went to this site, right? That's the whole onion thing. There's so many layers. It's like we don't know who this is or where they are, what they're doing, or anything like that. We just know right now that this particular person happens to be there's a user on Silk Road, but we don't know who it is or anything. You can't track them because they're using Tor. The other thing is you can't get into onion domain sites, dark web sites, unless you're using Tor, right. Like, they won't let you in unless you're an anonymous user. Yeah. So Tor has this kind of two fold thing. But there was recently a breach in it. And it turned out the FBI was using malware to break through the anonymity of Tor users and found out a lot of people on some sites that were hosted by something called freedom hosting. Which apparently had a horrible reputation for being the repository on the web. On the dark web for child pornography. Right. And knowingly basically just not doing anything about it. So the FBI had a they hacked the freedom hosting servers and inserted this malware. So if you went to a freedom hosting site, any of them, not just necessarily a child pornography, but any site hosted by freedom hosting, which is like, say GoDaddy for the dark web, right. You would get this malware package that exploited a keyhole in Firefox's Tour bundle. It went into your computer, said, hey, give me your Mac address, which is basically like your computer hardware, like serial numbers and your computers alone's tracking number, and then also tell me where the computer is. And it sent it back to a server, a mystery server in McLean, Virginia. And finally, after like a month, the FBI was like, yeah, that was us. We have everybody who went on that site's, name and address and everything on them. So that's a huge ripple. Firefox fixed this loophole, but it's been a huge ripple through the Dark Web and Deep Web community. Sure thing. Like, whoa, whoa, we were anonymous before, but now it's been shown definitively that the Feds can find out who we are. So that anonymity is reduced if not taken away. Yeah. Which defeats the whole purpose. Yeah. So if you don't have that, then you can keep lopping the heads off of these things and they're not going to go back because people are afraid. People will be afraid because they won't feel like they're anonymous any longer. Well, Tour has a sort of an ironic background, which we will get to right after this message break. All right, so we're back and we left you with the nugget that Tor has an interesting background. And the background of Tor is actually the US. Naval Research Laboratory in 2003 launched this program for political dissidents and whistleblowers so they can get their message out without fear of reprisal. Right. And this is still a use of Tour, like The New York Times, WikiLeaks, some other news agencies have tour sites that if you want to go and contact the New York Times or WikiLeaks anonymously, like, you can go to their Onion site and upload documents or say, hey, I have some information I want to share. Right. And you can do it anonymously. So the government, though, is basically law enforcement is trying to track down criminals using the software that the government created to begin with. So it's an interesting loop, but like we said, it's not all badness. If you live in a country where bad things are going on and you don't feel safe getting on the regular Web as a political dissident, you can do so on the Dark Web. It offers a virtual meeting place for sometimes people are trying to combat these oppressive regimes in their countries and they can't just hop on Facebook and organize a meeting because they'll get smacked down. Right. If you're a person who values privacy for whatever reason or no reason at all, the Deep Web and the Dark Web offer file sharing services. Email is a big one, too. Yeah, I can't remember the name of the one Edward Snowden has been using, but I think it got shut down. Like there's the whole company shut down. Sorry, you're out of business now because you're helping Edward Snowden, but there are other email services, basically everything you have on the Web. If you want to do it anonymously, you have to go to a company that operates on the Dark Web right. That uses Tor to route its information or your information. Yeah. The University of Luxembourg did a study where they tried to rank the most commonly accessed stuff on the Dark Web. And sadly, what they did find a lot of things like child pornography, there were also a lot of sites and chat rooms for human rights and freedom of information and just people that don't want to type in a search for how to grow marijuana. And then the next time they go to their Gmail account, there are a bunch of ads for grow lights. Yeah. And you're going, how did that happen? Well, it happened because you're searching the Surface Web, right. With an IP that can be traced back to you and not even illegal activities like that. You want to research a Fitbit bracelet, and then you go and they say, hey, Chuck, are you fat? You want to lose weight? Why else? You want to fit bit? All right, daddy, why would you want a Fitbit? Yeah, it's definitely creepy. There's the big brother effect. I think everyone feels it, the existence of the Deep Web, not necessarily the Dark Web, but just the Deep Web, all of those pages of information that are out there. Some companies will figure out how to exploit it, or the fact that normal search engines aren't doing a good job of looking into the deep web. That company, Bright Planet, I mentioned, they have a Deep Web Harvester, which is basically a proprietary search engine algorithm that goes into websites and gets everything. Like, it doesn't form an index. It grabs every bit of text off of every site associated with a URL. It sounds like big data. It is. But they're doing it for companies like Big Pharma, Big Government, and saying, like, oh, you want to know what your competitors up to? Well, here's every letter of every word of every strip of text on your competitors website, including all internal stuff, everything. Please give us $10 million for that search. Yeah. There's also this site called Vocative. Which uses something like Bright Planets. Deep Web Harvesting. But it does it for journalism purposes. And it's basically. Rather than searching using Google. You or I would for a story idea. They're searching using a Deep Web Harvester to find all this other information that we wouldn't be able to find because we don't know how to search the deep Web and writing stories like that. And there's some pretty interesting stuff that those sites put together already, I bet. Well, when you think about it, if you think the Internet is cool and you're only getting 3% of it yeah, not bad. And the surface web is getting deeper. The Deep Web is getting deeper, search engines are searching deeper, and they're trying to anonymize more effectively. So it's like this cyber war is going on. Oh, yes. That was another good one we did. What do we do? Cyber war one on cyber war. Yeah, I know. I've heard that before. So there you go. I would have to say that this is one of those episodes where we did it, but it is not done. No, no. Sometimes we do them, and it's like that's it. There's nothing more to say about this topic. Yeah, I'm interested to see what happens with Ulbricht. For sure. This can be a landmark case. Yes. If you want to know more about the Deep Web, you can type Deep Web into the search engine and how stuff works. It will bring back superficial results. Only how stuff works stuff. But it's pretty good, so you'll be happy. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this birthday shout out that we rarely do. Okay. Hey, guys. I'm a longtime listener, shamelessly writing to ask for a huge favor. Here's the pitch. I first became aware of your podcast when my last girlfriend, Natalie David, introduced me to it when we started dating, and I've heard of thanks for getting me Hooked. As we spend a lot of time listening to your show and learning together. As huge supporters of your podcast, we were compelled last year to make the trip up from Virginia to New York when you were putting on your trivia night. And Natalie is the one who gave us the mics on pants off T shirts. Okay. Yeah. And David, her boyfriend, they were super cool, super nice. They sat at a table right near us, so I got to know him a little bit, and he says, Anyhow, here's where the favor comes in. She moved to Shanghai, China, to teach, and she's teaching little kids English. That's fine. And sadly, they separated when she moved over there, which to me are always like, the saddest breakups, right? Like, there's nothing wrong with this moving to China. Sure. So they just thought it was probably the thing to do, because I inquired back to David, emailed them about this. And so I know you guys broke up and said, yeah, but we still really support each other and care about each other, and hopefully our paths will cross again one day. So, anyway, Natalie, David is in China, and because of this distance, I was at a loss when considering went to get her. He made a donation to Cooperative for Education in her name. And I know you guys like to read those names of people who contribute, but in this case, I was hoping you would just do a little something more special by wishing her happy birthday. So, on January 26, which I think should be very soon, natalie, happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday. We remember you. I wear that shirt all the time. My wife thinks it's funny. And I hope you're doing well in China. And don't give up on David just because he's here in stupid United States. Her new Chinese boyfriend is like, what, that guy? Yeah. She's like, Nothing. Wait, rewind that. So, anyway, I hope you're doing well over there in China, and thanks again for all the support, and I hope you guys hope your pass across again one day. That was very nice. That is from David Austin burre. If you have a special request for Chuck or me or us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffystemo. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can, as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoustenew.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetoftworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Lindacom. Linda.com offers thousands of engaging, easytofollow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at $25 a month and provides unlimited 24/7 access. Try Linda.com free for seven days by visiting linda. Comsysk. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
6c204e52-1549-11eb-a4ab-c3fd777f9442 | Chuck Bryant On The Why I’m Voting Podcast | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/chuck-bryant-on-the-why-i-m-voting-podcast | If you want to change, preserve, or build a better America, there’s one easy way to make your voice heard: Vote. | If you want to change, preserve, or build a better America, there’s one easy way to make your voice heard: Vote. | Sun, 25 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=6, tm_yday=299, tm_isdst=0) | 11761089 | audio/mpeg | "Whether you upgrade your car because you need to or because you want to, ebay Motors has all the car parts you need, over 122,000,000 of them, from new rims to seat cushions, all at the right prices. Ebay motors.com, let's ride. The moment you realized you were mistaking your kids for coworkers Katie, I'm taking my 15 now. Taking 15. What was the moment you knew it was time to get back to work? Let's job it up at Career Builder. Our simple customizable search tool lets you search for part time, full time, and even work from home job so you can find a job that fits your lifestyle. Get started now@careerbuilder.com. This episode is brought to you by Royal Caribbean, an award winning global cruise line. A vacation is what you make it. So are you ready to make the most of it? A Royal Caribbean adventure is the perfect opportunity to not just take a vacation, but to take it for all it's worth. We know you're eager to get back out there, and with Royal Caribbean, you can own that moment and rise to the vacation. This is not just a cruise. This is the biggest, boldest vacation on land or at sea. With over 270 plus destinations from the Caribbean, Alaska to Europe, and the biggest ships in the world to take you there, each one of our cruises is packed full of onboard features you won't find anywhere else. A Royal Adventure is taking your vacation to the fullest. Come seek the Royal Caribbean Visit royalcaribbean.com to learn more. Welcome to why? I'm voting a production of iHeartRadio. Listen, you already know this, but it's an election year. You might already be tired of hearing about it, but here's the thing democracy doesn't work without you. I'm Holly Fry, and I'm sitting down with many of my fellow podcasters, from Will Ferrell to Stephanie Ruel, as well as other luminaries to find out about their relationships with the ballot box and ultimately, just to find out why they vote. I hope you're exercising your right to vote, and if you're not, I hope that their stories inspire you. So today on Why I am Voting, I am joined by the fabulous and delightful Chuck Bryant, host of Stuff You Should Know and also movie crush and general all around guy who has kindly agreed that should have been all around good guy, but whatever. He's definitely an allaround guy all around good guy to join us and talk about his relationship with voting a little bit. So right out of the gate, do you remember when you realized as a kid maybe that voting was a thing and something that you could potentially participate in one day? Well, Holly, here's my story. I grew up in a house that did not really talk politics. It was a politics free zone, except for the occasional grousing of my dad, I guess, about something, but it was just not something that was very big in my family for some reason, and of course, I learned about all that kind of thing in civics class and voting, but it didn't really hit home. I kind of got a late start as far as personally being involved politically. That didn't come around until later, towards the end of college. So you didn't register right away, like, when you were 18? I didn't. And I may have been completely wrong about this, but if I remember correctly, I think I remember that, and it may have been true, but that if you registered a vote, you are also registered for the draft. And even though it's silly to think that there would even be a draft anymore, I think I remember at the time being like, I'm not registered. Not for me. Not for me. And I don't even know if that was true. So it was very shameful looking back, but I also didn't know anything about anything back then, so I don't know if I would have been a responsible voter even. Yeah, I think there's no shame in acknowledging, like, when you're kind of still a dumb kid, you're not really ready to make decisions anyway and maybe aren't ramping up to vote. Do you remember what made you finally decide to register to vote? Yeah. In college, I think for a lot of people is when a lot of that stuff becomes a little more to the forefront, a little more spiritually awake and politically awake and all that good stuff. And I remember very distinctly in, I guess, my sophomore year in college, maybe my second or third year when the first Gulf War happened, and sitting around and watching that on CNN and having a roommate who is now an attorney, that was pre law back then. That was very political. And his name was Rob. Elsie and Rob, we're still friends. He really kind of brought politics to the apartment. And my other roommate, Eddie Cooper, also were both ahead of me politically. And that's when I first started kind of realizing that it's important to be involved and to be aware and to know what the hell's going on. Do you remember the first time that you actually voted? Do you have any memories of that first ballot experience? I do. The first election I participated in was my final year in college because I spent six years there was the 96 election, which I guess was Bill Clinton part two, if I'm remembering right. Yeah, that track. And that was I think Nader was involved back then. I think Ross Perot was having his second go around, and that's when I cast my first vote as a Democrat, and I've been a lifelong Democrat since then. What is your research process like? Or do you research for elections? I know for me, some of the local politicians, they're not getting ads. I got to do some legwork to make sure I know who I'm voting for. What is your process like, well, I mean, you and I are both sort of professional researchers, so we know our way around the Internet when it comes to finding the good research. I like to think with the presidential candidates and all the way it's constructed in this country, you kind of have a choice of one or two things usually, and that's always easy for me. But as you go down ticket, I do research. I just try to Facebook a lot of times is where not what people are saying, but people linking to some good information is a good place to get stuff. I always try to read up on the measures, the local measures that are going to be on the ballot, whether it's can you drink on Sundays in Georgia, to things that are a little more substantial. But I try to kind of investigate and I ask around to people that are smarter than me. I don't think there's any shame in seeking out opinions of people that really know their stuff. Yeah, this kind of brings up the thing. So you do obviously vote down ticket, but do you make sure that you hit like the local elections that maybe aren't part of a bigger every two years situation? I do now, and for the past probably 15 years or so because I got a late start, I thought you go in and you vote for the president and that's doing your civic duty. And then the more I grew up and became a sentient, responsible adult, you realize I think, like we all do and like, you probably have that a lot of those local elections really matter as far as what impacts you and the people that you love and people in your community. So that is definitely something that came on later in life. But now those are very important elections for me. My husband and I always make voting a date. Oh, that's fun. Where we always go to breakfast or we go have lunch afterwards, whatever our schedule will permit. Do you have any rituals around voting? Well, I try to vote early in the pre voting just because don't like standing in lines and stuff. Although I will say I've had some great experiences standing in long lines to vote, some great feeling of community because I think that's one of the kind of the fun things about voting is you vote in your district and you're voting with your neighbors. And I live in a very mixed race neighborhood in Atlanta, and going into vote and standing in those lines to vote for President Obama, it was a great feeling and you could feel it in the air and there was just a good spirit of community and friendliness. And so I don't mind those lines because it can make me feel closer to my fellow person and my neighbor. But I also do like to try an early vote as well, just to get in and out it sort of depends if I miss my window. It's not like I don't hang my head. I just feel like, all right, I'll just stand in line. Yes, I like the line too, because I feel like it makes you remember that you're not just voting for yourself, you're voting for the well being of everyone in your community. Totally. That's a great way to look at it. Now, you, like me, came to voting a little bit later. You weren't right out of the gate at 18. But I feel like kids today are better informed, certainly, than I was at that age. So if there are any people out there, whether they're young or even older, that maybe aren't using their right to vote, if you could tell them one thing, what would it be? Well, I feel like subsequent generations behind us are more politically active than we were, maybe. But then I also sometimes see the voting numbers and see things like the younger generation isn't voting like they should. So I'm not quite sure how to reckon that. I would say, take a look at the world around you, and if you don't like what you see, it's kind of one of the only things that we have. We can protest and we can petition, we can lobby and make calls to congress people and senators. But your vote is really the only thing where you know that you're on record of having cast your official say on something, and that's important. I don't want to get sidetracked about the Electoral College and some states, people might not think their vote counts, but it does, especially because of the ballot measures and the local elections and council elections and stuff like that. It always counts. It's your duty. And lastly, as we go forward and we're getting older and maybe becoming jaded old hags, at least I am right there with you. But I wonder what it is that keeps you motivated to vote, knowing that it's not the same as when you're a kid and you're predicting or determining your future for quite as long a run. What is it that keeps you mailing in that ballot or going to the polls, even when it's a pain in the butt? I have a daughter now, a five year old daughter, and that's a big part of it. I want to ensure her rights to have control of her own body. I would feel the same way if I had a son, obviously. But it does hit home a lot more when you have a daughter, I think. So a lot of this is to set an example for her, to take her with me if she's getting to the age where obviously not during a pandemic, but she'll be going to vote with me the next time it's safe to do so. And I want to teach her about that kind of stuff, because I wasn't really taught that stuff. So I think it's a very selfish thing to only think about. While I'm here, let me vote for the things that are important to me. It's about the future and making sure the planets taken care of and making sure that everyone has their rights enshrined into law. And to not vote is lazy. It's cynical, I think, and I'm trying to rid myself of that cynicism, which is tough as you get older. But to set an example for my daughter, I guess, is the easiest answer. Perfect one, in my opinion. You're continuing the chain of voters. I love it. I'm trying to. Chuck, thank you so much for chatting with me today. But also, just thank you for voting. Thank you. And I wear that sticker all day. I know that's a big part of it. That Georgia peach. It is. It's cute. You got to post it on one of the social medias as well. Yes, that's how people know. So thank you, Holly. It was a pleasure to talk to you again. It's always a delight for me. I feel spoiled. I've gotten to do two chats with you recently. No, let's keep it up and let's keep voting, everybody. Yes, please. Hey, are you not registered to vote yet, but you think it's something you want to do? You may still have time. Voter registration deadlines vary by state, so to find out the scoop for where you are, check out a nonpartisan registration voting site like HeadCount.org or FairVote.org. Why I'm voting is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the heart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Agent Orange Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-agent-orange-worked | Agent Orange was a potent herbicide used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. Learn more about the origins, use and devastating side effects of Agent Orange in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Agent Orange was a potent herbicide used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. Learn more about the origins, use and devastating side effects of Agent Orange in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:45:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=13, tm_min=45, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=216, tm_isdst=0) | 24588689 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I thought you were going to say I'm Radius, and this is Ulma. Let's try that again, Sean. Okay. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Charles W. Brian is here, and so am I. I'm Josh Clark, and this is stuff you should know. I thought you were going to say I'm Radius, and this is Ulna. Wow. Okay. So, Ulna, how are you doing? Radius. I'm doing fine. That's fantastic. Good. Chuck? Sorry, what? I was just going to say I'm just doing the wristbone thing. Are you metacarpal? Yeah. Okay, so we start over. I don't care. Okay. No, we're going to leave it in because our producer Jerry loves this kind of stuff, and we're going to go forward. How about that? Yes. Chuck, you served in the Vietnam War, correct? That is correct. That is not correct. I was not even born yet. Are you sure? Jerk. Yeah. When did Vietnam end? Officially, 75. Oh, well, sure. I was born then. I wasn't born then. Well, good for you. Well, Chuck, surely growing up in the 80s, you heard of Agent Orange. Yes. Remember the skateboard company? Absolutely. Yeah. So that just really attracted me. I never had an Agent Orange skateboard. I was more of a Paul Perelta fan. Mike McGill, specifically. Sure. But I always thought Agent Orange was cool. It just had the coolest name. And then I came to find out that it was actually an herbicide, and I was like, that's not that cool. Yes. I used to get confused with Napalm. Yeah, I knew there were different things, but Napalm was orange, and so it was kind of confused me. Have you ever made neighbors at home? No, I haven't. Okay. Well, once I came to find out that Agent Orange was an herbicide, I kind of lost interest in it. And then now here we are, what, 10, 12, 15 years later? Yes. And my interest is once again peaked because Agent Orange was about the baddest mofo that the US Army deployed against the Vietnamese. Right. Actually, Agent Purple may have been, but we'll get into that. Okay, well, let's talk about it. Okay, Agent Orange. Let's give a little background on just how much Agent Oranges used. As we said, it was an herbicide. Yes, a very potent herbicide. Acting stats. You want to do the stats, buddy? That's my deal. Okay. It is a defoliant, and we use about 11 million gallons, specifically of Agent Orange alone. 42 million liters? Yes. From January 65 to April 1970. And about 20 million gallons, which is that is about, I don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 76 million liters. Very good. Thanks. Total herbicides altogether from 62 to 71. Right. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, I think over the course of 6000 missions, spraying missions, because it was all aerial, as far as I know. Right. About 10% of Vietnam was sprayed with Agent Orange alone. Yeah. That is a lot of herbicide. Yeah. And that's a substantial portion of the country to be infected with a harmful, dangerous killer. Yeah. Now, anybody who sprayed, like, Roundup or some other herbicide around the garden, you kind of almost have this natural inclination to keep it away from you as much as possible. And when someone gets on your fingers, you run inside and wash your hands 50 times. Right. Yeah. I can't use any of that stuff because the animals it's rough stuff. It can be. Right. But it does kill the grass. Yeah. As did Agent Orange. But not only did Agent Orange kill grass, it killed everything. And what's ironic about it is that it's actually a growth regulator, meaning that it stimulates growth in plants. That shocked me. Yeah. It was shocking. I thought it was a flatout killer. But apparently what it does is if it's used too much, then they grow to the point where it dries out and dies. Yeah. It grows so fast that the water depletes its water supply very quickly, and that's that crazy. Never knew that. But there's this guy, a botanist named Dr. Arthur W. Galston, and he actually created Agent Orange, and he did create it as a growth regulator to boost plant growth. And after the military got a hold of it, he started to realize that his invention was being used in a really horrible way and actually campaigned against it. Yeah. I felt bad for that guy. That's his legacy. Well, did you read that quote from him? I did, and I agree with it. Yeah. You want to read it? Yeah. Josh, the quote is, nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral, and it can be turned either to constructive or destructive ends. That's not the fault of science. Right. And I agree with that. Yeah. And I'm sure Phillip Oppenheimer would agree with that as well. Right. I mean, he created nuclear fission. Sure. I'm pretty sure he created nuclear fission. And it was used in a catastrophic manner to kill hundreds of thousands, millions, probably people. Right. He didn't create it for that, and it was just he created something and basically opened Pandora's box. And there you go. So I agree with Gallstone's assessment as well. But still, the fact remains, the US military got a hold of this and they sprayed it everywhere. They could, indeed. So, Chuck, what's the problem with it? Aside from the fact that if you're living in Vietnam between 1965 and 70 and they come over your village and spray that stuff, number one, it's probably going to stink. Which it did. Yeah. Number two, you're covered in herbicide. Number three, all of your trees are suddenly leafless. What are some other problems that it poses well, not only trees, buddy. Well, we should point out that the reason they did this was because of the thick jungle cover in Vietnam. Made it very difficult for snipers and air squadrons to see what's going on, not to mention the guys in the jungle. So they would use this herbicide to just wipe it out completely and make it like a barren, black landscape so the enemy could be seen. Right. So not only did it kill the vegetation, but it also killed crops, and it also destroys the root system and really completely gets into the soil. So nothing would grow there afterwards either. They would eventually, if you eradicate it sure. And also without root systems, then your soil structure is messed up. Sure. And so apparently, Vietnam's monsoons carried much of the top soil away. Exactly. Was it all away? Right. Which also then the Agent Orange entered the water. Right. You polluted that, and then you have a big problem with cropland. So we've got the polluted water supply. Right. So even if you do have crops and you're just spraying more Agent Orange on when you irrigate it right. So it's kind of a vicious cycle. Right? It is indeed. At the time, though yeah. You're getting rid of snipers, which were a huge problem in Vietnam, and also, supposedly, the US government secretly sprayed the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia, which they were definitely not supposed to rights as well. Yeah. And that was a key supply route into Vietnam. So yeah, there was a reason it wasn't just like, hey, we're over here, and why don't we just get rid of all the vegetation? Right. But again, Chuck, I repose my question. Okay. Am I dodging it? Actually, no, you did answer it, but I think the problem is okay, so most of the stuff is grown back, right. We're talking almost 40 years ago. Yeah, we're talking almost 40 years ago. Right. The trees have grown back, the vegetation has grown back. What's the problem? Why are we still talking about Agent Orange? Well, because it's been carried down through genetics, essentially, right. Through families. Well, what's the active ingredient that's so nefarious? Are you talking about the dioxin? I am indeed, my friend. Yeah. The dioxin is the trouble. Now, you may have heard of dioxins with that whole Tupperware thing. That tupperware, I'm sorry. Tupperware. I don't know if you use it or not, but some of these food storage containers, I think dioxin is a softener that's used in plastic to keep them from snapping, being very brittle and snapping. Right. The problem is they can conceivably leach out, and you're not supposed to have dioxins in them. But disruptors everyone has a little bit of dioxin in our system. Well, yeah. Aren't they naturally occurring? To some degree, yeah. But beyond that, the fact that it's used in things like those kind of plastic, small amounts of dioxin are present in pretty much all of us. Plus, also, when you burn trash, I believe dioxins are created or released. It's usually a byproduct, I think of some other burn copper smelting, which I know you do on the weekend, so you should probably go get checked. I'm a big copper smelter, but yeah, but we can deal with some level of dioxin. The problem is Agent Orange had such high concentrations of dioxins in them that there was some serious health effects. Right. And the Department of Veterans Affairs actually claimed that it only had minute traces of dioxin initially, and for Agent Orange, it was TCD was the specific dioxin. But that's just not true because people in Vietnam in some areas have blood levels up to ten times above normal for containing dioxin. Right. Today, yeah. And originally, right after the Vietnam War, even during, I believe, some people had about 200 times the normal level. Right. So, yeah, there's a lot of dioxin flying around. And these were all in areas where Agent Orange was being sprayed. Yeah. And we're talking cancer, we're talking birth defects. Birth defects, miscarriages. You want to know how it gets in there and screws things up so bad? School me. Okay, so basically, dioxins are capable of binding to it's fat soluble, right? Exactly. They're capable of binding to hormone receptor sites. Right? Right. So it can also very easily get into the nucleus of your cells. When that happens, my friend, your DNA can be tampered with. Okay. So let's say you remember we were talking about the chicken or the egg, and mutations take place in the zygote stage. Right. So let's say a couple of parents of a child have dioxins in their cells, in the nucleus of their cells, and these cells are contributed to create the zygote. Well, if the dioxin has managed to mess with the DNA, it's going to send all sorts of funky instructions, and that's how you get things like grossly misshapen heads. Yeah. You sent me some emails of pictures of children, vietnamese children. It's just awful to see that. Yeah, it's amazing. If you type in Agent Orange and go to search image results in Google, it's startling, some of the things that happen. One I saw was a picture of a five year old girl who didn't have eyes. It was just skin. I know. And kind of a depression because she still had the ocular cavity in her soul, but it was a skin grown over it. And I was reading the capture next to it. They were saying they think what happened was the hormones that were released that are supposed to instruct the cell to develop eyes or to instruct the body to develop eyes failed to do so because there was dioxin bound to these receptor sites that should have gotten that hormone and taken the information and created eyes. Awful. So it gets in there pretty bad, and it can be passed down. And Vietnam has a real problem right now, I think they estimate as many as 1 million of the 84 million people who live in Vietnam have been poisoned by Agent Orange. Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah. And you said earlier that it's the worst. And I brought up Agent Purple. They actually had a bunch of agents with the colors, and evidently they were named by not by the color of the chemical, but the color of the container that came in. There was an orange stripe on the container. Sure. So Agent Purple and Agent Pink, these millions of gallons of this stuff, too. And it's possibly even more deadly because Agent Purple has three times as much docs and as Agent Orange. Yeah. You don't hear much about Agents Pink or Agent Purple. No, I think because Agent Orange was used in spades. Sure. You know, it's odd. You said that cancer is a result of Agent Orange or dioxin poisoning, right? Yeah, about 40% risk of increased risk. Well, cancer is uncontrolled cellular growth. Right. What's surprising is that you remember we were talking about Agent Orange being a growth regulator and that it causes plants to grow rapidly. Interesting, in humans, the exact opposite happens. In small doses, dioxins actually keep cancer cells in check right. From growing. But then in larger doses, it promotes this uncontrolled growth. So it has the exact opposite effect on humans as it does plants. Right. How weird is that? It's very weird. And I know the who, the World Health Organization, it's officially classified as a known carcinogen. Yeah. There's no mistaking it. No, but there's still a debate. Well, there's not much of a debate anymore. But there has been since the 80s well, since the 70s, really, about whether or not Agent Orange caused all these problems. I know why? Lawsuits. Yes. Because no one wants to pay and be responsible for this. No. And certainly not the US. Government, which has actually been hiding behind sovereign immunity. Yes. That means the US. Government cannot be sued. Yeah. It's as simple as that. Nicely done. Basically, it's a doctrine that establishes international law. And it says, like Chuck said, you can't sue the government. Right. So everybody went after the chemical companies instead. And I think it behooves us to mention some of these chemical companies that created Agent Orange. Dow Monsanto. Hercules diamond shamrock were for the big ones. Right. And they all say that they were contracted out by the government to do a job. So it's not our fault. Yeah. And the Supreme Court, I believe, upheld that or at least tossed out a lawsuit that challenged that these companies were working as government contractors and were ordered to produce Agent Orange for the government. So by default, they're protected by sovereign immunity. I say by proxy. Basically, it seems like anytime there's been a big suit, it's kind of resulted in a big, fat dead end. Yes. But we should say that those four companies I mentioned in addition to, I think, three others. Yes. Seven total ended up paying out $240,000,000 class action to 291,000 people. Right. That was a settlement too, right? Yeah, that was a settlement. Sure. But there's still plenty of other people who have lawsuits pending or would like to sue. But it doesn't look like it's going to be happening. There was an attorney for Vietnamese national who is trying to sue one of the chemical companies who said that the ruling that because the government ordered these chemical companies to produce Agent Orange that they were government contractors and therefore the lawyer said that's pretty much the end of Agent Orange lawsuit. Right. Did you ever see The Fog of War? No. The documentary Errol Morris is one of my heroes as a filmmaker. Sure. You should check that out. It's an hour and a half long interview with Robert McNamara and just hardcore intense interview about the Vietnam War. Really good. I would love to see that. It's really awesome. Fog of War. I'll check it out. So, Chuck, while these lawsuits are some are being paid off, some aren't, there's still a problem of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam. How do you remediate this? Well, Josh, I have some numbers for you. I think I know what you're getting out here. Just as an example, the town of Bentre has 140,000 people there and the Red Cross estimates that 58,000 of them have suffered the effects of Agent Orange. That's like more than 40% of the population. Right. And as you said, a million total in the entire country. Right. But how do you clean this up? I think Christopher Hitchens mentioned that it's been called an eco site. Who said that? Yeah. So what do you do about this? Well, you clean it up, Josh. Okay. Well, that's kind of an expensive proposition. There is ways that this can be cleaned up. And we said a lot of the countryside has been naturally reforested. Right, right. Are you talking about the wall of trees? The wall of trees seems pretty cool. Yeah. They planted essentially a barrier to protect people from this in the form of trees. Yeah. Which sounds I don't know how that works, actually. It probably leaches it out of the soil. Eventually the trees will hold the soil in place right. So it won't be washed away. And then perhaps the soil can act as a natural filter. We should also say that dioxins appear to have about a half life of seven years, but once they hit the topsoil, they've been shown to stick around a lot longer. Yeah. I think part of the problem is there's a lot of people who have a lot of money that don't want to part with it who are saying, you know what? This is just eventually going to work itself out. Right. Well, they outlawed it and Richard Nixon actually outlawed it when they found conclusive test results in lab rats. But the damage was done. Definitely. And it has been going on and it may be going on without some sort of large scale intervention. It doesn't look like that's going to be happening anytime soon. Should we talk about Victor? Sure. Victor Ushenko. Yes. He's actually a living case study in dioxin poisoning in Me. Yes. He's a Ukrainian politician, and many of you may know this. He was poisoned with dioxin, but survived during the 2004 presidential election, which he won not too long ago. And he thinks he was purposely poisoned. Sure. And they traced it back to a dinner he had, but no charges have been filed. No one has claimed responsibility. But you saw the before and after pictures. Yeah. This dude had quite an effect on him. He was a good looking man. He was. After the dioxin poisoning, he ain't pretty no more. No, his face was. And you should look this up on the Internet as well. And the Google images. Me? No, our loyal fan base. Oh, yeah. It's startling. Pockmarked face. Deeply pockmarked like moon crater type stuff. Swollen up, big circles under his eyes. I think they said he had 6000 times the normal level of Dachshund. Is that right? Yeah. Which is the second highest ever recorded and human that lived. Yeah. And he looks a little better now. He does. And he's still up and walking around, which is miraculous. It is. But yeah, you can't keep you Shanko down. And should we talk about the veterans? Yeah, zoomwalt. Well, yeah, we'll get to that in a second. But in 1000, 978, the VA set up a program to officially deal with this and conducted health exams on 315,000 veterans. And basically the presumption is if you were exposed to Agent Orange, then you got some trouble and you have VA care. Even before the lawsuits, any lawsuits, were settled, the VA was operating on the premise that there was a huge link between Agent Orange exposure and all these problems. So the VA actually has done a lot to help out veterans from Vietnam and actually Korea. Right. I didn't even know we were in Korea in the late 60s. Yeah. And that was hand sprayed by people, but by Koreans. I got you actually not hand sprayed, but the Koreans did the spraying. And actually the VA is also covering the children of soldiers because a lot of times, like you said, passed on down and potentially even to another generation. Well, that's the problem in Vietnam. It's sticking around. So, I mean, eventually it will be rented out, I guess you could put it, genetically speaking, but that's a pretty sick way of dealing with the situation. But that looks like the way it's being handled. Yeah. So you want to talk about Zoom out now? Sure, if you want to. I think so. He was a Navy admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. And he commanded naval forces in Vietnam. And he now has a destroyer class named after him. Oh, really? The Zoom Walt class destroyer did not know that. On a positive note, he was credited with helping to end race and gender discrimination in the Navy. So it looks good thing. Sure. But during the war, he was concerned about snipers in the Mekong Delta. He ordered Agent Orange to be sprayed there. He had a son, Elmo III, or Zumwalt III, and he was commanding a boat that was in the Mekong Delta at the time. So essentially what he did was ended up spraying his own son, not by his own hand, but he gave the order to have it sprayed right where his son was, and he died of cancer. Zoom Walt III did. And his son, Elmo IV, has a severe learning disability, and Zumwalt to this day says it haunts him to this day. And then later on, Zumalt advocated for compensation for victims. He tried to fight the good fight afterwards. Yes. So that's Agent Orange. Really? In a nutshell, yes. If you want to learn more about it, you can type in those two words in the handy search bar pastaworks.com. It will bring up a really good article written by our former colleague, now freelancer Jacob Silverman, which I guess leads us to, I would say, I don't know, listener mail time, maybe. I've got a couple for you here, Josh. Do they have anything to do with high fructose corn syrup? No, they don't. This is from a serviceman serving in Rome, Italy. Okay. And I like to read the ones from the servicemen because, I don't know. You're proud to be an American. I just wanted to write and thank you for the podcast. I'm serving in the Navy. Currently stationed in Rome, Italy. Good job. I wasn't always in Rome. I did two and a half years on a ship in Japan before this. Sadly, I don't have a glamorous job. My compatriots and I are postal clerks. You never think about these jobs that you have to do in the military, this kind of everyday mundane and chores. I do. Sure. Well, good for you. You're better than me. We make sure the letters and care packages get from home in the States and make it to the guys in the field in Iraq. You wouldn't believe how much theft and rifling takes place when a partial is sent to when it arrives at its destination. It's terrible. It is terrible and distressing. There are not many of us here in Rome, no more than a dozen or so, and there's always more than enough work to do. I know there's kind of a long set up with no segue, but one of the PCs I work with is a master of useless knowledge and facts about everything and anything. In short, I worked with a real Cliff Claven. Yes. From Cheers. Yes. He's big, he's a male man, he's funny, and in true Cheers tradition, he can pound a beer or seven. Sounds like the kind of guy yeah. But thanks to you and your podcast, I can only keep up with them, but have been able to trump him. Yes, you are pretty proud of yeah. And he's very psyched about this. He says you have no idea how good that feels. I listen to the podcast when I'm driving mail from the airport to the various NATO installations and back. Look forward to each and every one. Take your ez I'm sorry, PC three SW Langdon. And please give a shout out to the rest of the PCs at MCA Rome. So shout out. You've been shouted out. The PCs. Yeah. And I have another real quickie. This is a tongue twister, and I know this is long overdue, but this one is so hard and so simple at the same time that I cannot even say it once. Irish wristwatch. Irish wristwatch. That's okay. Jerry says no. Okay, Jerry. Let me try again. One more time. Irish wristwatch. Better, but still not perfect. But I couldn't even say it once, so it's not one of those three times. I did say it once. Well, with about a five second lag. I got you. So we want to thank Ryan for sending that in. A truly twisted tongue twister. Irish wristwatch. Not bad. Thanks. But you've been drinking. It loosens the tongue, my friend. If you want to send us a tongue twister that has to do with the Irish or anybody else, if you're stationed in Rome or anywhere else, or if you just want to say hi, you don't have to impress us. You can just say hi. And you can send an email to stuffpodcast@howstoughfworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blogs on the housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are." | ||
444d4d22-53a3-11e8-bdec-0719d6fee511 | A History of Nursing Homes | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/a-history-of-nursing-homes | In America, we've treated our senior citizens in very different ways over the years. Tune in to hear about how we've tackled compassionate care. | In America, we've treated our senior citizens in very different ways over the years. Tune in to hear about how we've tackled compassionate care. | Tue, 27 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=301, tm_isdst=0) | 49727607 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there wandering around in the ether. And that makes this stuff you should know. She's been wandering around the ether for weeks, at least, I dare say month by now. Chuck yeah. I actually just chatted with Jerry from 10ft away. Oh, that's nice. Man, that must have felt really special. Her hair is long, man. My hair is really long, too. Yeah, I feel like I saw Jerry a couple of months ago, and her hair was long. So she must have, like, a full on, like, due now. Yeah, she looks like a proper lady. I'm not touching that one. All right. So, Chuck, this one was one of yours. It was nursing homes is the idea. Right? Yeah. So I have a question for you. What made you decide that you wanted to do on nursing homes? I mean, I'm almost 50. My parents are in their mid 70s. Emily's grandmother is edging toward 100s. Wow. So this is the kind of stuff that just you got to start thinking about at some point. And Emily and I are old parents and have an only child that we don't want her to have to have to take care of us or anything. So we're just starting to have all these thoughts. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I'm not so sure America does it right here. Yeah. And after studying this stuff, we do it. Okay. But it's also like, hey, work your whole life and then go broke at the end. Yeah, that's a real bummer about the whole thing is you're just kind of, like, expected to spend whatever money you have on care at the end of your life, and it just seems a little wrong to me, too. Yeah. And we need to shout out. First of all, our buddy Dave Ruse helped us put this together, and he actually did a real deal interview with Dr. Muriel Gillick, who is an author of Old and Sick in America cohen the Journey Through the Health Care System and was quite a resource in the history of this stuff in this country, I think was pretty fascinating. Yes, it is. It's super fascinating. And the whole thing kind of started out when we're talking about nursing homes in particular, but there's just no way we can't talk about other kinds of homes in particular, because nursing homes grew out of this kind of system that developed that seemed to really kind of take shape and take hold around the second industrial revolution, the one that happened here in the States. And because of that, because people were like, you know, I don't feel like swinging the scythe any longer. I'm going to go into town and see what they have in the way of jobs. So long, mom and dad. All of a sudden, mom and dad were like, gulp. Because they were on their own. Not just one set of parents in particular, but it was like an intergenerational trend where kids were moving away from the farm, and all of a sudden, there weren't multi generational homes like they were before. Because when you have a multi generational home, you don't have to worry about what's going to happen to you when you get older, where you're going to live. You're going to live in the same house you raised your bratty little kid in to take care of you until you die. And that's just the way it was for years and years and years in America. Yeah. There's a stat here in 1957%, of adults over 65 lived in a multi generational household, and by 19, 80, 80 years later, that went down to 17%. Wow. And big reasons for that. Like, you were talking about moving away from the farm, but just nowadays, people just move away. I mean, 63% of American adults have moved to a completely new community at least once. Right. And as Dr. Gillick points out, she says, not only are people not living with their adult children, they're not even living near them many times now. Yeah. Because they finally wised up, and we're like, gosh, I can get away from my kids once and for all that they are adults. Well, I think it's more like the kids like, hey, gee, I want to go live in wherever the heck I want to, and we'll just think of a plan for my parents. A home. Yeah. My generation doesn't have any hang ups about guilt or morality. But the thing is, it's not just the kids moving away. Like, my grandmother moved far away. She moved to Florida. She moved to Arizona. She moved. She was like, So long, everybody. I got this. But she was very fortunate that she had it. One of the things that nursing homes exist for is to take care of people who don't get it, who either don't have family, who don't have the money to hire people to take care of them, who don't have the money to go live in, say, like assisted living or something. That's what nursing homes have kind of evolved to take care of. And in that sense. They're actually directly related to what came what were originally called alms houses or county houses or poor houses. Which if you were old and you didn't have anyone to take care of you in. Like. The late 18. Early 19 century in America. You could go to. Like. A farm that the county maintained. And there would be a bed there for you. And you would be housed with a bunch of different people with a bunch of different conditions. And the one thing that you all had in common was that society didn't quite know what to do with you. Yeah. So, I mean, it could range from people who had no living family and just needed care, that had nothing else wrong with them except just being old and needing care and having no one around to people that were mentally ill, maybe people who were suffering from dementia or people who were alcoholics or drug addicts. And like you said, you could get a bed, but there were no doctors, there were no nurses, you couldn't get medical care. And that was sort of the beginnings of the shame, almost, if you want to look at it that way. Yes, kind of. But it does say something that society did say, we have a responsibility, people. We can't just be like, well, there's a cornfield for you to go lay in until you die of exposure. Good luck. There was a bed that was provided as meager and horrific as that whole thing was, it was at least an experiment or an attempt to do something. Yeah. And the next big change happened sort of midway through the 19th century, when sort of around the time of the Civil War, we started getting our first big hospitals, like medical hospitals, public medical hospitals in the big cities around the country. And they were sort of the beginnings of modern, large scale public health care. And here's the thing, though, is back then, they focus on acute care. So if you again were a senior and they called them old chronics, like you had maybe a chronic condition and no one to take care of you, then basically you were too dependent to go to one of these places because it was a hospital. And they're like, you can't stay here, right, because even though you're called an old chronic, you might not have anything wrong with you aside from being really old, and maybe you can't make it to the bathroom very easily, something like that, right? But not necessarily anything that a hospital could treat you for. It was just they had a bed, but hospitals very quickly were like, we can't like, this isn't working. You're going to stay here indefinitely, and there's really nothing wrong with you. We got to find a place for you. And so about that time, some charities, especially either ethnic or religious based charities, like the Baptists or the German Aid Society, was a big one in Boston, I think. The German Ladies Aid Society in Boston. I'm sorry. They kind of said, you know what? We have members. Who are they're? Members of our church, or they're German. They're part of our community, and they don't have anybody, so we need to make sure that they're taken care of. And they actually started founding what we're called old age homes, which is basically they would get, like, a large home and kind of outfit it with different each room was like a different room for a different tenant. And they would take care of old widows, basically, who didn't have the money or the children to take care of them. Yeah. But specifically what they deemed is worthy poor. And here's what differentiated them from the Alms houses. Was if you were worthy poor. And that's in air quotes. That meant that you were the wife of a man who worked hard all his life but never made a lot of money. Maybe worked at a shipyard or just had sort of a very low paying. Blue collar. But respectable job. But certainly not the kind of dough to pay for private nursing homes or anything like that. Right? But not alcoholic or drug addict or they didn't force a shame attachment to it. So these widows who were in their 60s or 70s, depending on how their husband lived their lives, they're like, I've been morphine free since 73, so let me in. They didn't have these big pensions or anything because of the jobs their husband's had. So they were taken into one of these homes, like a Baptist home or something, and they were given to bed, and they were given, again, not medical care, but they were at least given meals in a bed. Right. A lot of times they were expected to kind of pay for their room and board. It was kind of like a needs based sliding scale. I got the impression some of them just straight up said, hey, give us $500. At the time, I think around 1900 or the late 19th century, I don't remember exactly when it was the Winchester Home for Aged Women in Massachusetts, the Winchester Mystery House. I looked it up. I was like, Is that the same one? But it was bequeathed by a Lucy Winchester, who I couldn't find anything about. But it's not the same person. Lose a lot of people in that house? Yes, you would. Although you gain a lot more ghosts. That's true. But they said, you pay us $500, so this is in. You pay us $500 and you can stay here for the rest of your life. And $500 back then was worth about 15,000 today. And they're like, how old are you again, exactly? I was thinking about that. It's a bit of a gamble on both sides, but it's a bit like insurance, like some sort of long term care insurance where you're like, okay, let's stretch my $500 as far as I can go. Or you could die two days after they still kept your $500. But then, hopefully it was used to make life better for the other people who used up their $500 long ago. Right? So there was this kind of idea that if you could pay for it, you should pay for it. And then as time went on, it was like, oh, you sold your house. We need that money if you're going to stay here. And people would take in more and more money from that person's estate as they were alive to take care of them. And this is starting in the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century. So this is a very long tradition of extracting everything from old people as they're dying to pay for their care. And I'm with you. I'm bothered by that. Yeah. I mean, the question became not how much is it for your care facility? And it's more like how much you got? How much you got here, grab them by the ankles and turn them upside down. Or if they weren't charging, there was the expectation that they didn't need so much care that they couldn't also contribute. We got a room for you. We'll feed you, but you got to make your bed, and you got to clean your room and maybe help keep the property up. So I got the idea that these were people who, like I said, a senior widow who just didn't have anywhere else to go and otherwise was doing okay. Yeah, but forced to make knock off gucci wallets during arts and crafts time. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. I got a gucci wallet to work on myself. Okay. So we've got alms houses are still around. They stayed around until the 1940s, from what I could see. These county houses, poor houses, and then alongside of those, you've got old age homes. But then the government was kind of like, we can do better than this. New York itself, I think, became the first state in the United States to say, it's 1890, it's modern era. We need to do more to take care of our elderly, and in particular are mentally infirm. That state made a commitment to take care for the state to take responsibility for its mentally ill, and that included people with dementia of all sorts, which they would have called senility back then. That was kind of like the first entree of the state into caring for elderly people. And that actually kind of opened a bit of a floodgate. I think other states started to kind of follow suit, but it was a step in a really dark direction because by World war one, if you were elderly, especially if you had some sort of decline, some sort of cognitive decline from age, there was a really good chance that you were in a mental asylum with everybody else. And in a lot of cases, I think, even if you were just elderly, you would find yourself in a mental asylum. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. So you've got a situation where the states start to say, hey, we need to take care of our mentally ill, but seniors just started getting kind of lumped in if they didn't have anywhere else to go. So you might have someone's grandmother who just didn't have family and who was really doing okay upstairs and was in pretty good health, might find themselves in, like you said, a mental hospital with people with severe mental illness. Right. And I think there's a couple of stats here that Dave dug up. By 1930, there were more elderly Americans in mental hospitals than in those ALM houses and the private old age homes combined. And he mentioned one in particular, Chicago State Hospital, which was a mental hospital in the 1930. 70% of the patients there were, quote, aged or infirm that had no other underlying psychosis or mental health condition. Right. So that's a really dangerous place for old people to be, because if you act up, they can put you on medications, they can give you the hydrotherapy treatment, they can do all sorts of stuff to you because you're in a mental hospital. And I think it's kind of like one of those things where if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, if you're a 1930s old timing psychiatrist, everything looks like a mental condition. A mental condition. Right. And you're going to treat all of the people the same way. Luckily, Francis Perkins arrived on the scene around this time. So World War One is when old people really started to get shuffled off to mental hospitals. By 1935, the government swooped in, was like, whoa, this is way wrong. Just because these people are old doesn't mean that they're mentally ill. So let's extract them from that environment and figure out if we can do something else. And thanks to Social Security, that really began to change fairly quickly. Yeah. So this is again, you mentioned the great Francis Perkins. If you didn't listen to that episode, go listen to it. It's fantastic. You're missing out. The Social Security Act, basically, like, when we think of Social Security now, we think of the program where you pay in your whole life from your paycheck, and then when you retire, you get a monthly income, and if you work longer than, your checks are going to be bigger. I started working when I was 13, so I imagine I'm going to be rolling in dough. You're always boasting about that. I'm sick of hearing about that. About my 13 year old busboy job. Yes. It's a Title Max now, by the way. Really? Yeah. Drive by title Max. Got your money? Your money, your real money. Oh, man, that's a good free advertising. Yeah. I drive by there on the way to my mom's and Emily's parents house sometimes. And I always pointed out to my daughter and say, hey, that's the barbecue restaurant I worked at. It's now a title, Max. Is that the one where the guy put his football? It in the Brunswicks too. Yeah. Hey, man, so wrong. Wonder where that guy is now. Randy? He's in I don't know. I'm not even going to guess. I have a feeling Randy's in prison. Do you think so? I saw him do a lot worse than put his foot in the Brunswicks. Do you know what I mean? Oh, jeez, I don't. But my mind is racing. He was at his life behind bars. I see. And I'm not laughing at that. It's very sad. But Randy, he made his own decisions. That reminds me of Randy the Hippie from MTV in, like, the late 80s, early 90s. No, he ran for president. He was like, just a total weirdo burnout. Yeah, okay. It looked today like he could have been in LMFAO. Okay. Really? He dressed like that? But this is like, decades before. But anyway, I remember he ran for president, and I think he lost, and he's like, I've made my bed, now I must lie in it. I'll never forget that ad. For some reason. I just thought it was hilarious. But yeah, that was randy. Well, I mean, maybe it was D Randy. It was D rand is what I'm saying. So, yeah, that was old age insurance is what they called it originally. But then there was also Old Age Assistance OA, which was you're going to get payments when you're older, even if you didn't work, which was a big deal because so many women were not allowed to work and have jobs. So what were they going to do? They're going to say, hey, you didn't pay anything in. Sorry. You just raised your kids and grandkids. That's a great point. I think we still do that today, though, unfortunately. But at least women can actually work in the workforce if they want to. But, yeah, if they stay home and raise kids, then they're still treated the same way, which is pretty shameful. But I get your point, and the point is that we needed to be able to take care of people who hadn't necessarily worked in the workforce and paid into Social Security. And then also we had to offset that first, basically generation that we're like, okay, we're the first ones nobody's been paying in, but why are we the ones who have to pay in, but we get nothing from it? Good point. That old age assistance. The OA really helped with that. And I guess it's kind of gone away of disco, because the only thing I know about is the old age insurance that's still around, and I know they don't call it that any longer, but the old age assistance, where it's like I guess that would be Medicaid, right? Yeah, I think so. Okay. And we'll talk a lot more about Medicaid and Medicare. Just put a button in that all of you bureaucrat wonks. You're going to love it. Yeah, but FDR, this is when things really changed. And the reason we're talking about Social Security and stuff like this is because it sort of laid out the road map for what was going to happen and how we cared for our grandparents and what kind of places they were going to be. Because he went in there with a New Deal and he was like, these all houses are terrible. He's like, we need to get rid of these. And he said, in these state mental hospitals, they're overburdened. And that's not right either. So here's what I'll do. Part of the OA, the old age assistance. A big provision here is that you can't get any of that money if you're living in a public institution, like an ALM's house or like a statemental hospital. No money coming your way. No. So suddenly, the people who were stuck in state mental hospitals or alms houses not only were like, oh, well, I could get out of here now I have the funds to get out of here and go somewhere better. And this led to a huge boom in the growth of private living facilities for the elderly. Yes, I think that was the big change. I mean, surely people were like, great, I can get out of here. But I think people saw dollar signs that said, wait a minute. I can get paid by the government to take in these people and take care of them sometimes directly. Get paid by the government? Yeah. That was kind of like an amendment that they made later on where it was like, that incentivize. It even more. We'll pay you directly. This person doesn't have to be involved. Just take care of them. Follow these guidelines, and we'll send you this check every month. And the people like, is there any money left over for me? No, just don't ask any questions. As a matter of fact, now you bring it up. Do you have any money? You got to give it to them first before we give you yeah, there's a balance on your account, sir. So this is kind of how it went for, like, the first 1520 years after Social Security act was introduced in 1935, where it fueled this boom of retirement homes. Basically, the retirement home industry found its birth there, and then about 15 years after, the government was like, you know what? We've been sinking a lot of money into this. Maybe we should look around and see if any of these places are any good. And they found that. No, in a lot of cases, they weren't really good. If you converted an old Victorian mansion into an old age home with a dozen rooms, you probably didn't add a fire exit onto every room and fire stairs on the second and third floor. There's probably not a sprinkler system because they weren't very prevalent by that time. And so if there was a fire, all of these dozen agents and infirm people who live there were going to die in a fire. That was the one big one that they turned up that came out of these early investigations into what came to be called nursing homes. Yeah. So this is when congress steps in again, like you said, about 15 to 20 years later in the 1950s, and said, all right, here's the deal. If you're getting this dough from us, we need to regulate what's going on there, and they need to be safe. And a lot of these mom and pops that, like you said, converted an old house. They couldn't make those upgrades. You can't just slap on a fire escape to an old Victorian. I guess you could, but it wouldn't look that great or probably work that well. And so a lot of these smaller ones floundered and all of a sudden and this is thing where things really start to change, there's a big market for just basically I don't know if I would call it the corporatization yet, but maybe to a certain degree, these bigger facilities for residents that had this money that could go straight to them. And so these sort of larger places that weren't individual houses started popping up. Yeah, well, that's like an ongoing and recurring theme. And a big criticism among conservatives of big government or government regulation is that it homogenizes things. Because usually the mom and pop operations, even if they are well meaning and not nefarious, they don't have the money to add those fire exits on. But say, like a corporation that's going to own several of these things, they can build new ones with all the modern fire exits and fire sprinklers. And so those bigger corporations start owning more and more and more, and by building more and more and more, they're not going to make each one really unique and embedded in the community. They're going to plunk down the same one in every place they build one. And so there's this homogenization that occurs as a result of that. And that's exactly what happened with what came to be called nursing homes, which really started to find their advent in the 1950s from these reforms where the government was like, you guys need to be able to do this and this. We're going to assign the Public Health Service to layout guidelines. The Public Health Service knows about regulating hospitals. So they really added on to that homogenization, this underlying medicalization of caring for older people, which makes sense. You think of older people, elderly people, senior adults, you think, gosh, the body is starting to wear down. They have all these conditions or whatever. So it makes sense that you would couple hospitalization or medicalization with that. But that's not always the case. And the problem is it became the case whether you needed it or not. That was the kind of place you lived was basically a bland institutional extension of a hospital. Yeah. I mean, it's not like I kept thinking of the movie Say Anything when I was researching this because that was a prominent storyline in that movie. Oh, I never saw it. You never saw say anything. I didn't. Do you wonder what happens every time a guy in a trench coat holds up a boom box over his head? Yeah, of course. I just wondered if all this time you're like, what is the deal with this boombox? Yeah, it's like a reference to Kevin Smith and clerk. Okay, sure. Yeah, exactly. Now Ione Sky's father, the late, great John Mahoney was he ran a mom and pop nursing home. Oh, really? Yes. And spoiler coming if you haven't seen the 30 something year old movie. He was found to be ripping them off. And that was a big sort of subplot in that movie. All I heard was that was a big subplot in that movie. Good. But say anything aside, like you said, became more hospitalized, for lack of a better word. And if you went to one of them back then, there was very little to differentiate it from a hospital, from the central nurses station to the cafeteria food. I remember going to visit my grandmother on my paternal grandmother who lived to be 101 before my dad and his wife took her in. She was in one of these places, or actually, maybe it was the other way around. She went afterwards. But it was terrible. It was awful and very sad. And if I was not a young man with nothing going on in my life, I might have done something about it, but I didn't know what to do back then. You would have opened all the doors and been like, go free, go free. I would have ripped her out of there at least and said, Come up with me. Yes. I mean, they were pretty bad, especially by the time I'm guessing you were there in the 80s or 90s. Maybe this was and would have been the so in the mid 50s, even these things made a little more sense. At the very least. They were newer by the they were so bad that we had a reform act that kicked in in 1987, which is basically like, this place is wrong and maybe we don't know what to do or replace them with, but here are some things that you have to treat these people with, like dignity. They have to be able to have a say in what they wear or what's what they eat or what they do during the day. And it really kind of got off the rails within a couple of decades after their advent. The thing is, like I was saying, nobody knows what to do about nursing homes. And we'll talk a little more about that later, but just kind of put a pin in that. Nursing homes were not great and they're still not great. Yeah. Should we take a break and then come back and talk about Medicaid and Medicare and how that figures in? Yes. Alright. We'll be right back with those two tiny little things right after this. All right, so we promised talk of Medicare and Medicaid, and I think Dave kind of put it really on the nose here. He said no two government programs have shaped the nursing home care model over the last 50 years more than those two programs created in lyndon Johnson amended the Social Security Act. And if you still get confused, if. You're like a young hip and Hampton and millennial, and you don't know what those two words mean, and you get them mixed up. Medicare is health insurance universal, one might dare say socialized medicine. That's a red herring for Americans over 65. Medicaid is long term care for Americans lower income status. That's right, yeah. You don't necessarily have to be elderly for Medicaid, I believe. Yes, medicare, you do. Medicaid, you could be lower income and have a lifelong disability, and you'd be eligible for Medicaid, too. Yeah. So Medicare, again, this is if you're over 65, it's going to pay for acute medical care when you're in a hospital. But if you need something long term, kind of like what we're talking about at the beginning, then it won't pay for that. Like, you can't just say, all right, I'm going to go to a nursing home now, and it's going to just pay for that in full. But Medicaid would and for a while, everybody's like, okay, well, we'll just take Medicaid. This is after Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in 1965. So they were like, this is fine. And then somebody realized that Medicare pays way more than Medicaid does. And so all of the bottom line, people said, how can we do this? What are we going to do? So they read the act, and they found that there was language in there that says Medicare will pay for stay up to 100 days in a skilled nursing facility after three days or more of treatment in the hospital. And so all those nursing homes are like, well, we have nurses. We have doctors. Let's just rebrand ourselves as skilled nursing facilities. There was a huge, massive transition from nursing homes where you would go live potentially the rest of your life, and there were no nurses and doctors and all of that, and this was your new home until you died. You guys got to go because we're now a skilled nursing facility, which means the most you could stay is 100 days. But we're going to make way more off of flipping people every 100 days because Medicare is going to pay than we would letting you stay here as a nursing home because Medicaid is paying for that, like I said, just caused a huge change in the industry. Yes. And Americans in the generally, we're like, you know what, we need better facilities and more comfortable facilities that feel less like a hospital and more like an apartment, let's say. And that was sort of the birth of what's known now as assisted living facilities, where there are different levels of care that you can pay for. And the idea is that if you go to one of those, you have a little bit more independence, you have a little bit more say in how your day goes. And that's just at a daily schedule level, and it's like a little more social. It's sort of like the best ones are like what you would hope they would be, which is a place for your grandparents to go hang out and hang out with other seniors and have a social life and tell stories and be with one another and not just sort of be in a hospital room, right? So if you can't just stay in your house or something as you're getting older, this is a real alternative for you. And because there's different levels of care you can age in place there like you can just keep getting older and older and then they'll start adding greater and greater layers of care. The thing is, assisted living is expensive and it's outside of the federal purview. Like the feds went all in on nursing homes. They regulate nursing homes. They don't regulate assisted care. They will pay for nursing homes. They won't pay for assisted care. There's a lot of differences. They're very much intertwined nursing homes and assisted living, but they're very separate as far as the US. Government is concerned, there are two different things and the government recognizes nursing homes. The thing is, like you were saying in the were like, we don't want to live in nursing homes anymore. We want to move over here. And all the nursing homes were like, fine, we're skilled nursing facilities now and we can get some of that sweet, sweet Medicare money. Did you see that stat? Yes. 1963 there were 570,000 skilled nursing beds and in 1982 there were 1.2 million. So they definitely were like, oh, that money needs to be coming our way. Exactly. And that's exactly what they did. They said, we're skilled nursing facilities now. And they probably are owned by the hospitals where you do three days in there and then get moved to the skilled nursing facility. And then maybe if it's a large enough group, they might own an assisted living facility too that you can say move into after that 100 days or something. The thing is, the assisted living is great. It can be really good and nursing homes can be good too. All nursing homes aren't bad and all of them have their upsides. Like you were saying, assisted living is very social. There's probably a lot more going on, a lot more activity, just because a lot of the people who live there these days are going to be more active still. Whereas in nursing homes now, the people who live in nursing homes tend to be much sicker, more and firm. But there's still socialization where there's not necessarily if you just live alone at your house and somebody comes by a couple of times a week. So there are definitely good things to nursing homes. The problem is 70% of them are for profit. Some of them are owned by private equity firms. We shouldn't let private equity firms anywhere near the aged population ever in any country. That's just a terrible combination. And apparently, in fact, there are studies that show when private equity firms take over nursing homes. There is a measurable decline in health outcomes for the residents because the whole thing is they're dedicated to making corporate profits. So you cut costs and you cut services. You just approach things differently than you should. And that's kind of like this evolution that's going on now is we've been providing services to elderly people as they age, as if they're customers, where instead we should be providing care. And those are two different things. Even though from a few paces back they might look similar, they're not. They're different. And that's kind of the push that we're going toward now. Yeah. So where we find ourselves today statistically is and I was kind of surprised about this I had a feeling that more Americans were in these facilities than I thought. I guess it's a little bit heartening to hear the numbers. There are about one 4 million Americans in residential nursing homes and then another 1.7 million cycling through those skilled nursing facilities. If they have, like, a surgery or an illness or something they're recovering from or rehabbing from, which is only about 4.5% of all Americans over 65 and 10% of all Americans over 85. I thought it would be higher than that. If you want to look at the downside, though, is one big reason why maybe the cost. It depends on where you are, of course. But if you are in a private room at a nursing home and I guess was this in Georgia? Yeah. At $235 a night in New York, that's about $400 a night and change on average a night. Like, at that point, just move them into the W Hotel, right? Pretty much, yeah. The only thing is they don't have nurses at the W Hotel. Kidding. But it's a lot of money, man, and you can just get bled dry at the end of your life. Well, you do. And as a matter of fact, to pay for a place like that, a nursing home, Medicaid says you have to have paid in, which basically says if you don't own your house anymore, you have to give the proceeds from your house. You have to liquidate yeah, you have to liquidate your inheritance. You have to pay down to usually something like I saw like, maybe $700 a month income is the cut off anything over that, and you have to be contributing anything under that, the Medicaid will kick in and pay the place directly for letting you stay there. But the thing is, of course, the better alternative is assisted living. Some state Medicaid programs will pay or help pay for assisted living, but for the most part, if you're living in an assisted living facility, you might have a reverse mortgage on your house. Probably you've liquidated all of your investments. You're paying for it out of pocket in the United States for the good kind of retirement home. Yes. And there are people out there that are trying to further reform what these places look like. There's a gentleman named Doctor Bill Thomas who is a geriatrician who has something called the Eden Alternative. That is, he's trying to basically reframe these nursing home residents and caregivers as care partners. And it sounds kind of hippy dippy, but he wants people to be able to still grow in life and to still flourish and to still learn. Just because you're a senior doesn't mean you just have to sit in a room and watch Judge Judy or push checkers around a checkerboard. And, you know, depending on where you are, they might be adopting these methodologies of the Eden Alternative or the greenhouse movement. Another thing he helped spawn, which is you're in an individualized home. It's not a big facility. You got a private room, you got a bathroom, and there's outdoor space for you to go and garden and to walk around and to, again, try and flourish in your last years on this planet. Right. And there's also a push for aging in place at home sure. Which can be really beneficial. But again, it can also be isolating, depending on what kind of friends or family. Maybe if you live in a condo, it would be a little more. But if you're living in the house that you spent your entire life in and all the neighbors have moved away and you don't know anybody anymore, that can be isolating. So in that sense, assisted living or even a nursing home could be a better alternative. But a lot of people say, no, this is my house. I want to stay here at home. The problem is, I've seen it put that Medicaid has an institutional bias, which means that they'll pay for you to go to an institution. Like the definition of the word institution. They don't really pay for you to be able to stay at home. Some programs do, but a lot of them don't, even if you do want to stay at home, which is kind of heartbreaking to me. Yeah. I mean, Emily's grandmother Mary, who is very popular with this stuff, you should know, army, as the eldest general, we had to move her out of her house that she was in not her whole life, but for a large portion of her life. But it was one of those deals where it's out in the middle of the country in Ohio. There was no family close by. There was no hospital close by. And it's hard to say it's okay to stay there. And it was sad when she left, but she was also like, no, this is great. I'll move in with you guys. She didn't kick and scream. She was willing and understood. It was the best thing. And that's probably one reason why she's pushing 100 right now, I think, for sure. Where does she live? She lives with Emily's parents. That's fantastic. Here in Georgia now. That's great. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm very glad that that worked out for but I was also looking at the antithesis of that. What happens in the United States to people who don't have any family, who don't have any children, and who don't have any money? Like, what happens to them. And they seem to be kind of left on their own. Like, if they have a house, they're probably just going to be left in their house and maybe Meals on Wheels will come by. The county social services might be able to help them, but this is if they reach out for help, if they need assistance, they might not get it at home because, again, there's a lot of services that aren't paid for. And if you don't have any money, you're so you could go to a nursing home, but if you don't have any ability to pay, they can kick you out. They can kick you out for a bunch of different reasons. The most depressing thing that I've looked up in a while was nursing home evictions, thank God. And there was a loophole that was recently closed in 2016 that said if the nursing home is not able to offer care for the person, then they can be discharged. And they use that as like a huge loophole. They be like, we're sorry, we can't offer you the care you need any longer. You have to leave. And if you don't have anybody to advocate for you, where are you going to go? And I couldn't get a really good answer, but I get the impression that it's not huge and rampant, but there are a lot of people who are still falling through the cracks of society as they age because we don't have a robust nationalized plan to care for the elderly no matter what. And I thought, well, of course the United States is super behind in that respect, but apparently we're in line with other countries like Canada. You'd think Canada would have, like, a place for every senior and they're all happy and taken care of and everybody gets a pet beaver or something like that. Now you're on your own. Kind of like your state might help you out a little bit. The local city might, but that's about it. Same with the UK, too, which I was really surprised because both of them have nationalized medicine. Yeah. I will say that this is where social media has been beneficial as far as neighborhood and neighbors go all the time. On our neighborhood pages, we see people stepping up, especially in a place like Atlanta where gentrification has happened. You do see a lot of neighbors stepping up to help take care of the senior African American community that is still living in their houses and they haven't been bought out for a shamefully low price by a greedy contractor to flip it into a little McMansion, but you see it all the time. We work with a group called neighbor in need that really does great things. Oh, that's great. And aside from just the official organizations all the time, you'll see someone that lives next door to someone like that, they'll be like, hey, she's having a hard time paying her power bill this winter and in an hour it is funded for the rest of the year. The neighbors step up and pay for her power bill. And it's little things like that, but these are in communities where houses are close together and people know each other's business. Like Emily's grandmother out there in the middle of the country and a lot of rural America. That might not be the case. You might not have someone checking up on you and people bleeding hearts like you and I feel that they should be taken care of no matter what. Yeah, but I mean, isn't that something everybody can get behind? You would think so, but that's just not true. I'll remind you of our episode on homelessness many years ago. Yeah, that one's tough for me to swallow. Those are the people who believed in the unworthy poor, huh? Yes. And were to send them to Alms houses back in the day. Yes. The good news is if you're looking for a home for a family member these days, medicare dot gov has a lot of resources. I'll tell you another place to US. News and World Report is really hot and heavy on an assisted living and nursing home ratings. Yeah. Nursing Home compares another website. And there are places where you can go to really dig in, see which ones you feel are a good fit. They're rated on how the people are really doing there, not just like how pretty it is. And if you go and visit one, they said to be aware of the Chandelier effect. Like, in fact, if you walk in and you see a grand piano in the lobby, just turn around and leave. Well, yeah, that's one of the ways that they get you. You want to do a little more digging than just that. And you want to talk to residents. You want to read actual inspections and reports on those places. You want to look at stats like how many patients had to take into the Er or were readmitted into the hospital, how many have bed sores, any allegations of abuse? Apparently abuse has doubled between 2013 and 2017. It's still low. I think it was like 845, which is 845 too many, but it's still doubled since 2013. So you want to really look for that kind of thing. Are they over prescribing medications, like for psychosis? To people who are problematic when you don't really think they are problematic, there's a lot of stuff you want to look for that you can look for that's out there. Just do some digging because this is somebody you care about. Don't forget. Yeah, and we really want to point out that it's easy to zero in on things like abuse cases and unnecessary medication. But we really salute you if you are the lion's share of these people and nurses that are taking care of our seniors and doing a great job and a very tough job. Yes. And one of the things actually I saw I'm glad you said that. Was that it's a really thankless kind of job because traditionally people who work in elder care, like the actual workers, are treated like garbage by management. It's just like an industrywide problem. And that was actually one of those things from the Eden Alternative, was that workers are treated with the respect that you want the workers to treat the patients with. Everyone is treated with respect and dignity. Not just ideally the patients, the workers, too, because they deserve it for the work they're doing. It's amazing. You got anything else about nursing homes? I got nothing else we can do. Better start thinking about stuff. I mean, you're never too young to get a plan in place. That's all I'm saying. Great point. And since I said great point, it's time for listener now. I mean, maybe if you're like 25, you don't need to be thinking about your nursing home options. Okay. But you know what I mean. Well, not necessarily. I saw that 17% of nursing home residents were under 65. So there are some younger residents in there that I think get overlooked a lot, like by us. You know what you call those people? What? The party crowd. That's right. Oh, man. That's going to be me, man. What the party crowd at the nursing home? I'm going to be mixing it up like Scatman Crothers in the Twilight Zone movie. I could see that. Let's go play kick the can, everyone. It's midnight. It's time to take off that gown and live. Good things happen. You ready? I'm ready. Well, breathe away. I'm going to call this one goats follow up. Okay. This is a good one about the great, great Steve Gutenberg. I'm hoping someone throws this stuff his way. By the way, he needs to know I can feel him right now listening to all right. This is from Dave. Hey, guys. On a recent episode, you discussed the episode of Party Down, which the wonderful Steve Gutenberg allows the caterers to throw a party at his house. You knew this had come up before and wondered in what episode? In what context? By chance, the next day, I was scrolling randomly through older episodes and selected Barefoot Running boy. Remember that one? That was a rough one. When in this episode you started talking about Steve Guttenberg, I had an intensely existential experience. I was listening in the present to you talk about Steve Guttenberg in the past. Having listened in the more recent past to you also from a more recent past, talk about Steve Guttenberg. Unable to remember the more distant past in which you were talking about Steve Guttenberg which I was now listening to in the present, which knowledge of the future in which you would again discuss Steve Guttenberg. Is Steve Guttenberg the center of our cosmos, the nexus around which space and time and god swirl until they become one? The answer to this question for which our souls cry out, I can only speculate yes. Anyway, I wanted to let you guys know in which previous episode you featured Steve Gutenberg. That's great. As to the context, there was none. You started talking about Steve Guttenberg for no discernible reason. It sounds like me, which is as it should be, and that is from Dave. And Dave was very excited that this was getting read. And he said, to be honest, I had a little bit to drink when I wrote that, and I didn't fully remember the whole experience. Good job. There you go. Goose would be proud. I think Dave is going to be part of the mixing it up crowd at the nursing home, too. Kicking that can. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Dave. That was pretty great. And if you have something great to tell us, especially if it's in reference to something we said about something we said in the past, we'd love to hear from you. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff works. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit I heart radio app app, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1220363278568sysk-worst-way-die.mp3 | Is there a worst way to die? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-there-a-worst-way-to-die | But there's no consensus among professionals about which method of death is the least desirable. A person's fears may factor into his own personal worst way to die. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the worst way to die. | But there's no consensus among professionals about which method of death is the least desirable. A person's fears may factor into his own personal worst way to die. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the worst way to die. | Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:56:08 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=56, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=246, tm_isdst=0) | 14395582 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Stuff you should Know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects, and resolve online fraud. Safe, secure Visa. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Josh and Chuck here a couple of staff writers@houseupworks.com. How's it going, Chuck? It's going good, Josh. So, Chuck, I hate to tell you this, but there are people who are setting themselves on fire all over India right now. Have you heard anything about this? Right now? Possibly very lately. By right now, I mean lately. No, I didn't know that. It's becoming something of a widespread trend, actually, terribly. I read about one guy who's a tea vendor. He just sells tea like you buy a hot dog right on the streets of New York. This guy just sells tea. And apparently he fell in the bad graces of a local representative of the local government. And the guy was kind of being abused by this guy, the government official, and in retaliation, he doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire in front of the guy's house. That'll show him. Yeah, pretty much. Now, the guy lived, but he has burns, like, over 95% of his body. Well, and at this point, you kind of wonder, all right, well, which is worse, right? That sounds like a terrible way to go. And the whole thing kind of reminded me that an article I'd written, it's called is There a Worst Way to Die? Right. I love this article. It was really interesting to write. I talked to a funeral director. I talked to an Er doctor, and I also spoke with the guy who is the director of the Ernest Becker Foundation. We'll talk about that in a minute. But because there's no quantifiable way to say, yes, there is definitely a worse way to die. And here it is. It's all subjective, right? And even worse, there weren't any nationally recognized polls out there. I actually contacted Gallup to find out if they'd ever asked that question. Did you request a poll or no? No, I wanted to find out what the data was, if they'd ever taken that poll, and they said that they never had. I found one that was pretty close, a Gallup poll that was about fear of dying, not the worst way to die. And astoundingly only 25% of the people polled said, that they were afraid to die. Interesting, and I think a really logical follow up question would have been, how often do you actually think about your own death? Right? Maybe we should have conducted our own poll. Maybe we will. We'll get it up on the site in no time. Instead of Quiz Corner. Fear of Death Corner. Right. But while I was researching it, I came across some impromptu polls about the worst way to die, emily usually ranks up pretty high. Yes, I would say so. Burning to death, not good. Not good at all. I would say drowning is probably up there, too. Drowning is up there, too. Yeah. They're usually interchangeable at the top. What's your worst way to die? Boy, I don't know if I could say a worst method of death, but I think that anything where I died alone would be the worst way. That is very funny that you bring that up, because I was doing extra research for this podcast, and there was a British poll from April this past April, and the majority of the respondents said that their worst death was dying alone. Yeah. Like Isaac Hayes, God rest his soul, he just passed a few days ago, and I think they found him in his home gym with a treadmill going and something as mundane as that. It just seems like the most depressing way to go. Yeah. You're lying there, your treadmill is still alive right next to you, and there you are. Right. And surrounded by no one. Right. Or Elvis Presley. As you know, I got Elvis on the brain. Oh, yeah. After writing about Graceland. And Elvis famously died in his bathroom reading a book, and no one found him for hours. So he was just laying there in his bathroom. Yeah. So the second worst aspect of death that people came up with was not enough access to pain relief. Right. Which is a big thing, too. Basically, there's a really good way to answer this question. It's by changing the wording, is there a best way to die? Right. I think you would find across the board, dying in your sleep would probably be the best, most highly rated way to go. People don't want to feel pain. People don't want to be afraid or alone. No. My worst death kind of combines all these except for the pain part. I don't think pain would be involved. Plane crash. Right. I'm actually flying to Malta a week or so from now, and I'm Buddy. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to the plane ride. And my big problem with dying in a plane crash is if you're at 30,000ft or something like that, it doesn't happen instantaneously. I know where you're probably a good minute or two headed straight to Earth at like, 800 miles an hour, right? But even that takes a minute, maybe two, maybe three, depending on how high up you are. And, buddy, you're totally aware of what's going on the whole time, right? You got a solid minute to three minutes to think about, hey, I'm going to die. Right? And the panic and the hysteria just I would say with everyone on the plane, if you're by yourself, it would be bad enough, but you have hundreds of strangers that you are probably annoyed with just moments earlier for one reason or another, and you're all going through this, at least you're not going to die alone. But I'll tell you what, if George Gallup asked the people on a plane that was going down if they feared death, I'm pretty sure that the percentages would skyrocket. Right. There has to be a hastily performed pole. Yeah, exactly. So basically, check ours. Our approach to death, our fear of death in some theorist size is a result of a kind of sanitizing of death, of basically our desire to not look death in the face, not think about death. Which brings you back to Becker. Correct. Becker, Becker and sanitology. Right. A lot of Ernest Becker's views, his whole field was called the psychology of death. Right? Right. And in Becker's opinion, culture, every aspect of culture, from our Lazy Boy recliners, to NASCAR to whiskey to Guitar Hero, to the climbing the corporate ladder, whatever it is, it all serves to distract us from thinking about our own mortality. Right. So culture has been created to distract us so we can throw ourselves into it. That's Becker's stance. The problem is, in Becker's opinion, he died many years ago at age 49. Sadly. I wonder if he saw that one coming. I don't know. But I'll bet you if there was ever a human who was walking the earth, who was cool with it, it was Becker. And he died of cancer too. So I mean, he knew it was coming. But in Becker's opinion, we know that death is coming, we're distracting ourselves. So the unconscious mind has to find an outlet somewhere. And usually that outlet is violence or aggression or war. Right. So in Becker's opinion, if we'd all just go ahead and accept the fact that we are going to die someday and we don't know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen, we'd all be a lot better off. We'd all basically chill. Right. And I know along the same lines of how we insulate ourselves from death is how there's not as many open casket funerals these days. And I know back in the olden times, as they say, well, as recent as the 19th century yeah. People would sit up with a dead. I know that's a southern tradition where you would literally have the body in your house or wherever they died and the family is just hanging out yeah. For days on it. Yeah. They eat around it. And one of the points of that was to socialize children to death, public viewings. Right, yeah. And plus another aspect of it was usually it was in the home because most people died in the home. Right. Because modern medicine just kind of went, good luck with that palace in hell, that kind of thing. And nowadays, in 1900, the average life expectancy, it was like 49 years old. Right. In 2008, it's like 77 creeping up on 78, if it's not there already. So that extra 20, almost 30 years has really kind of strung us out. Right. We are really interested in squeezing every last minute out of it, even sadly, beyond the time when the quality of life is diminished. So, what are you saying? Well, I'm saying we have all these machines to keep us alive, to breathe for us. Right. And we know that they're out there. So we have thrown ourselves even further into this denial of death, as Becker called it. Right. So the very things that keep us alive are distracting us from the obvious. Pretty much. And the inevitable. Yeah. And there was another aspect when you brought up 19th century that I found really interesting. There was a trend have you heard of bereavement photography? Yeah. Have you seen the movie? The Assassination of Jesse James? I have not, no. Yes. He was famously photographed in his casket and the whole town came out. They had him on a block of ice. The whole town came and viewed the body and had their picture made with picture made? We're from the south. They had their picture made with the body of Jesse James. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. I mean, it's a photograph of a dead person. Usually, though, it was of a loved one. And oftentimes they'd be on a couch sitting up looking like they were sleeping or in bed looking like they were sleeping. Sometimes their eyes were propped open to make it look like they were awake. Yeah. That's really odd. It was kind of odd. But it actually still continues today. There is bereavement photography. Usually it's used by parents whose child was still born or died at a very young age. And this will be the only photo that they ever have of this. Is this the United States? Mainly, yeah. Wow. Yeah. You don't want to say time because clearly they're getting something from it. I'm sure it poses or creates a sense of catharsis or finality to it. And plus, they can say, well, this is what my baby looked like for as short a time as he or she was on Earth. Right. And it's very sad, but I imagine that you can get something out of it. Yeah. Who am I to judge? Exactly. And photography in general, since it was created, has always had kind of this fascination with death, like bereavement photography or outlaws, even. Pablo Escobar, there's that famous photo of him all bloated and dead on that rooftop in Meta Ying. Right. Or that famous photo of Lizzie Borden's father kind of sideways on the couch, face mashed in. And what is it about us humans that wish that that photo wasn't so grainy that you could make it out a little more, but at the same time, it kind of lets the imagination run? Well, we are a sick, sick, twisted species. We're afraid of our own death. And yet we love morbid photography of dead people. Or at least you and I. We don't want to speak for everyone. I guess we shouldn't speak for the rest of humanity, although I'd say we're fairly typical. But back to the photography part. There's a really cool exhibit by a German photographer named Walter Shells, right? And he did this series called Life Before Death. And what he did was he went and visited people who were terminally ill, spent the last couple of days of their lives with them, took series of photographs of them, got like the one he was looking for, and then arranged to take another photo of them right after they died. And he juxtaposed them one right next to the other. And there's actually a really great spread on the Guardians UK site. What do you find? Was it uplifting or was it depressing? It's very subjective. It's death. There's no objectivity with death. We have no idea what's coming after this. It's all subjective. You're scared of it, you're not scared of it, whatever. Right, so it's definitely one of those things where you're going to take what you want out of it and some are more startling than others, but it's oddly comforting. Yeah, I'd like to see that. Yeah, well, you can see it on the Guardian site. But first, don't forget to go to houseworkscom and read. Is there a worse way to die? It's a pretty cool article, if I do say so myself. And stick around to find out which article makes me pretty excited. That scares the hell out of Chuck right after this. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket? Or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera? But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. So, Chuck, we're back. I know this article scares the hell out of you. I like it. Tell us about it. What's the misplacedity project you want to tell everybody? Yeah. It has to do with dog cloning. Cloning your pets and kind of creeps me out. I know that you love your dogs like I do, but you want to clone yours. You want to have nine instead of three. Well, my dogs are never going to die. Not if I have anything to say about it. But if they do, I feel comforted knowing that I can bring them back. Well, you better get a second job, buddy. It ain't cheap. No, I know it's not. I'm saving up already, actually. It's like put kids through college or bring dogs back to life. Right? And we want to give a shout out to Housetepworks freelancer Julia Layton for creating a really cool article. You can check it out on howstepworks.com just type in what's? The Mystic Replicity Project. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houseworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
3f66b0aa-5461-11e8-b6d0-278e721b41d9 | Selects: How Blimps Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-blimps-work | After newsreels captured the Hindenburg erupting in fire in 1937, the promising development of airship aviation was cut short. Today companies and militaries are taking another look at blimps and the unique qualities that may revive them. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | After newsreels captured the Hindenburg erupting in fire in 1937, the promising development of airship aviation was cut short. Today companies and militaries are taking another look at blimps and the unique qualities that may revive them. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Sat, 23 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=23, tm_isdst=0) | 44608859 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, friends. Have you ever flown into blimp? I haven't. It's one of my goals, and on August 28, 2014, I hadn't either. But that's what we talk about and more in the episode How Blimps Work, coming up right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's with us. So that makes this stuff you should know. How are you doing? I'm good, man, I'm excited about this one. Oh, are you sure? Blimp. Yeah, because they have, like, eight names. Blimp dirigible. Is that Flynn? Yeah. Airship. Yeah. Well, technically, LTA, I'm counting that lighter than airship. Yes. Which I think is ultimately lighter than airship. LTA is the umbrella term for all of those things, which are slightly different. Yeah, I see an LTA, and an airship is all of them. A derigable is all of them. A zeppelin is rigid, and a blimp is non rigid. Nice. And mostly we just have blimps these days. Not a lot of rigid airships. Would they constitute yeah. No, but they can be semi rigid or non rigid. Right. Yeah. And I think the future we'll talk about that, obviously, at the end, but I think some of those are more of the semi rigid style. Right. That's huge. Yeah. But they're made of some really lightweight but very strong composite materials. Yeah. Boom. So, Chuck, let's talk about the history of blimps, because I think when anybody thinks of blimps, they think Hindenburg. They think they think the Hindenburg, and then maybe concurrently or right after the good year, blimp. Yes. Those are the two that really laid it on the line for blimp. Dumb. Yeah. You want to talk about the early history, I guess, and then get to the tragedy. Yeah. Because there wasn't that much time in between the two, to tell you the truth. Yeah. I mean, it all started, of course, with hot air balloons, because they're not so different. In 1783, a couple of Frenchies brothers, jacques Atienne and Joseph Michelle, they said they were brothers, but they have different last names, I think Jacques Etienne is his first and middle name. Okay, that makes sense. They all had three names. Last name serial killer Mongolfier. They invented the hot air balloon, an unmanned hot air balloon, in 1783. And then later that same year, a French physicist, last name De Rosier, had the first manned balloon flight, and they were just floating around, because that's what balloons do. You can go up, and then if you're really good, you can come back down. But left and right, that's up to Mother Nature. That's right. Which is a little scary, although, I think, these days. Can they steer them at all? We have a great article on this on hotel hot airplane. No, you're subject to the wind. To the what's? The god of wind that comes out of the cloud and blows wind. Yeah, that guy. You're subject to his whim. So if you're headed towards something, it's go over it or hit it. Yes. Okay. And you remember there was that terrible hot air balloon accident, and I think Virginia last year, earlier this year. I didn't hear about that. Yeah, they hit a power line, I think, and then the basket caught fire and they had to jump. It was really bad. Wow. But yeah, you can go up and over, and I imagine, I guess, under if it's like a power line yeah. Or a tunnel, if you're really good, or you're in a cartoon, like the Laugh Olympics. That's something they do in there. Totally. But I think if you're really good, you could probably know where to steer into the wind to maybe use the wind. But no with the Blimp. The big distinction is, aside from its distinctive shape, is that you can maneuver like a pro. That's right. And that's what Henry Jafar did in 1852 when he finally someone said, we should steer these things. He built the first powered airship, and it was cigar filled, like the classic shape that we know and love now. Had a propeller, like they have now, and a little engine, although it was a steam engine, which they don't use now. 3 HP steam engine. Yeah. They're not huge engines. Still, it doesn't take a lot, apparently. No, it really doesn't. And those were rigid airships. It's a metal framework. And in 1900, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That name sounds familiar. Led Zeppelin of Germany. And that's where they got the name, of course. Sure. But I never understood the Led the lead well, I think someone said, as a joke, you guys are going to go over, like, a lead Zeppelin, or they did when they played on the BBC. Is that it? But why take the A out? Because the same reason you take the A out of Def Leopard. I've never understood that either. And the same as you put a loud over Motley Crue, this makes you cool differentiates. You got to misspell something in your band. I think I was just looking too deeply into it. It's the problem. Yeah. Le ad zeppelin would be weird. Yeah. But I think our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think Led Zeppelin would be weird if we were used to Led Zeppelin with an A. Or if the Beatles was spelled beetles. Yeah. Instead of their punny name. Very punny. All right. Boy, we get sidetracked so easy with music stuff. Not really. Zeppelin was I think people saw that coming before they press play. That's true. So that was the rigid airship, the first one, and those have a metal framework, and it had tail fins and rudders, had combustion engines, and could cruise at about 1300ft with up to five people. Yes. Not bad. You could bring the whole family as long as you encounter as long as you totaled no more than five. Yes. As long as you paid off the captain. Well, then you just have to be a family of four. That's right. Because the captain's got to sit somewhere, right? Yeah. They got their little captain's chair. Everything was going quite swimmingly, actually, around the turn of the 20th century. It was just widely assumed that we would have a future where blimps zeppelins were just a regular feature of the sky. Well, they were. Up until the Hindenburg went down, there were more than 2000 flights, carried tens of thousands of passengers over a million miles. Like that was air travel, we should say ultrawealthy passengers at the time. Sure. The Hindenburg in particular was high class. It was the pride of Nazi Germany. Yeah. And it was on its maiden voyage, wasn't it? It was almost called the Hitler, by the way. Was it really? Yeah. But Hitler is like, I don't want my name on that thing. Really? Not that he like, foretold the future. I don't know. He just didn't want him named after an airship. He didn't believe Freud's idea that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Yeah. Or a cigar shaped airship is just a cigar shaped air. And it crashed and burned too. So he was probably pretty stoked that he didn't have his name on it. Yes, he very famously went when he heard the news. Exactly. So we should probably stop making light of this nearly 80 year old tragedy because people did die. Yeah. I mean, should we tell the story? What? All right. Well, it took off on May 3, 1937, had 36 passengers and 61 officers and crew members and trainees. Left Frankfurt at about 715 and then crossed out over the Atlantic at about 02:00 A.m. The next day. It's not super fast travel. It was compared to the ship travel at the time. It took about half the time to cross the Atlantic as it did in a boat. Yeah. But compared to what we're used to, it was leisurely. Right. And apparently after reading more about the Hindenburg and I guess ship travel is sort of the same way, like we're going to get there when we get there. Like we're trying to get there then, but you never know what's going to happen. Right. That's why they called them the leisure class. That's right. It followed a northern track across the ocean, eventually into North America over the coast of Newfoundland, and arrived in Lakehurst, New Jersey about 12 hours late. Germans, they're always late. They're famous for it. And basically arrived there at the Naval Air station. And because of poor weather, the captain and the commanding officer on the ground said, you know what? The weather's not so great. Let's wait a little bit because they can fly around forever and those things. Right. And he said, all right, well, the Jersey shore is nice. Let's just go fly above that and tell everyone to look around and look at all those old timey bathing suits on everybody. They're up to the ankles and water. By 06:00, P.m. Conditions had improved, and at 612, he sent a message saying it's suitable for landing. Recommended landing. Now, at about 708, he finally pulled the blimp in. It was a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually got it down toward the ground pretty skillfully, which, as we'll see, it's not as easy as you'd think. Even though it sounds easy, it's not in practice. No. They dropped the landing lines and then things went south. It's, like, really fast. Yes. But it was filled with hydrogen, which is the lightest element, right? Yeah. And it's also probably the most flammable. Or one of them, yes. Inflammable was a big error at the time. A lot of blimps had caught on fire. This is not the first accident, and people testified afterward because not everyone died. We'll get to the numbers here at the end of the story, but there was testimony that it appeared as if gas was pushing against the cover. Maybe it escaped from a gas cell. At 725, the first visible flames appeared, and it varies, but most witnesses say that the first flames are either at the top of the hull, forward of the vertical fin, or between the rear port engine and the port fin. And they described it as a mushroom shaped flower. And it pretty much engulfed the tail, like, right away. And it was able to remain steady for a little while. Like people could start jumping out at this point. Well, those are the people who died, correct? No, that's what I always heard. That's what I have heard is that the people who stayed in the gondola lived and the people who jumped were the ones that died because the flames, because hydrogen is light, they were burning upward. Well, it says here basically it was all dependent on where you were. If you were close to a means of exit, you generally survived. If you were deep inside the ship, like in the power room, along the keel, or in the smoking room. There's a smoking room in handenburg. I'm surprised it wasn't all smoking with a big blimp full of hydrogen. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about it. It was not a good idea. They had, apparently, a double air locked door, one electric lighter, and you were allowed to smoke as long as you put it out before you left. So, like I said, if you were in the smoking room on B deck, you are in big trouble. If you were one of the nine men closest to the front of the ship, you definitely didn't survive. Really? Yeah. So out of the 97 people on board, 62 survived. I think when you see the footage, you can watch it on YouTube. It looks like, how in the world could anyone survive it? Because it goes I mean, it's fully burned in less than a minute and on the ground. Yeah, it went up fast. But 62 did survive, 13 of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew. And there's still two guys alive today. I checked two years ago, but they don't like to talk about it. I can imagine experience. They're both named Verner. Verner Franz and Verner donor the two runners, and one was a little cabin boy, and one was a passenger with his family, and they were contacted for the ceremony. I guess you don't call it an anniversary, I guess. Memorial anniversary. Yeah. It just sounds like a party. But they said, no, we're not coming. We don't like to talk about it. Yeah. So it's been a long standing mystery exactly what happened. I found an article in the UK Independent from 2013 about a study from that year that found they said they figured it out. They built, like, scale models of the Hindenburg, which was like, two and a half football fields long, by the way. Yeah, they were building scale models that were, like 60ft long, so good sized ones, and they tried to blow them up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage, that everybody hated the Nazis even then. And they tried all manner of stuff. And what they finally figured out was that probably what happened was from being in that stormy weather, that exterior, the envelope of the blimp became electrified. And when the ground crew ran up and grabbed the cables, they completed the current from the blimp to the ground, which caused a spark, which actually ignited a hydrogen leak. That fire caused much pushing out. Yeah. One thing they say it definitely isn't what they long thought it was, was the actual fabric was, like, painted in this flammable stuff. Right. And that's not true. It was the standard fabric. Okay. It was just big balloon filled hydrogen park. Yes. So when that happened, the future of blimps were just pretty much like that was it for blimps? That wasn't the immediate end. But as far as commercial blimp travel, that's tough for an industry to get over, so it kind of fell the wayside. Although they did continue on in a couple of forms up until the government, especially the Navy, maintained blimps. I guess the Air Force, I don't know if it's the Navy, but one of the branches of the US. Military used blimps as giant aircraft carriers of the air. Not the sea, the air, which is pretty awesome. And apparently they had them so you could connect, like, a light plane to what's called, like, a trapeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the blimp. So just, like, hook your plane on, climb up and say, hey, guys, where are we going? Or you can take off from there, too. What? Yes. How do you take off? You just drop I think you just release the hook from the trapeze and start a free fall. And then you just go off into the distance and go, thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird. And they had even bigger plans that were never realized because the Navy scrapped the program. And I think 1962, to have, like, a landing strip on top of the blimp. So you could have just, like, planes take off and land and then be stored, like, in the blimp, which would have been pretty awesome. Well, cargo airships are the wave of the future, perhaps. So we'll see. Yeah. But the military was involved in blimps for most of the first half of the 20th century, and then our friends at Goodyear came up with a blimp that has really served them well. Like, they were making blimps for the military, and then they started using them for commercial purposes. And everybody knows about Goodyear thanks to those blimps. Yeah. And they're going to figure in here, of course, because you can't talk about blimps a lot without a ton of buzz marketing for Good Year. Yeah, but that's where they make their name. In fact, my in laws almost wrote on the one based out of Akron, because that's where they're from. And they think he was going to put in a bid on an auction bid to win a trip. And I think it never happened. The trip never happened. I think he either lost the bid I'll have to ask him. But I don't think they ever wrote on the blimp. Okay. I was going to say, if the trip never happened, that doesn't sound like a good year. I know. No, they're like the Germans. So there's three good year blimps, actually. There's one in, I believe, Texas. There's one in California. There's one in Ohio. Or is it Florida? California and Ohio is what it is. I'm sorry. The spirit of Goodyear, the spirit of America. The spirit of innovation. And, Chuck, about the time this episode comes out, robin Roberts, the TV personality, is going to be christening the newest member of the fleet, the wingfoot one. Nice. So they're going to have four. Yeah, because there's a lot of sporting events. There sure are. And you can't watch a big sporting event without hearing the words aerial coverage provided by Goodyear. Yeah. And those shots, man, they're pretty great. They really are. We haven't been around forever. It was, I think, an Orange Bowl in Miami where the first one was broadcast in the 60s, maybe. I don't know, something like that. And it changed America. Yeah. Well, it certainly gives them a lot of press. And about saving some money. I haven't seen their balance sheet, but they don't spend money on that 32nd spot. They still do to tie into the blimp. Right. But it's great advertising for them. Yeah. They also were good sports in a movie called Black Sunday. Do you ever see that movie? No, of course I never saw it. But apparently they provided some of the footage for the movie and let their blimps be used. And let their name be used, even. It wasn't like the good wire blimp. They didn't try to have to change it just enough. They used goodyear, which made the whole thing even more terrifying and realistic. Yeah. They wanted to kill everyone at the Super Bowl. That was the plot. Right. With a Blimp. Right. That shot darts, which is weird. But it was written by the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs. Oh, yeah, he's a good writer. Have you ever read any of his books? Oh, he was the book writer, yeah. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah. No, I haven't read any of The Silence of the Land. He does very good research. Interesting guy. Nice. Anyway, so good. You're in the military after the Hindenburg. That was the two cases of blimps. But like you said, there is potentially a future for blimps, which we'll talk about. But first, let's talk about how blimps work in general after these messages. You want to know how blimps work, buddy? I do. They're pretty simple. This is the delight to learn because it was like, oh, I thought there would be just that little to it. And that's really kind of the case. Right? Yeah. There's not like oh, and here's where it gets really hard. Right. They're like the pontoon boats of the sky. Yeah. Like the most complicated thing on the blimp is probably the Gyroscopic camera on the front of it to film the football stadium. Yes, I think you're right. So let's talk about the anatomy of a blamp. You mentioned the envelope earlier. That is the thing that you're looking at. That is the big cigar shaped balloon. It's filled nowadays with helium. It is that shape because of aerodynamics, of course, and they are super lightweight and super strong. Like you were saying, neoprene two ply neoprene polyester generally. Is that what the envelope is made of? Yeah. There's a company called the ILC Dover corporation. They make a lot of skins and they use the same material that they make spacesuits out of for NASA, for Blimps, too. Good enough for Neil Armstrong buddy. Good enough for my blimp. This is like all about Ohio, this one. Oh, is he Ohio? Yeah. Might have done it. So it was good you no, I knew that. So are your in laws. That's right. The envelopes, they hold and it depends on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course, but between 67,250 thousand cubic feet of helium and it's not super. The pressure is really low inside. Zero \u00a37 per square inch. So that's why if you shot a blimp, it wouldn't like, fall. No. Just leak very slowly and you just land it and patch it up, I guess. Yeah, very slowly. Yeah. In 1994, the British Ministry of Defense fired hundreds of bullets into an airship just for fun. We'll notice if it could be shot down in battle, basically. And it took many hours to deflate and land. Cool. And they don't even deflate them, they just leave them that way. So their natural structure well, not natural, but their original structure prevents them from being shot down. That's one big benefit because I was wondering about that. I was like, you're just providing a target for every teenager with a gun in any country that you hover a Blimp over. Sure. Now I understand. But secondly, we'll see it also has to do with the dynamics of flight, of hovering in the atmosphere. Yeah. So you got the envelope, and the envelope also has something called nose cone baton, which is basically like a support structure for the nose. The front of it. Yeah. Just the very tip. And it keeps the Blimps front from being mashed in as it moves forward, which is pretty smart. Yeah. I think I misspoke the nose cone is on just the very tip. And then the battens are like the fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone. Got you. Okay. So they're like the structure that comes out of the nose. Right. Yeah. And then also on the nose is the mooring hook, because you got to hook a Blimp up to something. Yeah. It's got a little spindle there, and it's got a little wheel under the tail rudder. And that's basically how it sits. You just tie it down. Yeah. Very simple. Just like a balloon. That's right. So here's where it gets a little craftier, like 19th century crafty, but still neat nonetheless. Sure. There's something called Ballettes. Right. And these are basically air bladders that are located within the envelope, and you inflate or deflate them, depending on whether you want the Blimp to go up or down. If you wanted to go up, you deflate these balancing. You want it to go down, you inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're inflating these ballots with air and helium, which Blimps fly using now is lighter than air. So more air means the Blimps heavier, so it goes down. Less air means it's lighter, so it goes up. Yeah, it's pretty easy. It's sort of like how a submarine operates. And there's one in the four and one in the aft. So that's how you control your trim. You can just nose it up or nose it down. Filling up or deflating. That's the pitch axis. That's right. Or trim. Okay. Well, the trim is the levelness. Okay. Yeah. And the axis where the nose and the back go up and down, that's the trim access or no, the pitch axis. Right. Yeah. Okay. No one can see you. Not in agreement. Okay, Chuck. Then there's the catinary curtain and the suspension cables, which I didn't get the catinary curtain. Really? I understood the suspension cables just fine. It's on the inside, about 30% off center. And basically, it sort of looks like where you attach the basket to the hot air balloon. There's a number of these lines that run down and all meet at a single point near the gondola. Right. And that's what you attach the gondola to the Blimp using, right, yeah. So basically, if the Blimp envelope wasn't there, it would sort of look like a hot air balloon. It would have these lines that run up from the gondola, aka basket, up to the top. So they would be like the vertical lines, whereas back or the horizontal lines. Yeah, okay, I understand that exact amando. Then you've got the really technical stuff, the flight control surfaces. So everything we've just described is basically balloons and then the structure that gives the balloon its shape. Right? Yeah. And then the flight control services are basically a rudder and elevators and they're the things that you can control to make the balloon tilt upward or side to side. That's pretty much it. Yeah. There's that one rudder on the top and bottom and that controls your Y'all. And you do it with little if you look at the captain's chair, he's got little foot pedals, like a clutch pedal you would push in and on the very bottom back of the rudder, there's something called a boost tab. And that's just a little additional sectioned off piece of the rudder that's also controllable it's like a little mini rudder. And it assists with the rudder, I think, to make an even tighter turn. Got you. So if you imagine just the smaller rudder as part of the main rudder, just to give you that extra boost, I guess, when you need to turn. And then there's two elevators. And if you are sitting in your little captain's chair, imagine a car steering wheel placed vertically, like by your side and that's just a wheel that you turn up and turn down. It's really very basic. It sounds like the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Like all the machine he's messing with is blown out. It looks very steam punky when you look at it. So you steer up or down with that wheel and that's pretty much it. Oh, no, don't forget the engines. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, as far as like driving this puppy. Yeah, the flight control. Yeah, this is what separates it from hot air balloons. Don't forget the engines. No, the hot air well, yeah, the engines, but also the flight control services. But the engines are turboprop engines. Right. There's twin ones, which means there's two. One on each side of the gondola at the rear. And they're pretty cool because they propel the thing forward. But very cleverly. There's also something called air scoops that are basically these funnels that face the back of the turboprop and they catch the vented air out of the props and they use those to inflate the balloon. Ed. Yeah, that's called prop wash. It's all the lingo I've learned. That's good stuff. And the engines are just six cylinder engines. Like I said, that you don't need a ton of power to power these things. And you can go at about 30 to 70. That says miles per hour, not knots. So how about that? And 70 is cruising. Apparently like 30 to 50 is where you want to be. Get this, I did the calculations. So one of the great advantages Blimps have, which is the reason we are even talking about these things, anybody's talking about still making Blimps is that they can stay aloft for days, weeks even, which gives them a huge advantage over airplanes which have to stop and refuel and stop and refuel. But going 70 mph chuck a Blimp non stop at that rate could travel the circumference of the earth around the equator in 14 days. Wow. Is that enough fuel? Yeah, which I think is not very hard. Now at 30 knots, the sky ship, which is just one example, consumes about eight gallons of fuel per hour. So apparently during an entire week of operations, it consumes less fuel than a 767 commercial jet uses to move away from the gate. Wow. So it's super green, which is kind of cool. You can understand why cargo companies are looking at them too. Yeah, and it runs on AV gas. Of course. Not just regular old gas. You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like your car because I think avgas is still leaded, or a lot of it is. And that's the dif. That's not that green. Yeah, true. But you're not burning much of it. Let's see, what else is there? The valves. You got to be able to let air in and out. You also want to be able to let air in and out of the envelope itself in case things become too pressurized. You don't want it to pop. Yeah, that's true. So you've got your air valves for the bladders inside and they are underneath. Two up front, two in the back. And then you have your helium valve and you can either vent it and you don't have to do this much because you should have it pretty like the pressure set. But if something does happen, you can either manually do it or it's set to automatically release. And if you look at the Goodyear Blimp, it's sort of in the why of year. Wow. Just looks like a little gas cap. You really know your Blimps man. Well. I mean I went to the Goodyear site, it's awesome. There's all sorts of animated gifs. Or is it Gifs? I never could remember. I say GIF. Yeah. Graphic interface. Yeah. But there is a correct way, I just don't know what it is. Well, the guy who created GIF says he pronounces it Jeff, which kind of throws a wrench in the works, but I disagree with him. Morgolon gift. The Goodyear Blimp Gondola, which is where we are now, is 22.75ft long. It is aluminum. On welded steel frame and that's where everyone rides. Depending on your BLM, it's going to hold up to well, it depends on how big the blimp is, but usually you don't see a blimp with more than twelve passengers or so. Yeah. And it's not even necessarily passengers. The gondola can also be the place where it holds all of the surveillance equipment, too. Sure. Depending on what you use it for. Or it can also be the massive cargo hold. Yeah. You've got your communications up there, your flight surface controls, any NAV equipment, propeller controls. There's not much else to it besides what you got there in the gondola. Yeah. What's funny is I always thought blimps were basically like you get the blimp in the air and it takes off and then that's it. But at least with Goodyear, it's kind of like got helicopter parents almost, because when you see the blimp, if you look around, you'll also find a ground crew with a bus, 18 wheeler and a bunch of vans that follow it everywhere because I guess those things break down. Yeah. And apparently the pilots, too, they're FAA certified and Goodyear pilots also have another training program, but the pilots are even everyone is cross trained, it sounds like, to work on the ground or make repairs and yeah, it's like a little selfcontained unit all just traveling around together like half tornado chasers. Right. And you talked about if they just took off and floated around if the engines did stop. That's exactly what you're doing. You're basically a hot air balloon at that point. So you lose control of the flight service controls. Yeah. Well, I mean, they call it a free balloon, so it's buoyant and it's kept aloft, obviously. But if they lose all the power, then all you can do is ascend and descend because I think I guess the rudders and the elevators are also powered mechanisms. I got you. It's not just attached to a cable, attached to a pedal, attached to a wheel. It sounds like it is, though. And as far as weather goes, they compare it to roughly operating is about as similar as a helicopter. Like we can fly in bad weather, but we try to avoid super bad weather. Yeah. I don't blame them. Sure. That's no fun. No. You want to be above the Rose Bowl and like 70 degree weather. Sure. Yeah. So coming up, we're going to talk about how blimps fly and then also the future of blimps, and if there is such a thing after this. So Chuck, the way blimps fly is pretty simple and beautiful and elegant if you ask me. Yeah. So you have helium, right? Yes. Which is they used to use hydrogen. Helium slightly heavier than hydrogen, but not that much more. You don't notice a difference, I would guess. Yeah. I mean, you get why they use hydrogen. They weren't dummies. Right. It was lighter than air. Sure. The lightest of all the gas, of all the elements, from what I understand. And when hydrogen blew up, they said, okay, not hydrogen, what else do we have? And they said, well, helium works. And so they started using helium. And helium has a lift capacity of zero 70 lb/sqft, right? Yes. Which is 1.1 kg/m\u00b2, which means it can lift a pretty decent amount of weight for just a little bit amount, sure. And since they're filling these balloons with hundreds of thousands of cubic feet or cubic meters of helium, they can lift tons and tons of weight and they do it by just simple physics. Since helium is lighter than air, as long as the helium has enough lifting power to lift whatever the envelope and the gondola and all of the mechanisms way, then it will rise more than the air. It will rise into the air. Yeah. It's called positive buoyancy. And what you want is a blunt pilot is neutral buoyancy. So that's why you're going to control, like we talked about your air bladders, to get that thing where once you've got your cruising altitude, you just want to be at the same level. You want up and down and you want to fill it up by blowing exhaust into your air scoops, which fill up your ballot. And the higher you get into the atmosphere, the less pressure there is, which means the higher up you could float conceivably. So you want to make sure you get that air in so you don't just float away and you achieve is it negative buoyancy or neutral buoyancy, you said? Yeah, that's what you want. And then when you want to land, you do just the opposite. You fill it up with even more air and then you make the blimp heavier than the helium inside can lift and it just slowly comes down to the ground. That's it. That's how blimps rise and fall. Yeah, it is pretty simple. And when they're on the ground, they just tie it to that little spindle. You've got your little wheel under the rear, you got a little tractor to tow it around, maybe a hanger, and that's the life of a blimp. And like I said, they don't inflate and deflate these. I'm sure it's a time and expense and I think they're running out of helium too. Didn't we learn that? Yeah. Do you know much about that? Well, we covered it in the probably the Mars Turbine episode. Mars Turbine, yeah, that was it. I read a really interesting article and I think The New Republic, I can't remember, I found it online last night. And it's about the helium shortage and why we have a helium shortage. And apparently the US has had a reserve, a strategic helium reserve, since 1925 in a cave in Texas. And apparently during the Clinton era, the government said, let's make some money off of this, or let's make our money back off of it. So they passed a law that said start selling the stuff off Bureau of Land Management, but only make enough money off of it to recoup whatever we've put into it over the years, which is like $1 billion. Yeah. So they started selling it, and by setting the price artificially, they created an artificial market, because this is like 80, 90% of the world's helium reserves in this cave in Texas. So whatever the BLM was selling it for, that's how much the market value was. But it was artificial. So you had artificially cheap helium flooding the market, which had a two pronged effect. One, it led to these scarcities that we're running into now because they just started selling it off in a fire sale to private industry. But the other more positive effect it had was that it spurred all of this technological innovation because nuclear magnetic resonance, the technology behind MRI, superconductivity molecular analysis, uses helium to super cool magnets to turn them into superconductors. Right. So you need helium for that. So all these industries were using this helium from the Bureau of Land Management to advance technology by leaps and bounds, which is one of the big reasons why we are where we are right now, technologically speaking, because of helium. But now we're starting to run out. There is, I think, 9 billion cubic feet of helium left in the reserve in Texas, which is about a third of what they had when they started selling it off in the 90s, which would be fine if we just clamped it out and said, okay, this is a reserve again. But instead, for some reason, the government just doubled down and issued another decree to the Bureau of Land Management, like, keep selling this stuff. Let's just get rid of all of it for no good reason. I don't understand why interesting, like, it made sense in the 90s, maybe, and it had all these great effects, but now it's like, okay, we understand that helium is literally irreplaceable. As the article put it, once there's no helium, there's no helium. We can't go get it anywhere else or manufacturer, and we have no technology to recycle it. I wonder what the reason is. I guess money. Private industry has a lot of interest in it, and there's good interest, too, like using it for MRIs or pharmaceutical research, that kind of birthday parties. Well, that's the thing. So the Med and Pharma sectors use 29% of helium worldwide. Welding uses 17% because they use helium to weld yeah. Party balloons equals 8% of worldwide helium use. Wow. I have a feeling that party balloons are going to go the way of the dinosaur very soon, if they haven't already. And half of that is the stoner kid who operates the helium tank. Right. Just talking funny. Yeah. So that's the helium shortage. That's the skinny on it. Wow. So I wonder if there's any other gas they could use for blimps. I don't know, it seems like a giant waste or I wonder if they could do like a hybrid so it's fueled by hot air, like a balloon? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Well, I guess we are at the future then. In the future, and depending on who you ask, the future of airships is either super exciting and awesome. And when you look at these, they are yeah. Or it's not going to be funded enough to really there's not a lot of money being pumped into it. Well, the government was for a little while with the Afghanistan war. The Department of Defense was like, give us new blimps. We want these things now. And all these companies ran in and we're like, here's your blimps, here's your blimps. Give us some money. The problem is the whole program got scrapped because nobody could fulfill the enormous orders the DoD was placing for helium. Right. Well, that makes sense. And the military is interested because they basically could be a satellite function. As a satellite? Yeah. Like a 10,000 foot satellite? Yeah, pretty much. There are people doing it, though. Lockheed Martin has a P 791 that is super cool looking, and it is a trihaul. If you look at it from the front, it looks sort of like three blimps squashed together. And it has four big it looks like feet. These disk shaped cushions that are apparently for landing. And these are also cool. There's another one in California from Worldwide Aeros Corp. Called The Dragon Dream. And it's different looking. It sort of looks like a whale shark. Did you see it? Yeah, it's a single hull, I guess, but it's sort of kind of flattened out and it looks like a whale shark. They actually submitted that design to the DoD and when the DoD scrapped the program, they bought their design back because they want to go commercial like cargo carrier with it. Yeah. They're in trouble, though, because the Dragon died. Well, I had a roof collapse in a hangar. Yeah. And they don't know if they have the money to even fix it and then continue. Well, they have another model called the ML 866 that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It supposedly can carry 250 tons, which is more than twice the cargo payload of a cargo 777. Wow. Twice. Again, you mentioned how little fuel it takes to power these things. Yeah. So it'll take a little while for you to get your package, but the company shipping it isn't going to spend too much money delivering it. I still say if it's a military like to use as a cargo plane, I know you can't shoot a hole in it, but what if you launched the surface to air missile at it? It's still full of helium. I don't know. They're so high up there, you can't the fact that we have satellites and drones, it seems to me like the surveillance uses of blimps are preposterous, especially considering that we could be using that helium for medical purposes instead. Yeah, I agree. You got anything else on blimps? I got nothing else. I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by the way blimps float, I think it's cool for some reason I did a Brain stuff video oh, nice. About you can calculate how many balloons it would take, like regular party balloons to lift yourself into the sky. And I made a video about it so you go to brainstormshow.com and check it out. Nice. And if you want to read this article, you can go to housetofworks.com, type in how Blimps work and it will bring it up. And I said, housestiff works. I think. So that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this sterilizing Attics. Remember that old one did a show on whether or not it's legal to sterilize addicts? Turns out it is. Yeah. And that's the thing. And this is from someone who had a personal stake in it. It's long, but I'm going to edit it in my head as I go. Okay. Hey guys, just recently listening to your podcast and Sterilization of Addicts had a personal story to share until my mother is a fully recovered heroin addict and I'm grateful just to be alive till I was six, she was only an alcoholic. However, drug addiction set in fast. My mother, brother and myself, along with whatever scumbag boyfriend she had at the time, were constantly on the run from the police, looking for shelter and searching for food. My father is an upper middle class, blue collar worker who always had a sound home environment. When my mother was sent to prison when I was ten, I was sent to live with my father, always had food to shower and clean clothes, was never in fear for being homeless. I lived with my father for three years until I finally ran away. Once I regained contact with my mother, my father, even with his financial support and stability, was never there, even though he was only a few feet away. My mother, even while on drugs, always listened and always cared about my thoughts and feelings, and that was what was important as a child. My mother eventually overcame her addictions cold turkey because she could see it was damaging to me and my brother. She's been clean for eleven years now and is an amazing mother and an amazing grandmother to my nephew. I like to believe that seeing the harder side of life made me appreciate such things and be more humble and responsible and fearful of what could happen if I slipped or did not take care of myself. I don't want to be the poster child for children of addicts. However, I do believe that we are all in control of our own lives and that is anonymized as. Cornelius Jacob II. Courtney Jake, seven. Yeah, he said, yeah, you can read it. And I said, I'll anonymousize. It. Is there some sort of name anonymizer on the internet? No, he said, please do. Just make it something awesome, like Cornelius Jacobs the 7th. That's great. That's cool. PS. I've been secretly wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Durden of your podcast. That even means, like, made up, but like, we think she's real, but she's not. Okay. Are you real, Jerry? Jerry says no. No. That answers that. Cornelius Jacobs, the 7th. And you read the Roman numerals correctly, chuck this time. Good going. Yeah, nice going. VII. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us any story like Cornelius Jacobs the 7th, please do. You can tweet to us at syscpcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstopworks.com. And as always, go to our cool home on the web. Stuffyshow.com. Stuffyshotko is production of iheartradios is how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
4479750a-53a3-11e8-bdec-ffa65a322b32 | Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/cabbage-patch-kids-must-have-toy-of-the-century | Surprisingly, Cabbage Patch Kids have turned up on SYSK almost as much as the Nazis or Seinfeld. It’s finally time to dive all the way into CPKs, from their controversial origins to the Christmas craze of ‘83 to their alter egos, Garbage Pail Kids.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Surprisingly, Cabbage Patch Kids have turned up on SYSK almost as much as the Nazis or Seinfeld. It’s finally time to dive all the way into CPKs, from their controversial origins to the Christmas craze of ‘83 to their alter egos, Garbage Pail Kids.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 01 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=336, tm_isdst=0) | 49163460 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Josh Malcolm Clark. There's Charles Wayne Bryant. This is stuff you should know about. Cabbage Patch Kits who have two names. Which is why I just did that. That's right. This remarkably, the third time we've talked about cabbage Batch gets on this ship. I only remember one other time. When was the third time or the second time, I guess? Well, the last time was not even a year ago on our episode on Musthave Christmas gifts. That's all I remember. Yeah. And then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage Patch Kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone this story before, so I think this will be the third time that we hear these stories. I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch Kid. You don't remember the other two times I told the story? No. You got to tell it again. It's called a hat trick, baby. Yeah. My sister has one of the first 75 of them of the Little People dolls oh, wow. That she bought in Georgia when she was a kid. Now I know why it didn't stick with me, because I didn't understand what the heck you're talking about. Now I totally get it, and I think it will stay with me forever. Chuck when we do our 4th, fifth, and 6th podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be the one telling that story. How about that? Well, and you also told the story of yours that you ripped the head off and gave it a Mohawk. Yeah. For yours. Weber dino met a pretty terrible demise, and I have two of them myself. That my mom every once in a while says, hey, do you want these? And I say, no, I don't think they're worth much money. And I don't know even know if my sisters is worth a lot of money now, even though it's hand signed and one of the first ones, I don't think the market is robust as it was at one point. So was hers a colleko little people, or is Xavier Roberts like original Appalachian artworks? Little People? No, hers was one of the handmade Xavier Roberts craft Fair dolls. I think those go for, like, maybe $2,000, I think. Yeah, I guess it depends on where you look. I saw the one of mine that was one of those originals, and it wasn't one of the first 100, but people are asking, like, $150 on ebay for those. Yeah, I'm surprised to see that. From what I've seen, if you really want the big bucks, it's the original Xavier Robert's Little People. But we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because some people are probably like, what's the Cabbage Patch Kid? Right? Right. So what, we'll tell everybody what a Cabbage Patch Kid is? It's a little doll that was a huge deal in the Christmas of 1983, and like Chuck said, we talked about this on I think it was our Christmas episode. Or was it a different standalone episode from last year? No, I think the first time we did it was a Christmas episode, and then last year, it was in November. It was just my Christmas toys. Okay. Got you. So it's worth listening to. But in December of 19 eight, three Christmas of 1983, everybody was going crazy for these dolls, but at the same time, because it was such a huge craze and they were so part of popular culture at the moment, they were on the news every night. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to get their hands on these dolls for their kids. There was a lot of talk about, what are these things? They're so ugly that they're cute. And other people thought, well, no, they're actually just ugly. There's a journal article that came out in 1986 in the Semantics Journal, et cetera, and the Cabbage Patch Kids were described as open arm, denied seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only mothers could love, which I think is a pretty accurate description of a Cabbage Patch Kid, don't you think? Yeah. So on that, this is something I never knew. Apparently, there was a rumor years after the fact that the design was managed by Ronald Reagan because he wanted to get Americans used to what mutant offspring might look like. If the big one ever drops and we go to war with the Rooskies, we might want to get used to our babies looking like this. It's sort of in the classic Hollywood, like, their theories that that's why we make UFO movies. They're commissioned by the government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea that one day there's going to be aliens walking around. Right? Exactly. But that's probably not the case. Ronald Reagan probably didn't have anything to do with it. But that's just such an 80s think. Cabbage Patch Kids, ronald Reagan and nuclear war with the USSR. That's about, like, the greatest 80s combination I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah, pretty good. So if you go on to the Cabbage Patch Kids website, you'll find the enchanting magical story of where Cabbage Patch Kids came from or how they came into our human world. And it goes something like this that when he was a young boy, xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian Mountains, and he saw what is called a bunny bee, which is a magical bee or magical bunny that can fly around like buzzes around like a bee. And he followed it, and the bunny bee went through a waterfall, and Xavier Roberts went and looked and saw that behind the waterfall there was a tunnel. And he went into the tunnel, being an inquisitive type of Appalachian young boy. And when he came out of the other side of the tunnel, he was clearly in some sort of enchanted land, because there were a bunch of bunny bees flying around over a cabbage patch, sprinkling some sort of magical dust. And Xavier noticed that when the dust hit the cabbage, the cabbage would start to move and a little baby would be born from it, a Cabbage Patch Kid. And one of those kids, a kid named Otis Lee, came up to Xavier and said, hey, will you take me and all of my friends over to Human World and help us find homes? And so Xavier Roberts agreed, and he found a baby land General Hospital for the purpose of adopting out Cabbage Patch Kids. And that's where it all came from. That's right, babyland. General right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And I just so happened to have driven by there but two days ago. Oh, yeah, we went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday. Did you see a bunny bee? Didn't see a bunny bee. But we drove right by, babyland. General. And Emily was like, did you know that was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there. So of course I knew it was there. But that's where Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at True at McConnell there in Cleveland. So that was the connection, right? Yeah. If you want to kind of take it down a notch. As far as magical enchantment goes, the official story is that Xavier Roberts, while he was at Truth McConnell, while he was studying art there, he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the 19th century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen, you know, that really famous tomato ping cushion, Chuck, in the 70s. So you know how, like the top the creases in the top of the tomato are made by taut thread pulled through together to kind of create that molded look that, from what I can tell, is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts was like, I really like sculpture, and this is a form of soft sculpture. I also like quilting. And this kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to get into this. I'm going to figure out how to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And he did just that starting in yes. And for those of you that want to throw your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming about the story, because you know the true story, just put a pin in it, we're going to get around to it. That was very merciful of you, Chuck. Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know. But in 1977, Xavier Roberts, who sort of look like a shorter haired Kenny Rogers type, wore a cowboy hat and had this beard, and he developed these, like you said, soft sculpture, but they were dolls called little people. And here was the sort of hitch that really drove kids wild, is that they were not dolls that you buy. They were little people. That you adopt. So you got adoption birth certificates, a brilliant idea that he had put up in it. Right. And he sold these things, little people originals. He went to arts and craft shows. He sold them. We bought ours at unicoy lodge, at unicoy state park in a gift shop there. So that was the kind of place that would carry this kind of stuff. They were about $40. And I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying $40 for a doll. And I think we even left without little Chuck. And he went back because he felt so bad about how crestfallen and my sister was and bought the doll later on for a Christmas gift or something, if my memory served me. But it was a lot of money. $40 is a lot of money for a doll back then. Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to $100. And, I mean, who goes to unicorn state park gift shop and expects to drop $100 on a piece of folk art that's really just a baby doll? I can kind of see he thought he was going to have to get a Michelle miniature license plate for 250. Sure. Exactly. And when you go in with an expectation like that and you are faced with $100 soft sculpture payment that you have to make, that's a big shock. And sometimes somebody needs to get in their car and drive home and think about it before they can accept that. That's right. Like you said, that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this. You could have also found them at craft fairs or something. And in fact, Xavier Roberts won first place at the Aciola art show in Kissimmee, Florida, for little people that he named Dexter, which is one of the most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life. But it helped kind of generate some buzz. And at that point, he was like, you know what? Things are kind of going, well, people are paying $40 to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning first place prizes. I'm going to get together some friends. And he founded what's known as original Appalachian artworks. And they are the ones that actually opened up babyland general. They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is super creepy, that they took an abandoned hospital and opened it's basically like a doll store. Really creepy. If you step back and just look at the contours of the whole thing. No, it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look at the words on paper, put it like that, it does seem it was like a little house, and it was the opposite of creepy. Like, it was delightful. And I guess it still is because it's still an operation today. But people would show up, and the people who work there were dressed up as nurses and doctors, and they would help the babies be born from cabbages. Then they would be incubated. They were preemies that were born. It was a big deal operation to take this idea of that you were adopting a cabbage patch kid rather than buying a doll and then adding that whole extra dimension to it of going to Babylon in general to do it really helped generate a lot of buzz for these things. Yeah. And I should say that my sister's Dal, Chuck, who they come with their name. She didn't name it after me, but Chuck had if you see the early versions of these things, like you said, it was kind of horrific looking. They weren't the cutest dolls at all. Chuck had a very crooked hair line. It looked like it was made by someone who didn't fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hairline was like a good three inches higher on one side of his forehead than the other, which, again, further, my dad did not see the charm in this. He was like, it's not even made well, and I got to pay $40 for these things. But supposedly with the preemies, xavier Roberts has given some credit to just raising awareness for premature babies because the premise and cabbage patchland were so cute. They also had sea sections, cabbage sections, and by the time 1980 rolls around, he's selling a pretty good amount of these things, but it really explodes in popular culture from sort of the early 80s. He was featured on the TV show Real People, which I watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made the Wall Street Journal. And so the press is starting to kind of come around, and these things are just getting more and more popular at this point. Yeah, a lot of those stories is kind of focused on people who were paying a lot more than the original retail price to start collecting these dolls. So there was like a whole underground cult market that was developing around these little people, and it became very apparent that Xavier Roberts was not going to be able to keep up with supply. So we started looking for some help, and he found it in 1982. And we will talk all about that partnership made in heaven, starting after these messages. Okay, Chuck, so it's 1982, and the little people are just going bonkers. They're flying off the shelves. They can't keep them in stock anywhere. They're selling them. Unicorn state park is on the phone every day being like, send us more, send us more. We don't care what the hairline looks like. We got to have them. So Xavier Roberts started looking for a legit toy manufacturer to help him out, and he found it in Colico, who had made a name, I guess, around the same time as maybe a little bit before this year, before maybe as the people who came out with Pacman. So they were riding high by this time, and they said, I think there's something to these little People, and we're going to buy in here. Xavier Roberts partnered with Coleko and the rest of the story just kind of takes off like a rocket from there. Yeah. So this was in at first. Colico said you know what? We're going to keep calling them little people. We think that's a good name, even though it wasn't. So they stuck with the name. They figured out the best way to mass produce these things was to get rid of that hands on head. That was a real problem. That's what took the most time. Sure. It's also, frankly, what gave those early dolls all the personality. A lot of that was lost when they went to the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies. The machine produced these vinyl heads. They sized the doll down a little bit to about 16 inches. The initial dolls were pretty big. They varied in size, obviously, depending on how old they were when you adopted them, but they were large. Like, Chuck was a big doll. The two I have are big dolls. Yeah. They were like the size where if they were possessed by a demon and came alive, they could smother you. You'd be in big trouble if they came alive while you were asleep. Yes, big time. But sizing them down made a big difference because then you could just box them up, get more shelf space that way. Sure. And they were smart early on, too, to realize that kids wanted a lot of variety. They wanted different ethnicities, they wanted different skin color, different shapes. They wanted some with freckles, some with dimples, obviously different eye color and hair color and stuff like that. And that was one of the big selling points as it wasn't just this same zoduced doll that every kid could have the same one. Every kid wanted a different version. Yeah, because that was the part of the whole marketing that you were adopting. Your own individual kids, your own Cabbage Patch Kid who had his or her own name, his own specific birthday, he or she was a unique little baby that you were adopting. So the idea that you could take different head molds and different facial features and different types of hair, and you had, like, a few different from each category, you suddenly had, like, millions of combinations that you could randomly put together. It continued. That uniqueness. That was, like, part of the brand from the beginning, and like you said, was part of the big thing that made this craze so huge. They were very smart to identify that as a big part of the marketing and then figure out a way to carry it on while also mass producing these things. It's pretty clever on Cliko's part. Yeah. And it was also clever to change the name. Little people just didn't have legs, basically, in the end. And they thought Cabbage Patch Kids, they were born in the Cabbage Patch and looking back, it's a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted, being born in the little Cabbage Patch, and it was pretty brilliant. I think it was the kind of name that you could end up making into a bunch of other things, which they did, and we're going to talk about that, but I don't think little people quite have the legs to do that. So Collego also figured out that there was a really good sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it, you would still stretch to reach that point. And they started adopting. The adoption fees for Cabbage Patch Kids came to about $30, which is $78 in today's money. And then they took their comparatively much larger clout in context in the media and started getting way more press for Cabbage Patch Kids than Xavier Roberts ever managed to generate for little people. Which I have to say, looking back, though, xavier Roberts did some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland, Georgia, who was hand sewing dolls. I mean, he got some pretty good coverage. Yeah. Nation regional, right? Exactly. And it wasn't it became a big deal. But Coleco just put it to shame. They got a lot of press, a lot of interest drummed up for Cabbage Patch Kids. And all of that kind of culminated in a December 12, 1983 edition of Newsweek, when there was a little girl with a Cabbage Patch Kid on the cover of that edition, just in time for the Christmas buying season. That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek and saying, mom, dad, look, it's on the cover. We have to get one. Yes. And that was at the very quaint time when you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas. And by the way, just to save listener mails, colleco did not make Pac Man, and we just want to save you from that fate. Is that right? Yeah, I think it was Namco, if I remember correctly. Oh, man. I mean, they did do video games, but okay, well, thanks for saving me. No, there'll be plenty of people that probably sent the email before I even got to this and that want to retract the email, but that's okay. So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold 3 million plus by the end of 1983. And like so many Christmas items that came before and after, it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability and supply, and they were under prepared, and they could not keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube, where they just made millions and millions and millions of these things, and it became a supply problem, and it became a really big deal. And this is the first toy where people were angry because there weren't enough of them to go around. Yeah, and, I mean, they still made 3 million of them, and they ran out, like, very quickly. And when you say people were angry, they were throwing elbows, they were pushing one another. They were getting physical trying to get these dolls, and now it's like, well, yeah, that sounds like must have Christmas toy. People hadn't done that up to this point. This is very new. And so in addition to the normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending up on the nightly news a lot that December with stories about how parents were driving across state lines to get one of those Cabbage Patch Kids. Or there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas City, I think, who flew to London to buy one, which I don't understand why? Because London had its own frenzy going on as well. There was a whole lot of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before Cabbage Patch Kids came along that Christmas. Yes. I wonder if that became a technique to sell more things, was to either kind of falsely say that you don't have enough. I think we cover that in the Must Have Toys episode. That is a technique that they use that they purposefully under produce to create scarcity. Yeah, but then you can't sell as many I would think it would be better to produce the regular amount and then just say you didn't. And then they're like, but we found a warehouse that we didn't know about. Exactly. You still want to move these dolls? I mean, Rubik's Cube, they sold 200 million Rubik's Cubes in the first few years. I know. That's nuts because they were just pumping those things out. Yeah. Well, at the very least, I think Kaliko was genuinely caught under prepared. I don't think it was in any way, shape, or form a purposeful scarcity. I think it was just straight up scarcity. And there's this footage from Zayer Department store in Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Right? This is in Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania or Wilkes Barra. I've also seen Pennsylvania, but there's this manager who I know we talked about before, but you got to see this guy. He's the manager of the Zaire Department Store in December 1983 at least. And this guy is, like, unhinged. Have you seen footage of him? Yeah, I saw him last year. Okay, you got to see him again. I got to describe him again because he struck a chord with me this year that he didn't last year. But he's holding a baseball bat very famously. But if you listen to what he's doing, he's shouting at the customer. He's like, shut up. Listen to me. And he's, like, waving this baseball bat, and there's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this department store wanting Cabbage Patch Kids. And this guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is to just start tossing them into the crowd. So the crowd is like, Jostling going crazy trying to catch these Cabbage Patch Kids while the manager of the department store is screaming at them, holding a baseball bat. It's one of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film, and you got to see it yourself. Yeah. He wasn't doing his best work that day, we could all agreed. A lot of times the problems were so big that they didn't even want people in the stores. So they would say, like, we can't have another fist fight in here. So what you do is you can arrive and get a coupon, and then you go around back to the loading dock and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them up and then marking them up, and then there was the black market that really marked them up. Right. And this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of DJs kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when some local DJs there said, there's going to be a B 26 bomber plane and it's going to drop $2,000 over the brewers baseball stadium. And all you have to do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit card so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it. And of course, this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but that still didn't stop a couple of dozen people from showing up with their baseball glove and credit card. Yeah, in negative seven deg wind chill, which is very cold. If you're in the centigrade parts of the world, that's very cold. They're used to it. The fact that people would do that, I double checked to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend, and it definitely is not. That really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the Craze reached. And what's really to Colleko's credit is they managed to keep the party going for a full nother year, because in Christmas 1984 coverage, pet kids were again the musthave toy. And in just 1984 alone, not that year, they sold $2 billion worth of Cabbage Patch Kids in 10 00 19 84 money. Yeah, this was I think, one of the things that made it truly unique is, like I said, the Rubik's Cube was really hot for a few years, but generally, as these things go, it's sort of like you can count on the one Christmas season if you're overlapping to the next Christmas season. That is a grand slam home run as far as toys go. Absolutely. So one of the outcomes of that, of being a toy that manages to span two Christmas seasons that thoroughly, is they become iconic and they start popping up in other places. Like, there was one named Christopher Xavier, who is a very famous Cabbage Patch Kid, I guess as Cabbage Patch Kids can be famous, and he actually rode on the space shuttle on a genuine legit NASA space shuttle mission. In that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen the mini doc about the Challenger? No, not yet. It's good. Oh, boy. It is really good. It's a high caliber documentary to begin with, but then the emotionality that it manages to dredge up is a really well done documentary in every way. I highly recommend it. What's that showing? That one's on Netflix, I believe. I'm almost positive. And I think it's just called Challenger. And then probably colon something. But it's good, I think. JJ. Isn't bad. Robot JJ. Abrams production company. Yeah, they did it. They were one of the companies that handled it. But it's very good. I did watch Anola Homes on your recommendation. Yes. What did you think? I liked it a lot. It was good. It was just a good, breezy, light, fun movie to watch, which is just what we needed to deny. We watched it for sure. But it was smart, too, wasn't it? Yeah, it was smart enough. And she's just great. Millie Bobby Brown. She's got a lot of personality and lovable charisma, so she's great to watch. And it's fun to see her outside of playing Eleven with all her personality able to come out like that, right? Yeah. Well, I'm very glad that you liked it because I think we would have had some sort of awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives. You haven't seen the octopus stock yet. No, I did. Okay, so I think if we're going to talk about my octopus teacher, you should just turn down your volume for about a minute and you won't have it spoiled. All right, fair enough. Actually, I think that guy is terrible. I think he's a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend on two different occasions. Really? Yes. And I know that he's a documentarian, so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen drop dead gorgeous. I know the rules, but this is different. He crossed the line, he crossed boundaries. When he became friends with that octopus, he stopped being a documentarian, started being his friend, and then he, as his friend, wasn't there for his friend when it was attacked, not once, but twice. And I really dislike that guy for that reason. Oh, interesting. Well, I don't concur, but I guess that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different takes, but there's not a gulf between us, a wedge between us, now, is there? I mean, did you hate the documentary? No. Otherwise thought it was amazing. All right, well, then there's no go. Amazing. It really was great. Except for that one thing. All right. No way. So let's see back to average patch kids. There's another kind of landmark they reached in 1992 when they became, I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the official mascot of the US. Olympic team and got to go to Barcelona with. Them. Yeah, this is pretty impressive. This is ten plus years after these things were the hot ticket, which is crazy time. They were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though, his star well, not his star, it was more than Christopher Xavier, but their collective star was going to fade. Like all toys and all dolls. We've all seen Toy Story. We know what happens in the end. It never completely went away, though. Kaliko eventually was like, we got to offload these guys. We're going to sell it. We're in the video game industry, like, big time. Have you heard of Pacman? Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying to recoup some money on their investment. So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license, and then this is not before trying a few things they tried, like, talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that. But eventually they went bankrupt in the license, moved on to different people. Over the years, Mattel hasbro Toys R US. And then right now, it's owned by Play Alone and Inc. Which seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that now. I agree, I agree. And I find it unsettling. Like their slogan should be, we're watching you. It just seems like we talk about this a lot. Like, there's still the giants, like Hasbro and Mattel, but I feel like when we done our toy podcast, it seems like the newer ones, they don't have these sort of name brands that you think of as toys. No, I know. They all sound like Russian fronts. It's really weird and unsettling and kind of offputting. And all the CS or KS. It's really strange. It's very sinister. So, yeah, along the lines. Like, all of these companies were like, we got to figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle again a second time. It just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. And so they tried different things. Like you said, colleague tried that talking one, didn't work. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive. Sure. And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw. It was called Cabbage Pet Snack Time. Kids. And these things would eat like they came with French fries or something, and you'd put, like, the French fry in their mouth, and they'd start chewing, and the French fry would go down their throat, actually come out the back of their head and fall into their backpack. And then you could feed it to them again, which is great and fine, but if you're a little kid and you get your fingers in there, your hair in there, that Cabbage Patch Dolls is going to keep eating and eating, and you're going to start screaming, and your parents are going to be like, I don't want this doll anymore. Give me my money back. Yeah. And these things also declined in quality. Think of the mid 90s. Mattel shrunk them even more down to 14 inches, and they were like, forget these cloth bodies even. We're going to make the whole thing vinyl. And people didn't like that at all. And it took, I think, the 20th anniversary in 2003, it took toys r US, who took over the rights at that point, to jack these things back up to 18 inches. They had cloth bodies. I think they had an 18 inch and a 20 inch. And then they finally brought back those cloth bodies, which were a big deal, and they debuted them at their flagship store in New York City, and they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit. And it's about this time, and I think a year later is when playlong licensed it. But it's about this time that people started buying them again a little bit for nostalgia. Like kids that grew up with them were now buying them for their kids, and I think they sold okay. It's nothing like they were at first, but they're still around. No. Yeah, and Play Along ink, if that is their real name, was very wise to basically recreate the original 1983 style cabbage patch kids. Like, they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who are buying them now for their kids had when they were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia. They're doing pretty good trade on it without having to reinvent the wheel. That's right. A little quick stat before we take a break that is remarkable. Over the past 32 years, there have been 130,000,000 of these babies born, which would make, if they were real little people, it would make them the 10th most populous country in the world, with one being born every 6.8 seconds. But having said that, we're going to take a little break, and right after this, we are going to tell you the true origin story of the little people. Okay? Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that? Well, if you listen to the show a year ago, it's already ruined. But we didn't go into that much depth. Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady. That's the easiest way to say it. There was a very kindhearted, softspoken folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas went to art school in the seventies. She experimented with the same exact german soft sculpture molding, and she created what was called little doll babies. If you google Martha Nelson Thomas little dolls, and you see this very now famous picture hasn't been swept under the rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe colico's people, this black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly and obviously cabbage patch kids. Yes. And there's actually, funny enough, there's another famous picture of Xavier Roberts taken probably about ten years after that, and he's surrounded by straight up cabbage patch kids with the vinyl heads and everything. But the fact that that picture was taken of martha nelson thomas in photographic documentary evidence that she is the person who came up with cabbage patch kids. Not cabbage patch kids, but what cabbage patch kids were based on. And if that were it, if that were the photo, if that was the only evidence whatsoever, you'd be like, I don't know. People can have similar ideas. There's only one old german technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it, but that is not the only evidence. And in fact, xavier roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by martha nelson thomas, but he changed it enough. But if you go and look at the actual story and the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good 16 minutes long vice documentary on this whole thing that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by martha nelson thomas's work. And in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off. Yes. From what I could tell him, there's a bunch of different sort of versions of this online, but from what I saw is they actually did have an agreement early on that he would sell these for her. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and sell them for you? And I think I could sell a lot more than you could. And for a little while, they did have an agreement, but as it turns out, he ended up marking them up and charging too much money. And she wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, these shouldn't cost $40. It's 1978, for god's sake. That's a doll. And he's like, yeah, but what do you think? This is unicoy state park. They're handmade, and you should put a value on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that. And she said, you know what? Forget it. I don't want you to sell these anymore. He follows up with a letter saying, well, you know what? If you don't let me sell your dolls, he basically said, I'm just going to start making my own. And that's exactly what he did. Supposedly he wrote her a letter, and I don't remember who mentioned it in the vice documentary, but basically they said that in the letter, he said, if I can't sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them. And she apparently was like, whatever. Just went her own way. She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little doll babies for sale at the atlanta airport. Way to go. She said, I'm not selling these at the atlanta airport. And apparently that's when she knew she had a big problem on her hands and found out that xavier roberts had come up with the little people dolls that were just the spinning image of her little doll. Babies. Yeah. So she filed a lawsuit that went on for years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in 1983, she was about seven years into this lawsuit. And for her, she asked for, I think, a million dollars. But she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want to see this as a commodity, and I don't want to be ripped off, and I don't want this guy to come along and basically not have the same respect for these little dolls that I had. And if you look at the court case, you think, open and shut. She's got this picture from 75. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says where he basically says he's going to rip her off, but she didn't copyright these things. And you would have had to copyright because they were all handmade and they were all, I guess, unique to themselves. You would have had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll, and she didn't want to do that, and he had no problem doing it. Ours. Little Chuck has an Xavier Robert's hand signature on his butt if you pull down his little corduroy shorts. Yeah, it's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch Kids, aside from their distinctive faces, that each one of them has Xavier Robert's signature stamped onto its butt. And I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place to put a signature on a child. And these are like children to me. That's why I adopt them out rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this. I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically you would think it would have sunk her case. And after almost eight years, Xavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with he sold out at some point in the 80s. He sold his portion, and I would guess he probably needed that court case to go away to finalize that sale. And for whatever the reason, in 1985, he was suddenly ready to settle, and they settled for an undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with. Yes. And he also said, hey, lady, you say you can't copyright these things, you can sign it right next to their little butthole. Right. He said to cockney there for a second. Cockney? Like, I started to get nervous, like, oh, my God, why does he sound cockney? And then you pulled it out with the real Appalachian mountain folk twist at the end there. Yeah. So he settled enough money to put her kids through college. She said, It's still sort of a sad story to me that this man came along and ripped off this lady's design, and then later on complained that he was getting ripped off. He complained about knockoff and said, my point is not take my product to my creation and tarnish it. Yeah. Which was pretty audacious because he said this like, I believe when he was settling with this other case in which a part of the settlement was he had to acknowledge that he had taken her idea. And for him to be complaining about this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if, you know, that the full story. But even though it was an open secret or even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today, everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts as the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids. And technically he was, because he came up with Cabbage Patch Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with little doll babies. Yeah. And he sold it to well, he didn't come up with Cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to Pacman. And Pacman named him Cabbage Patch Kids. Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was Tops trading cards. Tops Trading cards around still in the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid crates in 1985, came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out with the beloved Garbage Pale Kids series. Yeah, I wouldn't end this. I was a little too old. I was 14. I certainly remember them in the Zeitgeist, and I knew it was a very big deal. But this was probably more for kids, probably around your age, I imagine. You were probably into these, right? I loved garbage. Pill Kids. I believe Jimmy had a pretty impressive garbage Pill Kids collection herself. Oh, really? Yeah, and she actually bought me a couple of Garbage Pail Kids I have somewhere, I think one is Squash Josh. I can't remember the other one, but they are for people who don't know what a Garbage Pail kit is. Go look up G Pk.com, and I think it's, like, Geeka y.com, I'm not sure. But they have every single series scanned so you can see all 15 series that came out between 1985 and 1988. And they're just awesome. But they're basically like, if Cabbage Patch Kids were meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like, garbage Pail Kids were the mutated version of that. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were deformed and they were plagued and diseased, and they had names like Adam Bomb and Boney Tony and I guess Squash Josh and Rumi. Yumi. I don't know. They didn't have names for everyone, but it was a big deal. They sold a ton of them. And Xavier Roberts was not happy with this and I think ended up in the lawsuit being successful in getting them just to change enough to where it didn't look like it was officially tied to the Cabbage Patch Kids. Yeah. How it says on the box for the Cabbage Patch Kid? It's, like, in a banner, kind of like semicircle banner. They had that originally as Garbage pill Kids. They had to turn that into a straight bar. They made them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls. In the later series, there are a few changes, but it was still pretty clear what the whole thing was a riff off of. But one thing I didn't realize is that one of the art directors who helped conceptualize Garbage Pill Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Mouse. Yeah. Did you know that? I've heard of Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about them, so I didn't know that. But I know the name. I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like just a legendary graphic novel about fascism. But that guy helped create Garbage Pale Kids just a couple of years before he created Mouse. Amazing. And there was a bad TV show that eventually only aired in Europe. There was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad, but it was a big deal, though. They sold a ton of them. They didn't quite have the spin off power of the CPKS, but the GPKs did okay for themselves. Yeah, I mean, that really goes to show you just how big Cabbage Patch Kids were, that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody, even. That's how big Cabbage Patch Kids were in the hats. Off to Cabbage Patch Kids. I can't wait to talk about them again next year in another episode. That will be great. We'll figure it out. We'll spend 2021 figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about Cabbage Patch Kids some more, it's time for listener mail. That's right. Before we do listener mail real quick, I just want to give a shout out to the Budge family. Not really going to get into what's going on with them, but I just want them to know that we're thinking about them and sending them lots of love and support over the Internet airwaves. But this email is called oh, I know. I'm going to call it the Beaver. This is about beavers again. And it starts out as this is seriously not a please read me on the air email. And that's a pretty good way to get on the air. By the way, thanks for the amazing show. Been a listener since they were paltry. 20 minutes. Love everyone. Keep me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, and providing an endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain. I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmate. As we grew up in much the same circumstances around the same age, we have very similar cultural outlook on different things. I do have a small difference of opinion, though. Your bigfoot podcast was great, and I was happy to hear you say the possibility exists. Did we say that? Yeah. I don't know if it was we so much as you. Yeah, maybe so. But a while back teasing. I think it was me. You were adamant that Nessie does not exist. Buddy show nessie some love. Wouldn't it be amazing if she did exist? So she has her fingers crossed on that. But the real reason she wrote in, she listened to the beaver episode and came across Beave the Beaver. So just get online and Google Beave. It was this beaver that was found, I think, abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be put, maybe a wildlife center or something. But the long and short of it is Beave make dams in their house. So there are all these pretty cute videos of beaver dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that Beave is trying to damn up and like dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, like anything Bee can get a hold of in his little paws and teeth, he'll drag over to this doorway and try and damn up. And it's really one of the cutest, funniest things I've ever seen. Yeah, it is very cute because he looks like, should this go here? Or maybe a little bit to the left? Okay, that's all right right there. When he brought the pillow over, he's like, oh, this is very useful. I can just squish this into place. It was very cute to watch him do that. It is amazing. And that email, by the way, is from Kerry Keeley. Thanks, Carrie. That was a great email. And yes, way to get it on the air by saying it's not meant to be on the air. We fall for stuff like that all the time. And if you want to try to make us fall for something, have at us. You can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows here." | |
How Panic Attacks Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-panic-attacks-work | Almost three percent of Americans suffer from a debilitating disorder that causes them to suffer intense fear seemingly without reason and science hasn't yet figured out what causes it. Join Josh and Chuck as they get to the bottom of panic attacks. | Almost three percent of Americans suffer from a debilitating disorder that causes them to suffer intense fear seemingly without reason and science hasn't yet figured out what causes it. Join Josh and Chuck as they get to the bottom of panic attacks. | Thu, 02 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=275, tm_isdst=0) | 32174989 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. So it's stuff you should know. Yep. Widespread Panic. Did you see that video? No, which one? There was a dude this is just, like, two days ago that went up on stage and attacked the band. Oh, no, I didn't see that. Yes. And they've got the whole thing, and it was during one of the really repetitive, droning parts of a song, and I haven't seen an explanation, but I went to the Widespread Panic Facebook thing because there was a big threat about people talking about it, and I just said, hero. Did you really? Yeah. People gang piling me going, Hero. That's hilarious. Dangerous troll. I thought it was pretty funny. He attacked the members of the band. Yeah. Like, physically. And I couldn't quite attack the drummer, and he was upset. Wow. I don't know if that part of the song made him snap, but it was definitely one of those repetitive over and over and over. Yeah. Stop. But he was at the show, so that'd be weird. Unless he went there to attack them. Yeah, that's probably the bath salts. Maybe. So we're not talking about that kind of panic. That's more a psychotic break. And this is not widespread at all. It's very individualized panic. It is. But it turns out people suffering from this is kind of widespread. How about that? So it fits a little bit. Sure. Instead, we're talking about panic attacks and the combination of panic attacks or the culmination of panic attacks, that can lead to something called panic disorder. And it is a sucky mental condition. That about 2.8% of Americans, which is a pretty significant amount of people. Yeah. That's more than bipolar, which we've covered in schizophrenia. Yeah. And OCD. Well, we've covered all three of us. Yeah. So that's a pretty significant amount of people who suffer from panic disorder. Right. But that's different than just plain old panic attacks. Even though to have panic disorder, you have to have panic attacks. But if you have panic attacks, you don't necessarily have panic disorder. Right, right. Exactly. And I've had two experiences, which I'll talk about at some point through the show, not personally, but Emily had a panic attack once, and friend in college had a panic attack, a roommate, and neither one of them had panic disorders. It was just an isolated incident. Yeah. So apparently I don't know if common is the right word, but people do have panic attacks, but that might be the only one they ever have for their entire lives. I hope so. Which makes the whole thing kind of mysterious. And we should say, like, science does not know what exactly is going on here. They have some theories. Yeah. But there's no way to predict what's happening. They don't even know if it's genetic or what environmental. Well, they finally isolated a gene last year. I guess I'll go and talk about that now. OK. In December 2013, they isolated the gene. And genes are always so boring with their names. Unless it's Simmons. That's right. The Nkrt Three, they think, may be responsible because its presence appears to cause an overestimation of fear and danger and an overactivation of the hippocampus and amygdala. So basically, if you have this gene, you're going to exaggerate your fear overall. Okay, but it's not like they're saying they prove that's the cause. But that is a good step scientifically in the right direction. That's a huge step because that does sound very much like what a panic attack is. A panic attack is where you experience a very pronounced sense of fear and basically your fight or flight symptoms response. And really, from what I can understand, your flight response, you're not in a position to fight or freeze because, you know, now these days, it's fight, flight, or freeze. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, there's a third option now. Drop and roll. Kind of, yeah. Oh, no, wait, those aren't options. That's a sequence. Right? These are options when you're confronted with danger. Nick soon, our buddy, the comedian dude, have you seen his Honda Fit ads? Yeah, those are awesome. Yeah, I was like that's. Nick thou and he's on Miss America. Yeah. The first thing I always think about is, good for you. Cash those checks, baby. Yeah. He has that funny bit on stop, drop and roll, and like they needed to continue that, like, keep rolling. He's like, that's kind of key. You don't stop, drop and roll because you'll be consumed by fire. You need to keep rolling right. Until you get to a door. Yeah, it's very funny stuff. So this is a little different. Flight or freeze. Yeah. So how does freeze factor in? Like, you just freeze up and that's beneficial of all these adaptations to danger. But basically when you're confronted with danger, you can either fight, fly, or freeze. That makes total sense. I don't know why freeze was never in there to begin with, because so many people freeze. They just added on the last couple of years. I think I'm a flyer or freezer for sure. It depends. I don't know if do you think there's a personality type? Oh, boy. I don't know. Don't you think it's possibly, like, just what your body chemistry happens to be doing right then? No, I think some people are more inclined to fight, for sure. Okay, well, with panic attacks, you're flying. That's your jam right there. And you're experiencing it in the exact same way that somebody's coming to mug you or has pulled a knife on you and you're running away or there's a lion chasing you. Except this is the key to panic attack. There is no lion, there is no mugger. Yeah. There's no knife. There's no discernible reason for you to be experiencing the sudden onset of crippling fear, but you're experiencing it nonetheless. That's right. No tangible thing happening right in that moment. Right. So when you come out of it and these things can they peak within about ten minutes, but the symptoms can last for an hour or more. When you come out of it, you're like, I don't ever want that to happen again. The place that this just happened, say, the park I'm never going back to, because now I associated with this. Because what you're doing when you experience fear, you're learning to stay away from something. So whether you want to or not, you've just been conditioned to fear the place that you just were. Sure. Because you had a panic attack. And then lastly, you think possibly you're crazy. Yeah. Or having a heart attack. Yes. Both of my wife and my friend both thought they were having heart attacks. Yes. Which is super scary, and we'll get the difference later on. But I guess we should talk about just some of the initial symptoms of a panic attack. The old DSM diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists. Looks like about ten symptoms. And if you have at least four of these, you may be having a panic attack, which is heart pounding, shaking, dizziness, sweating, choking, feeling nausea, shallow or short breath, chest pain, numbness or tingling, chills and hot flashes, feeling of unreality, feeling like you're going crazy or feeling like you're about to die. Yeah. You got four of those. You're having a panic attack. Yes. And if you have four panic attacks within four weeks, or you have one panic attack and then fear having another panic attack for about a month or so, then you can be diagnosed with what's called panic disorder. So if you listen to our Fear podcast, which was a really good one, it's kind of the same as a panic attack. We covered. Your autonomic nervous system is what maintains all the functions in your body, the involuntary functions in your body, that is. And it's going to take signals from your central nervous system. It's going to regulate your organs. That's why you don't have to tell your heart to beat, your kidneys to work, your pancreas to secrete stuff. That's right. It's your autonomic nervous system, and it has two parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, and your parasympathetic controls, like I said, your heartbeat and stuff like that. The normal aspect. Yeah. Homeostasis. Right? Yeah. That balance that we all seek, that we don't know we're seeking. And then the sympathetic is if you have that fight or flight or if you become excited in any way, really? That's when that's going to kick in. Yeah. It's like normal gear and then high gear. Yeah. But it's not always fear, just any kind of excitement. Right. You could be super happy. It could be sexual arousal. That's all your sympathetic nervous system. Right. And those two components make up the autonomic nervous system, which it kind of switches from one to the other depending on your state of arousal, right? That's right. But when fear has aroused you, your sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear and adrenaline is released, which is a huge factor in causing the symptoms of a panic attack. You start breathing very heavily and shallowly, your pupils dilate. We always used to say if you're digesting food, you stop doing that. Yeah, that's right. Basically, all of your energy is transferred over to either fighting or flying. And in the case of a panic attack, it's transferred over to get you to be able to run away as fast as possible. Yeah, which can be a little scary. But in a real fear situation, if you're in danger, your parasympathetic nervous system is going to kick in and calm you down. But that is not what happens in the case of a panic attack, which is really perplexing. So let's recap this. A panic attack is when you experience this incredibly intense fear, so much so that you run away, but there's nothing there to be afraid of. And then to make everything a million times worse, your parasympathetic nervous system doesn't kick in and calm you down like it would under normal circumstances, so you get to experience this horrible thing even longer. That's right. And after this break, we are going to get into some of the potential causes of penetrates. All right. So like I said before, breaking news from December of last year. They think they've isolated a gene previous to that. Some researchers said it could be genetic because identical twins experience it more than fraternal twins, but it's always been sort of up in the air. There have been contradictions as well on a genetic basis. I think it's also possibly epigenetic or environmental. Like, apparently one study found that a lot of people who have panic disorder had some sort of traumatic incident happen in their childhood. My friend from college did. Is that right? Yes. So they're thinking, like, possibly it had some sort of effect and set up like a time bomb for later on in life. Yes. The stored feelings that maybe you've never dealt with about some traumatic events, they're going to rear their head at some point in your life in some way. Yes. Or it just rearranged the neural output in your brain so that one day you're just set up when everything is just right, that chemistry is flooding your brain in a certain way, and then bam, it comes out of nowhere. You have a panic attack. Yeah. Another theory is that they think if you have an overactive fear system, like you basically have been scared too much in life or you're a scared person, then it's just going to make it a hair trigger for something to set it off. Right. Which makes a lot of sense. I think it could be a combo of a lot of things as usual. Yeah. I wonder though what it will end up being though, if we'll find that there is one thing that leads to this predictably built up. But then there's the actual trigger. Right? Yeah. And that's another thing too. They don't know what triggers these things. They do know that a panic attack, being worried about having a panic attack can actually trigger a panic attack. Yeah, absolutely. I feel so bad for people with panic disorder. This is like a terrible affliction because you do become very much afraid that you're going to have another panic attack. So that can set off a panic attack, but it also can set off a comorbidity called agoraphobia where you are afraid to leave your house but you're also afraid to be alone. And I read this article that was from the they were saying like the Freudist followers of Sigmund Freud were saying, oh well clearly if you're an agoraphobic, you don't want to go outside because that's where sexual desire is and you don't want to be alone because you're worried that you will abuse yourself. Right. So agoraphobia and everybody went boom. Sit down. Shut up Freddie. Yeah. So nowadays they have realized that agoraphobia is almost exclusively the result of panic disorder. Oh really? Yeah, and it's because you fear the place that you had a panic attack, so you don't want to go there again. And then maybe it happened again at the grocery store, so you don't want to go there and it happened. You don't want to be alone, but you don't want to be around strangers. So you cling to your family members and now all of a sudden you're not living your life anymore. You're developing phobias because of your panic attacks and your association with them. Like if you're on an elevator and you have a panic attack, you're not getting on an elevator again. Right. You've just developed a phobia for elevators. And so all of a sudden you're not going to be working at a place where you might normally work because you have to take the elevator to get there. Or you develop a love of stairs. Right. But then what if you don't like confined spaces at all, like a stairwell either? Yeah. Have you ever been locked in the stairwell here at the building? Yeah, I mean you just walk down however many flights. So you're at the lobby. Yeah. Oh, you can get out down there. Yes. Okay. Yeah. You're not actually locked in, you just have to walk all the way down. I usually just call you and say, let me another theory is that when you're super tired and overworked, a lot of times when these are set off, your brain is producing sodium lactate or CO2. And when those levels increase, your brain says, you know what, I think you're suffocating. And so I'm going to send a signal to get you a lot more oxygen. And I found this really sad case of this woman, a university student who died from a severe asthma attack, like three days ago, and she had a history of asthma and then told the medics that she was going through, like, final exams and she had been having panic attacks in the week, like, proceeding. So breathing is a huge part of panic attacks. And as evidenced by her, if you have asthma, it can be deadly, which is super scary and sad. I guess there's a neurological basis, they believe, for people who have panic attacks. People who suffer from panic disorder tend to have fewer serotonin receptors and apparently also GABA, which helps us get to sleep. It's called a gamma immunobutyric acid. Let's call it GABA. GABA. Those two have some sort of role in panic disorder. Like, you don't have enough serotonin and your body is not producing enough GABA. You may be prone to panic disorder. There isn't like a specific type of person that necessarily gets a panic attack. It can happen to anyone, but usually it happens if you're in your 20s, although they say kids can get it as well. Have a panic attack or a disorder. Twice as many women have a panic disorder, develop one as men, which is pretty interesting. And like you said, just the fear, like, having had one before, that fear can lead to more. So it's very cyclical. Yes. And you know, that one paper from 87, I can't tell if it was arguing in favor of panic disorder being like an evolutionary adaptation and possibly beneficial, or if they were saying, like, some people think this, can you believe this? But one of the points that this guy made was, well, twice as many women have panic disorders as men. Right? So clearly it's an evolutionary adaptation because women wouldn't have had to have gone as far away from camp while they were gathering food as men. Sure, men couldn't stand to have a panic attack or they couldn't. It wouldn't be an adaptation for men, it would be for women. Plus, women can't run as fast when they have kids to carry, so they need to be on alert a little more. Got you. It smells like bunk. 1987. Bunk. That was a big year for bunk. Yeah. If you do have a panic disorder, you may have a hard time getting your family to understand it. Sometimes they overreact and think it's like way more severe than it is. Sometimes they under react and say, it's all in your head. Right, like, just calm down. But either way it's saying, boy, you're nuts, or you just need to relax. Neither one of those is going to help out your loved one. Chill out. There's no lying. Yeah. One thing I've learned in arguments and fights with my wife and I'm boiling this early on is saying telling someone to relax never causes someone to relax. No, it's like not the worst thing you can do if something's heated is to say, just relax, it is true, that's just going to ramp it up. Yes. So that's my advice for couples out there in any relationship. Really. That's a good advice, Chuck. Thank you. There is a silver lining to all this, and that panic disorder is actually highly treatable. The treatments that they've come up with are pretty successful, and we will talk about those treatments right after this. All right. So you mentioned that they are treatable. They have found success rates through medication and therapy, which seemed to be about the same. As far as how effective they are between 60 and 90% of the time, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's not bad at all. So that's the good news. So there's three typical methods of treatment antidepressants, anti anxiety pills, and therapy. And you might use them independent of one another in conjunction with one another. I also saw beta blockers. Some people use beta blockers to treat them, but they're not quite sure what's going on with that. I've used those before live performances. Those are the ones I read about. You gave me one, and I was like a useless worm. Yeah, it didn't affect me like that. I just totally lost my personality. I wasn't nervous, but I didn't do anything. Well, I've gotten used to live performing now, so I don't need them anymore. But I got that tip from, apparently, a bunch of musicians, like, in symphonies and stuff, using them. I was like, well, if the first chair of violinist, if it's good enough for them to give me some beta blockers. Yeah, but it worked for me. But like I said, I'm over all that. I enjoy being on stage now. So with SSRIs, which is what you moved on to from beta blockers, right? No, I'm not on it. So with SSRIs, those are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and they do exactly what they sound like. You've got a bunch of serotonin receptors in your brain. If you have panic disorder, you may have fewer serotonin receptors in your brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps basically stabilize your mood by either causing a neuron to fire or inhibiting a neuron to fire in this really beautiful, perfectly balanced chemical reaction, right? Yeah. So if you have fewer of these receptors than normal, you're going to be comparatively out of balance. What an SSRI, an antidepressant, does is it allows the serotonin to kind of stay in your synapses a little longer than as normal, so that you are releasing a little more serotonin than you would under normal circumstances. And it's proven pretty effective for panic disorder. Yeah, they work wonders for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, but not everyone. And they can cause a lot of negative side effects. So, obviously, work with your doctor on a program, and it takes them a little while, like, two to four weeks to begin working right. For a panic attack. An antianxiety drug like Xanax might be a little more effective because that immediately hits you. It is a tranquilizer benzodiazepine. Right. Yeah. And Xanax is going to help chill you out immediately. But you can get hooked on those things pretty quick. Yeah. And they're dangerous to quit cold turkey. And it's not the best thing to go to Xanax a lot. Well, yeah. They say that you should basically, if you undertake an SSRI regimen, you can conceivably stay on it for years. Yeah. If you undertake anti anxiety or benzodiazepine regimen, it shouldn't last for more than a couple of weeks or month, from what I understand, because of the dependency. And again, you want to really do all of this with, like, a qualified, competent doctor's assistance? Sure. Not a doctor's assistant doctor's assistance. It depends. If it's a qualified, competent doctor's assistant who can write prescriptions for the trust, go for it. That's true. And then there's therapy, of course, the old CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, which we've talked about a bunch, but sort of the process is going to play out like this. They're going to teach you about your panic disorder. Right. Which is a big step. If you understand something, you can overcome it more easily. I think they're going to monitor you, and you're going to self monitor and record your symptoms and when they happen and why they happen, what the circumstance was. Breathing, like we mentioned, is a huge part of it. Anything from meditation to just regular breathing exercises, which will give you some tips on that in a minute, too, are going to help you out. And then the old exposure to situations. And this is once you've rethought what your approach is going to be like, here's your new outlook, and now here's a situation that might give you a panic attack. How do you feel? Yeah. Or, like, if you had a panic attack in an elevator, like, they may tell you to imagine you're in an elevator, your therapy might progress until you're actually in an elevator and you're chilling out. And the hope is that if you can undergo exposure therapy to that degree, it will get you over your panic attacks in general. Another aspect of it, Chuck, is rethinking. Yeah. And that is basically accepting the fact that you have panic attacks. Apparently, if you can say, I'm having a panic attack or I have panic attacks and you acknowledge it to yourself and to other people, it immediately turns down the volume on the whole thing. Yes. I noticed some similarities in someone guiding someone through an LSD trip and guiding someone through a panic attack. Yeah. It's interesting. A lot of it is like, understanding, like, I am having an acid trip. I am not having a good time. It's the same thing as I'm having a panic attack, and this is no good. Right. And if I understand that, then I can calm down more easily and keeping it in just leaves you to freak out more. Exactly. So that's CBT. Cognitive Behavioral therapy. And if you undergo therapy and you're still suffering from panic attacks, apparently being discouraged is a real problem with people with panic disorder because you can still suffer them even if you're doing everything right. So a lot of people have learned to cope, and there's some pretty common coping techniques for panic disorder. And like you said, the heart of the whole thing is breathing. Like, when you suffer a panic attack, you start breathing shallowly and quickly, and you can hyperventilate. What you want to do is breathe from your diaphragm. And you can actually practice this in the times when you're not having a panic attack. Yeah. If you're a singer, you know how to breathe with your diaphragm. But if you're not, what you can do is lie down on your back, put some pillows on your head and knees, and put a hand on your stomach and a hand on your chest. And then practice breathing and making your hand on your stomach move without the hand on your chest moving. Right. And then tap the hand on your stomach while you make a circle with the hand on your chest. When you're really advanced. Wow, it's pretty impressive. And then another thing you can do is just literally, like, put a weight on your stomach and make sure it's too heavy. No, like a book. Sure, yeah, like a nice atlas. Something that you can see going up and down when you're breathing with your diaphragm. That's right. And you want to just kind of breathe in the good exhale the bad. Yeah. Like, I'm having a panic attack. This will pass. I know this will subside. This is a temporary feeling. You should be saying to yourself. And if you're a person who's, like, out in public and you see somebody having a panic attack, you basically want to do the same thing that they're trying to do for themselves. You want to remain calm. You want to tell them that it's going to be over with pretty soon, that everything's okay. They have nothing to fear. Yeah. You don't want to tell them to chill out, though. Guiding someone through relaxation is different than saying chill out, by the way. Right. Very different. They do recommend that if you have a problem with attacks in general, or if you have a disorder, you should exercise a lot. You should practice. They don't call it meditation, but that's really what it is. Deep breathing and relaxation. It's called mindfulness these days, isn't it? I don't know. I think that's what they call it because meditation turns people off, right? I guess. Interesting. Cut out the caffeine and sugar and nicotine. That's a big one. Yeah. That's not going to help you at all doing all those things. And if this stuff is stuff that's building up inside of you, which it often is, learn how to express yourself a little more and talk about your issues. I know that in both of my cases, my buddy in college, it was during finals week, and I had gone to bed, and my roommate and another dude were out in the living room staying up, and one of them came and woke me up, and he was like, dude, he's having a heart attack. He's having a heart attack. And I didn't know anything about panic attacks, so we took him to hospital, of course, and that's all it was. It was a panic attack. He calmed down. I think they might have given him something there some sort of medication to calm him down. Probably benzodiazepine. Yeah, probably, like a good shot in the arm of that stuff. And he's like, oh, I'm fine. Right. With Emily's case, she had been under a lot of stress and was driving back from Akron, Ohio, to Atlanta. I think she would get some furniture or something because she was in a truck, like a moving truck. Oh, yeah, that's a stressful event. Had been drinking caffeine like crazy like she does, and basically started to have trouble breathing on the highway, going, like, 80 down the highway and had to pull over, called me, and I called her down. I was like, all right, let's get back on the road. See how you do. She got back on the highway and immediately freaked out again. And I flew to Cincinnati and went to her hotel and drove her home. Nice. Yeah. I mean, there was really no choice at that point when it's your wife. Plus, it was a good opportunity to get on the white horse and ride in and save the day. Oh, I think everyone loves those opportunities. Yeah, for sure. And I've always also wanted to run to the airport, give me a one way ticket to somewhere out of my way. I have time for your body scan. Pretty much that's what happened. So she checked herself into a hotel, and I went there and had some nice Cincinnati skyline Chile. And then the next morning, we hit the road. Nice. Yeah, it was good. And she hasn't had one since then, thank goodness. Despite, like, she has a lot of anxiety, just as a human, but no panic attacks. Yeah. So I definitely have seen the things I saw in this article, and both of them, whether it was during finals, like, the things going on in her life at the time were super stressful. I think the trigger was she doesn't see great at night or in the rain when she's driving. And I think all these things compounded and just played out to where she felt like she was having a heart attack. Got you. And so did my friend. But I guess we should mention that there are some telltale signs of a heart attack. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah. That you can recognize the difference because you. Don't want to actually be having a heart attack and be like, that's just a panic attack. Just breathe while you're dying. Here are a few tips from the American Heart Association pressure in the center of your chest that persists longer than a couple of minutes or goes away than returns shortness of breath pain in the arm or upper body. You might feel nauseous or faint. And of course, if you're ever in doubt, call 911. Because like you said, you don't want to be having a heart attack. Thinking it will subside. No. There will be egg on your face. Well, to say the least. Exactly. If you want to know more about panic attacks and panic disorder, type either one of those sets of words into the search bar. How stuff works and it'll bring up this article. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. We call this basement fear. Hey, guys. I know most listeners know your podcast is great for learning and entertainment, but I found another purpose distraction from stress induced irrational fears. That sounds familiar. We were just talking about this kind of thing. Oh, yeah. And I didn't even realize it when I picked this out. How about that? Serendipity? I grew up in a house with a creepy, gross basement where we did laundry, and it never bothered me. My fiance James and I recently moved into a house with a non creepy and non gross basement. But I think the stress of planning a wedding is getting to me because when I need to go down into the basement to do laundry, I nearly have a panic attack. Imagining a person lurking in the basement, I started playing an episode of Stuff You Should Know on my iPhone and carrying it in my pocket when I need to go down to the basement. Stay back, spirit. Exactly. So we literally accompany her into the basement, which I think is hysterical. Yeah. I am busy enough enjoying your humor and information that I don't get as overwhelmed by this irrational fear. I think it may even be waning now. So I continue to make myself go down into the basement and see that my fear is not really based in any reality at all. That's CBT. That's exposure therapy. Yeah. Boom. Nice. Also, before this weird basement fear popped up, I long called you guys my cleaning crew because I listened to episodes while doing my chores. And that is from Kelsey in Kansas City, Kansas. Not Kansas City, Missouri. Missouri. And Kelsey, good luck with that. And just don't look behind that door over near the washing machine. That was very helpful. Just kidding, Kelsey. There's nothing down there. Just take us with you. We will protect you because spirits don't like us. No. The podcast is coming from inside the house. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can tweet to us at Skyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook comstuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at houses stuffworks.com. And, as always, join us at our home on the web stuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstafworks.com." | ||
How has toxoplasma turned the world into zombies? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-has-toxoplasma-turned-the-world-into-zombies | Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic infection that favors cats, but it can also be found in humans. Discover the disturbing details of how toxoplasma gondii finds a host -- and how it affects human beings -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic infection that favors cats, but it can also be found in humans. Discover the disturbing details of how toxoplasma gondii finds a host -- and how it affects human beings -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:34:08 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=14, tm_min=34, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=195, tm_isdst=0) | 20083115 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from how stefworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is the the always lovely and effervescent Charles W. Bryant. I have on shorts today. You do. You look like you're ready to go to the beach or play basketball or play beach at the basketball. And I'm at the opposite of that. Play basketball at the beach. Yeah. You can do that in Southern California, buddy. You can do anything in Southern California. Trust what I hear. Yeah, I can do anything because my wife is out of town. I know. Chuck is a bachelor today. Bachelor, as we say. He looks terrible. He's dressed shabbily, clearly hasn't showered. Batching. It's food stuff stinging down in the front of his shirt. Family steak in his beard. It's a big hunk of steak on your beard. It is. So, Chuck, how are you feeling? I feel a little tired and under the weather because of my bachelor experiences, but I am ready to go. Are you? Yeah. You're bringing it? Yes. So, Chuck, you know how neurotic I am right now? I'm thinking about what you're really thinking about me. Yeah, you're a little neurotic. I wouldn't say hugely neurotic. I'm definitely not Woody Allen. Neurotic. No. But things like guilt, self doubt what was the third one? Self doubt. You always think you stink on the show, which is just ridiculous. Well, I do, because you're good. Regardless, these things drive me. Right. So, yeah, I would consider myself fairly neurotic. And I recently found out, Chuck, actually, thanks to a new show that has inspired this podcast and the next one, we're doing a pair of them on Parasites. It's an Animal Planet show, actually, called Monsters Inside of Me. Yes. And the staff is parasite crazy right now. It's all over the blogs. The blogs are lousy with parasites. Lousy with Parasites because it's a really cool show. Have you seen it yet? I've seen parts of it, yeah. It is wicked and frightening. Yeah, I like it. I think it's cool mainly, though, because it relieves me from any responsibility for my own personality. My own horrible, disappointing, obnoxious personality actually probably is the result of a latent infection by a little thing called toxoplasma. Gondi. Yes. T. Gandhi. T. Gandhi. I'm going to call it t. You can call it t. I'll call it toxo. Okay. Yeah. Just for ease of pronunciation. Yes. But yeah, this is a parasite. It's a zoonotic disease, which means we catch it from animals. Right. It's a relative of malaria. It is. But this thing is possibly running the world. Yeah. This is a little disturbing, I got to tell you, a tad bit. So let's talk about t. Let's talk about toxo. Yeah. It is a parasite. As we said, it has a complex life cycle, like most parasites, and the life cycle has a purpose to get into its final host. That word just creeps me out. Host or definitive host. Yes. And this one is unusual because it completes its lifecycle in one place and one place only, and that is inside of a cat. A cat's gut. A cat's gut, yeah. This is where T wants to be. Yes. Because this is where it gets it on and reproduces. Yeah. Everywhere else, it goes to incredible lengths to get back into the cat gut. Yeah. It's crazy. Really, honestly, we haven't gotten into this yet, but this is like Master Blaster from Thunderdome, right. It's like the little guy, like, just running things and making whatever it needs to carry it to the catgut, do whatever it wants to get it into the cat gut. Right. And toxoplasma is actually really common. Estimates run into as much as 80% of the world population is infected, have a latent infection with toxoplasma. Right. Yeah. 67% of Brazilians alone. Yeah. But then on the other side, 70% of the UK is infected. So yeah. It's lopsided. And this may sound familiar already, because for many years we've known that pregnant women should stay away from cat feces. I should go ahead and pick up just go ahead and say that our guest producer. We have a guest producer this week. Oh, yeah. Hey, Lizzy. Lovely. Infecting Lizzie. She thought I was kidding with her when I told her that oh, really? That pregnant women can't clean out the cat box. She thought I was pulling her leg and I was going to pull one on her. That was actually, like, the first public health warning I ever came across. Yeah, I've known that since I was kneehigh to a grasshopper. Yeah, I love that phrase. Yeah, I know you do. So, yeah. You're not allowed you're not supposed to the police cat box, police will come to you. You're not supposed to clean out the catbox if you're with child because fetus is one of the ways, one of the things that can be harmed. Yeah. Groan damage, supposedly birth, like serious birth defects. Yeah. So, yeah, if your lady is pregnant, you want to go ahead and take care of cleaning out the cat box during that nine months, because that's how toxoplasma infections result from handling cat feces, or more specifically, and I got the impression that it's much more virulent when cat feces mixes with soil. Right. It has much more staying power, that kind of thing. So if you have a cat that likes to poop in your garden and you're a big gardener exactly. You're going to want to murder your cat and get rid of all of your topsoil, start over again. Right. I imagine you could also get it from eating a rat, because rats and mice tend to get it as well, but you can also very easily get it from eating undercooked livestock. Yeah. Pork, especially, that has been around cat feces. How many farms have cats on them? Quite a few, I would say. So let's talk about the life cycle of this because it's interesting that you mentioned rats or mice, because these things are under arguably the most control of T. Yeah, that confuses me because I had a car named T. All right, I'll call it Taco. Okay. All right. I had a car named Taco as well. Man, it's not true. Do you have one named T. Gandhi? No. Okay, well, I'll go with that one. Thanks, Chuck. You know, I have a speech impediment. We'll go with toxo. Okay. So toxo gets into the soil. Let's say your little kitty goes and poops outside and mouse passes by the soil, passes over, it, eats it, rolls around and it plays with it makes a little clay sculpture out of it, and that's his friend. And the rat is infected. So this parasite actually goes through the bloodstream and travels to the brain, where all sorts of freaky stuff start happening to the rats behavior, rat or mouse. And that's slightly alarming to us because as everyone knows, which is why we use lab rats, we have very similar brains to rats chemically, the way it's put together the whole deal. Right. Which I've always thought was interesting. Well, let's talk about rats as the intermediate host. Okay, so now a rat is infected with toxoplasmosis. Gross. Its brain is being taken over. What are some of the weird things that begin happening? Well, one thing that was most disturbing was they actually become fond of cat urine. They do. They're attracted to the scent of cat urine. And they did a test opposite of what's supposed to happen. Yeah, they did a test where they did you see the one with a little sleeping they made the little beds for the rats, and one of them was soaked in cat urine. And they would actually go for that bed. They prefer that bedding over their normal bedding. Yeah, which is really weird. I wrote another study that found that these rats were actually attracted to cat urine. Not just a son of it, they would go and investigate cat urine. And they investigated the brains of these rats. Meaning they chopped their heads off and cut their open. They didn't just ask some questions. No. Okay. Although they did these studies, they did different trials. And what they found, essentially, was that the rats or rodents lose specifically their fear of cat urine. Okay. That's it. Everything else remains intact. All other innate fears that they have that all rats and mice display remain intact. It's just their fear of cat urine. So they're attracted to cat urine. Plus, also toxo has an effect on your motor reflexes, so you're not quite as fast as you used to be. Right. So these two things together, an attraction to cat urine, the scent of cat urine and slow reflex time, that means that you can get eaten by a cat and that means you get into your final host. Right. That means the Toxoplasma has made its way back into its definitive host, the guts of the cat, by controlling over the brain of the rodent. It is the coolest, most frightening thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. It really is, because like you said, Chuck, rodent brains are very similar to humans in composition, at least chemically. Right. That's why we're always experimenting on rodents, to find out how we can treat schizophrenia, that kind of thing. So which leads us to, since 80% of the human population is infected with a latent toxoplasma infection, is it having an effect on us? It looks like yes. Well, yeah, for many years they always said, oh, so many people have it. But it's really not that big of a deal because once it enters the human body, we're not going to get eaten by a cat anymore, like a lion or a tiger. So it doesn't matter. Once we're infected, they go and inform resistant cysts. Basically just hide and that's it. They don't do anything. They set up camp in your body. Right. But generally that's it. Unless you have AIDS or another repressed immune system disease, sure. That's when it gets right. But it's going to just sit there because we have antibodies that can keep them in check. Right, but that's what we thought. Exactly. But around, I think, 1992 is when they really started to begin to look to see what kind of behavioral changes toxoplasmosis might cause in humans. And we started to find some startling results that lowered motor reflex time. Right. They did some tests that I know. They did a couple. One where they were supposed to stroke a specific key stroke on the keyboard in a certain amount of time, and another where they showed a white recognition test where they showed like a white square on the screen and you were supposed to react when you saw the white square. And they found that people that had the latent toxoplasmosis, there was a lag that were definitely behind the rest of the crowd in recognizing these things. Right. You know who that study? Your buddy a guy named Doctor Yara Slavfleger. You just talked to him? I just talked to the guy on the phone. This guy is arguably the preeminent expert. He's a parasitologist out of Charles University in Prague. Did you call Prague just now? No way. Wow. And I need to expense that because I did it on my cell phone, because, you know, I'm not comfortable talking at my desk because I'm neurotic. Because I have toxoplasmosis anyway. So Dr. Flager, who is arguably the foremost authority on Toxoplasmosis, he conducted that study and many more. Right. I think he conducted eleven. And in nine of the eleven studies, there was a significant difference between people who are infected with Toxoplasmosis and people who weren't. In humans. There is actually an equal and opposite effect defined by gender. This is what I thought was really interesting. It's odd. It was almost dead opposite the way men and women were affected by this thing. Yeah. And women just kind of got out of head in this deal. Yeah. Wouldn't you say? So these are the women we love. The toxoplasmosis infected women. That's my favorite. Women who are t infected and not Chuck's Car, but the other kind, they tend to be warm hearted, outgoing, conscientious, moralistic. These are wonderful women. The salt of the earth. Yeah. But also outgoing. Like, everybody loves a gal who's willing to just try anything, but also has a line which is more realistic. Men got the bad end of the stick. We tended to be stupider, but more loyal. Is stupider a word? Are you talk so plasmatic? I am less intelligent, more loyal, frugal, which was interesting and mild tempered. And dogmatic. Did you say dogmatic? I did not. So dogmatic meaning inflexible, basically, right? Basically, guys who are infected with toxoplasmosis or jerk. And women who are infected are cool, right? Yeah. But they're both neurotic. That was the one shared trait. Right. And so I talked to Dr. Flager, and I was asking, where are we as far as understanding how toxoplasmosis could affect us physiologically, our brain? And one thing I saw that kept coming up was neurotransmitters. He said the likeliest, candidate is dopamine, or dopamine, as he put it. Did he really? He said it increases levels. And he also has found that there are increased levels of testosterone in men. Lowered levels of testosterone in women who are infected with toxoplasmosis. That makes sense. So he says, in his opinion, that would account for it. Again, he's a stickler on pointing out correlation. Right. Not causation. We are definitely at the correlation stage and understand. Absolutely. Plasmosis can affect human behavior. But he's finding some really cool stuff. Yeah, that's interesting about that. It kind of makes sense with the testosterone levels because they found that, like we said earlier, 67% of Brazilians are infected with this stuff in countries they found where there were a lot of people infected with this, they were more likely to have masculine sex roles or more divergent gender roles or more pronounced distinction among exactly. Like, the men go out and they're masculine. They do the hard work. And the women, they work in flexibly. Exactly. Yeah. And the women are just like that's my man. Yes. Very interesting. Yeah. I mean, think about it. If 80% of the population is infected with latent toxoplasmosis, then this would conceivably alter cultures. Still a little hanky, if you ask me. I don't know, man. It's still new research, but I'm thinking it starts to look like this parasite rules the world. Well, it could be because we rule. We're ruled by toxoplasma. Ergo toxoplasma rules the world. I think it's a bunch of factors. That's me. Go ahead. That's my camp. So Flager also conducted a study back in 2002 in Prague where he was a driving test, I think it was 167 people who were identified as the causes of car accidents. Right. Either as pedestrians or drivers, which I thought was also interesting. And he found that people with toxoplasmosis are 2.65 times more likely that's almost three times as likely to be involved in a car accident as someone who's not infected. I think that goes back to the latent reaction time. Wouldn't you think it could be the delayed reaction? Again, though, there's red lights or motor skills. Oops, right. Crash. Sure. Or if it makes us more reckless. Like if you're a man, right, because we said that you're more willing to break rules if you're a man infected with taxes. Red light, screw it. Exactly. Or this car will stop for me if I walk out in front of it. That kind of thing. But again, we're at the correlation, not causation stage, so everyone points that out. It's entirely possible that people in Prague who have cats and would be more likely to be infected with toxoplasmosis are also more likely to zone out while driving. Thinking about how Princess Lady would look really good in a little cattle that you saw online that morning. They said it could be a personality thing, which I thought that was a little hinky, too. But there's also a correlation between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis. Not hinky. No, there's a definite link. And there's also a neurotransmitter called nitric oxide. This is not Flager. Flager actually said that he had not done much research on nitric oxide, or nitric oxide, as he called it. But actually, some guys from Toledo, my hometown, really, some psychiatrists have been researching into it, and there are increased levels of nitric oxide in Schizophrenics. And toxoplasmatics in Schizophrenics are more likely to own cats, which I thought was odd. So it says the University of Maryland, right? They own cats because the toxoplasmosis and the neighbor's dog tell them, too. Right? Actually not. University of Maryland. Sorry. Stanley Medical Research Center in Maryland. I got you just want to clear that up. So, Chuck, what do you think? Do you think it's still hinky? I think it's slightly hinky. I think there's something to it. But I think, like I said, I think it's one of many factors, probably. I don't think you can chalk up the McKeel of the Brazilian man to caboop. Right? Not yet. So that's talked to Plasmosis, but if you are into parasites or this podcast has piqued your interest, chuck and I would both strongly recommend that you watch that new show Monsters Inside of Me on Animal Planet. What is it? Wednesdays at Nine. Wednesdays at nine. It's a cool show. Yeah. Cool graphics, like CG, they get inside your body as if you were a parasite. Yes. Our parent company, Discovery, definitely threw some money at this one. It looks very cool. Definitely. Yeah. So check that out. And we also have tons of cool stuff. You can also check out the Monsters Inside of Me website. Yeah. Robert Lam. Robert Lam wrote some really cool stuff. And actually we have to give him a big thanks for pointing us in the right direction for research on this particular podcast. He knows what he's doing. He's parasitastic. Yeah. And of course, How Stuff Works.com has tons of stuff on it. And if you're interested, you can also read all of our blog posts on it. There's like 5 million of them and each one is better than the last. Yeah. That's it for plugin, isn't it? I think so. Yeah. Plug heavy for. Which means, buddy, it is time for listener mail. So, Josh, I'm just going to call this we're awesome because we saved the woman's life. Yeah. This is crazy. It is slightly hanky, but I'll take credit. Bonnie from Boulder, Colorado wrote in and Bonnie says this hi, guys. Stuff you should Know just saved my life. The facts are these. I was driving home and had just finished listening to your hypermiling podcast. As a result, I was only going 40 mph on a stretch of highway where I usually go 60. All of a sudden, there was a pair of headlights right in front of me. Some genius was going the wrong way in the same lane of the highway as me. Short story even shorter, I ended up facing the wrong way on the highway. Wow. Thanks to some recent rain and some awful skidding and sliding, but due to the late hour, lack of other cars and my slow speed, I avoided hitting anything. Who knows if I would have had a head on collision if I had been going my normal speed. But I do know that thanks to you, too, and you're always enlightening podcasts. I will never have to know. Many thanks. You're immensely appreciative, listener and fan, bonnie of Boulder, Colorado. Thank you, Bonnie. Dude, awesome. Honestly, what if she would have been going 20 miles an hour? That could have made all the difference. Oh, yeah, definitely. Even if it was just a fluke thing, I'll take credit. Yeah, even if it wasn't a fluke, we still picked up an indentured servant for life. Yeah. And personally, I think we should get a key to the city of Boulder. I've been angling for one of those for a long time. The key to any city? No Boulder. Okay. Yeah. This is our end for sure. Hope so. Maybe a T shirt even. Sure. This lousy t shirt. That's a good one. If you have any good T shirt ideas or any instances of how Chuck and I saved your life, you can send them in an email to Stuff podcast at HowStuff works. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetuffworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. By autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
8718e468-3b0e-11eb-9699-eb0d7c9371e0 | The Rock Ampersand Roll Hall of Fame | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-rock-ampersand-roll-hall-of-fame | Cleveland rocks! So said the city of Cleveland when they lobbied for the "Rock Hall" way back in 1985. Since then the museum has grown and evolved amidst great support and controversy. | Cleveland rocks! So said the city of Cleveland when they lobbied for the "Rock Hall" way back in 1985. Since then the museum has grown and evolved amidst great support and controversy. | Thu, 04 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=308, tm_isdst=0) | 47320172 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should Know, a production of. iHeartRadio hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, licks, Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is stuff you should know. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame edition. TADA. Or as was it Skinner that said rock and or roll? Yes, it was. It's a good one. I'm glad you said that, because every time we walk past something one of the Simpsons characters said in their 900 million seasons, somebody writes and is like, how could you possibly not say that, you dummy? Remember that time we got to go to a Simpsons table read, aka probably second or third best day of either one of our lives? Yes, absolutely. That's always what I respond back with. I was like, oh, I'm sorry. Were you at the table read where you were at when we met Matt Graining and he drew Simpsons characters on our autograph scripts? Yes. Which I still have. I don't know if you still have yours. I still have mine, kid me. Of course. Yes. I am kidding you. No, I tossed it. So you're like, I don't have room for this. Yeah. So, Chuck, we are talking about the rock and Roll Hall of Fame today. We've already talked about the Simpsons unofficial episode before. Two of them, actually. This one's a little different. This is about rock and roll, the musical genre, which is way more encompassing than a lot of people would like to admit, it turns out. Yeah, we'll get into that. There's a lot there. We definitely will. It smacks a lot of our remember our disco episode? Yeah, it smacks a lot of that. I know we've talked about this. I don't think you've been, have you, to the rock and Roll Hall of Fame? No, I haven't, actually. I'm sorry, Cleveland. I'm sorry. But I settled down. I have not been yet. No. And I actually have to say I don't know that I care to. I know that there are plenty of people out there who would love to go to that and should, but for me, personally, I just don't care. Yeah, it's not your kind of place, really. No. It's not meant for losers like me. No, I don't think that's it. It's meant for losers like me. Emily's family is from Akron, and so when they were all living there, we spent Christmases there and other holidays there. So we did all the Cleveland things, and this was one of them. It's definitely one of the Cleveland things to do, for sure. It's one of the Cleveland things. It's a place that I want to go back to. I love this. And the museum in Seattle, like the pop culture museum. I can't remember what it's called. Called what's? It the museum of popular culture. Yeah, but there's more name. But I love standing and looking at the original pad of paper where the original lyrics to Purple haze are written. Yeah, see, that's what I'm saying. I like listening to Purple Haze. I couldn't care about looking at the paper that it was originally written on. Like, I get what people are getting out of this. It just doesn't hit me that way. No, I hear you. I had a bunch of other things I was going to say I love, but are you going to say you don't love them after every one of them? Let's find out. I love looking at the outfit that Bruce Springsteen wore on the Born in the USA cover right in front of me. I love looking at I could see how you would like that. I don't care about that outfit, Chuck. One, I love standing in front of Prince's tiny little purple jumpsuit. Okay. I'm like cool guitar. Or Mick Jagger's tiny little ten year old boy sized jeans. Oh, really? Or leather pants. So small. They're all so small. I thought Mick Jagger was not pint sized. Really? Okay, I knew Prince was small, but I didn't know that Mick Jagger was as well. We talked about this. That's why they learned to be musicians, because they're trying to get girls. Well, Prince was a great basketball player, too. I don't know about Mick Jagger, but he was. Yes, that's true, though. He played basketball in high school, too, for his size. He was a good athlete, I think. But the point is, I really love seeing that stuff in Seattle. I love seeing Kurt Cobain's striped sweater from the video and the broken drumsticks of Dave Groell and Chris Cornell's Gibson guitar. I loved knowing that. And this is not just rock and roll memorabilia. I like any museum where I'm like, oh, that's the real thing. That's the Declaration of Independence I'm looking at. Yeah. It's not a copy. That's the one. I really get a lot out of seeing the thing in person. And the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a lot of things to look at in person, so I don't want to come off like some rube who doesn't care about museums like, I care deeply about museums. It's just some, like, pop culture memorabilia doesn't get into it. It's as simple as that. I think we've established that. Okay. But I just don't want people to be like, Josh doesn't like museums. What a dumb. Me. No, we know you like museums. You got engaged in a museum. You liked museums so much. That's absolutely true. Thanks for that. I appreciate the backup chuck. Yeah. And you'll see the screen in a million art websites and art history books, but to stand in front of the screen is a different thing because it's the real thing. All right, let's talk about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame itself, shall we? Yes. I think we should start talking first about this because this really kind of summarizes a lot of some people hate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not just because they're not into pop culture museums, but they hate the idea and they think the least rock and roll thing you can do is vote people into a hall of Fame. Yeah. Which is a real criticism of it. And it's really something that. From what I've read. The Rock and hall of Fame. The Rock Hall. The people who are in the know has never fully figured out how to deal with that paradox. Because it is a paradox to take what is rock and roll. Which is in your face. Your parents hate it. It doesn't follow the rules. And then just like put it behind incredibly expensive. Like. Recessed lighting and protecting it with plexiglass and all that. That is the opposite of that. And they just had to move forward as a paradox, basically. Yeah. And I should point out, too, that my love for this stuff is like, it doesn't have to be behind glass. I'm going to Woodstock in New York in November. I'm going to drive by Big Pink, where Bob Dylan and the band lived, and I like being at the places where the things really existed. There's an energy to it. I think I get why you're going to drive by that house, but I don't care about that. You got to stop. But this all comes back to Johnny Rotten, the leader of the Sex Pistols. When they were inducted, he wrote scribbled out on a piece of paper, didn't go, obviously, and he said, next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that hall of Fame is a pistain. Your museum urine and wine, we're not coming, we're not your monkeys. And so what was a great read. So that's sort of the thing, though, that is how some people feel. But to me, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is rock and roll because they read that on stage rather than just burying it, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like that's rock and roll. Yeah. And I mean, it had such an enormous impact on world culture, on human culture, that of course it deserves a museum. And then if you're going to do like a world class museum, there's just certain things you have to do. And yes, that doesn't fit with rock and roll, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a rock and roll museum. It's just like, yeah, we took this rock and roll stuff and put it under plexiglass. And that's just what you do when you create a museum. That's right. We'll talk about more of that stuff later, but let's talk about the history, shall we? Yeah. Because the whole thing opened up on September of 1995, but it had been brewing since the early eighty s, I think, thanks to a dude named Ahmad. Erdogan, erdogan, I think it's, erdogan I got it the first time and then I doubted myself, but I still got it, that's the point. That's right. So, erdogan, was the co founder of Atlantic Records, the biggest name in records. At a certain time. Certain times, yeah, a couple of certain times. He was the son of a Turkish ambassador, but loved music, co founded Atlantic with Jerry Wexler and started out in the R Amp B game. Yeah. Did they sign the Drifters, ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, all of whom were, like, unknown at the time, so that alone is worth celebrating. That's an amazing record label, just to start. And then in the 60s, they shifted over to rock and signed Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Cream. So just these two incarnations over two decades kind of put Atlantic on the map, I think, like you said, it kept going. Right. Is Atlantic still around? Oh, it's got to be. I mean, it's probably owned by Disney or something. Sure. But it's a storied record label, and for good reason. That's right. And so he first hatched the idea of having a museum and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he was like, well, of course it will be in New York City, because that's just where you do it. What he didn't know was that there were these businessmen in Cleveland, Ohio, that were already planning their own Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Yes. And when Urgence heard that, he shuddered. All right, why Cleveland? I said, well, hold on. Cleveland actually has a lot of claim to rock and roll credits. For one, the local DJ, Alan Freed, is widely considered the person who coined the term rock and roll. That guy came up with it, and he was a Cleveland DJ. And Erican said, okay, I'm listening. What else you got? And he said, well, it was the radio station WJW that Freedjd at broke a lot of big acts. You kind of had to make it in Cleveland. Not had to, but making it in Cleveland could break you. David Bowie was broke there Rush. And we got to thank Dave Ruse for putting this together. And I also want to thank Dave Ruse for saying Bruce Springstein. Yeah, I noticed that. Now, I know it's a typo, dave, I know you're listening, but it was fun to read Bruce Springsteen. He's like, no, I mean the much less known Bruce Brinkstein. Joe Walsh is from Cleveland. Trent Reznor's from Cleveland, Ohio. I've talked about before in Emily's hometown of Akron. Her high school Firestone is where Depot was from. And Chrissy Hinds and Black Keys. Yes. Like, that's a heck of a roster to come out of a single high school. Yes. Plus, also, even back long before Devo was around, that same guy, Alan Freed, the DJ, he organized and hosted what's also considered the first rock and roll show, the Moon Dog Coronation Ball, way back in 1952. And we've talked about it before. I could not figure out what we've talked about. Coordination ball. Yeah, we've definitely covered it. I'm almost positive. Anyway. Yes. So Cleveland has some rock and roll credits, so it would make sense that they would be considering a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And it would also make sense that Aidan and the rest of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation said, okay, we'll think about this. They were skeptical at first, but then they said, how about this? We'll open this whole thing up to voting as to where the site should be. And we'll say Cleveland is one of a number of different cities. Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and, of course, New York, which everybody knows New York is going to win. And just whoever gets the most votes will say, that's the city that gets the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yes. I get the feeling it was that. It was like, hey, we know we're going to put it in New York, but this will drum up a lot of publicity, get everyone excited all around the country, even though they're going to lose. But I think he underestimated two things. The passion of Midwesterners and the pride of Clevelanders and Ohio put their city on the map a little bit more than it even was then. And the disinterest of your average New Yorker to take place in a poll or a vote or a petition to sign their name on something. Yeah. And don't forget, this is around the time of Balloon Fest 86. So Cleveland, they were trying to find something that let the world know Cleveland was great. So they actually collected 650,000 signatures, which was more than the population of Cleveland at the time. They got a lot of people behind this idea. And I guess USA Today ran a poll in January of 1986 right. And they said, okay, which of these cities should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame be in? That's right. And I'm sure they had a colorful graph to declare Cleveland the winner by a landslide, 110,000 votes in first place. Second place went to Memphis with 7200. So Cleveland, they know how to get people motivated for civic pride. I will say that. Yes. But the thing that probably really got the foundation's attention was that Cleveland also simultaneously raised $26 million for the museum to basically say, hey, we're quite serious about this. And it would turn out later that the whole thing cost about 100 million. But Cleveland footed the bill for the whole thing. Yeah. So it was actually, as we'll see, a pretty good choice. And finally, in 1986, it was announced that, okay, fine. Yes, it will be in Cleveland. That's right. But they did not wait for the building to be built to have their first hall of Fame class voted on and inducted. They did that in 1986 in New York City. Chuck Berry james Brown ray Charles sam Cook fat Stomano the Everly Brothers buddy Holly jerry Lewis elvis and Little Richard And then on the non performance side. You had Sam Phillips and Allen Freed. You had early influencers. Jimmy Rogers and Jimmy Nancy. And the lifetime achievement that year went to John Hammond, who didn't look up. But that's got to be the Hammond, Oregon guy. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So there was this great quote that they found that really kind of got across. Like, even at the outset of the criticism of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it said that rock and roll is now so middle class. It was according to most civilized honor, it was given a dinner when writing about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame first class induction in 1000 1986. You know that reporter was like, right after they typed it. Yes. I'm so self satisfied right now. Oh, gosh. All right, we're going to take a break now, and we're going to talk about the building itself and how you get in that thing besides paying money to buy a ticket right after this. So, Chuck, everywhere I've read is that you have to show that you've signed your name and blood in the book of Satan to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and pay $30. Yeah. Right. Is it still $30? I didn't look that up. I believe, yes. I think about it. And they have different stuff, too. Like any museum, they'll have temporary exhibits. So if you've been once, don't think you can't go again. Right. They'll let you back in, especially if you're willing to pay another $30. Yeah. And you'll see new stuff, but supposedly you should not expect to see everything in an hour, even two, and really be able to soak it in. I've read that you can zip through the museum and maybe two and a half hours, but you're not getting that much out of it. It depends on how much you want to read the placards and stare at Jamie Hendricks purple hazelyric. Well, yeah. There's also lots and lots of videos and archival footage and stuff like that that you can really add a lot to your visit to sit and watch and listen to that's. Right. So when they went to build a building, they enlisted the services of one im Pay. Is it pay or pay? I am Pay, the architect who just happened to design the expansion of the Louvre, which didn't even take that long. It didn't. Didn't. That the second time I've referenced that same seinfeld thing in the last few weeks. No. Remember when George pretended to be an architect? Yeah. And they said he designed the new thing on the Guggenheim and he didn't really even take that long. Yeah, I do. I don't remember you referencing it again. I've referenced it recently. I thought it was to you, but it's hard to tell. Real life. I'm totally with you ma'am these chats these days. But, yes, I pay had a great resume. Designed that glass pyramid at the Louvre and went to a few concerts to sort of get the gist of what this whole rock and roll thing was all about. Yes. And apparently he was on acid with Lou Reed at the Bon Jovi show at the Meadowlands, and when he stood up and he said, I've got it. Another triangle is what I'm going to do. Another pyramid. And he did it's a pretty iconic building in and of itself. And the pyramid, though, if you hear that he also did the pyramid at the Louis, you're like, oh, come on. There's other shapes. But this one is meant to evoke especially if you look at the logo or the letterhead for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they have a pyramid in that. And you see very clearly that that's meant to evoke guitar neck vanishing off into the distance, like you're looking up the neck of a guitar from the body. Yeah. There's a couple of cool things about it. There's also this central tower, and then in front of it, a big 65,000 square foot circular plaza. And if you look from above, it's really neat. You can look at a picture of it, it looks like a record. And then on that plaza, there's, like, the arm of the record player and the needle, and it looks like a turntable, which is really cool. Yeah, it is very cool. So it's a very literal building as far as what it's supposed to look like goes, but it's also enormous and very nice. It's one of those things where if you research the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you either come across Cleveland.com articles, rock music, journalism articles, or architectural articles. Those are the three groups that basically lay claim to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And you're like, I'd fly over it, but I'm not going in. It's not that I wouldn't go in. I would go in. I just wouldn't get as much out of it as you. Okay. All right. We're getting places. Yeah. And I certainly don't begrudge anybody going. I'm just saying I won't get as much out of it as you will. It's not like I don't understand it. I guess what I'm trying to say is let me see if I can put in a different term. I just don't care. I know that's not true. I care. We're going to crack this code by the end. Okay. So they broke ground in 1993, opened in 95 with a six hour concert. I thought seven and a half. Oh, well, springtime was involved. He did it again. There it is again. Did he really? Dave did it. Oh, my gosh, he did. Dave starting to think it doesn't know that's. No, Typo, because I see other E's. Like his eButton isn't broken. No, it's true. There's one that comes right before the I and Bruce Springsteen. I can't wait to get his email. Oh, man, I can't either. So they have a concert at Cleveland Muni Stadium with Chuck Barry who is still around played with Springsteen and Johnny Cash and Johnny Coogs aretha Al Green, Lou Reed It was quite an event. And then I guess we should talk about how you get in because this is where it takes on a lot of heat. Some people say there should be no such thing because rock and roll shouldn't be in a museum. But then other people say, like, the voting process and the vagueness of qualifications to be considered that are just weird. And it's a popularity contest and it's gotten a lot of criticism over the years because basically you have to be at least 25 years out from your debut album and you need to have demonstrated unquestionable musical excellence. That's it. And that's all. Yes. Which is not really great guidance, but it is kind of rock if you think about it. It's kind of rock and roll that way, I think. But, yeah, that definitely is so subjective that, of course it's opened up to accusations of favoritism sexism, which definitely seems to be legit. Only 8% of the inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are women. And there's definitely way more than 8% of women rockers or women contributors to rock and roll. So it's not that these allegations or suggestions are just totally off base, necessarily. They may be quite accurate. Yeah, I mean, here's my deal. I kind of think it has to be that vague because they would get probably more complaints if it was the numbers. If there was an algorithm. Like, you need to have had this many number one singles, won this many Grammys, which are also subjective, by the way. I don't think it can be based on record sales. Right. Like, it'd be weird to design an algorithm. I think it has to be kind of vague. To me, it's an award of longevity in a way, which I do like, because 25 years on, unless you die young, you can still get in. Like Buddy Holly, obviously, and people that died young. But you can't have a record that came out 25 years ago and still be a performer who is not very popular and get in, you know what I mean? Yeah. You have to have withstood the test of time and it's easy to poo poo this stuff. But like, dude, if there's ever a podcasting hall of Fame, you bet your sweet butt I want us to be in there. Sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And we'll be standing at our own little display with the microphones in our headphones. I'll be like, I don't care about the microphone in our headphones. And most people will be going, who are those guys right now? I've seen that logo, but who are they? You'll find me hanging out at the display being like, this one's pretty great. Hey, I'm Josh Clark. It's good to meet you. Thanks for coming. So, yeah, the vagaries around induction has definitely been a criticism. The staff comes up with a list of nominees each year. They send that out to 1000 musicians and members of the record industry, historians, music historians. And then they vote for the top picks. And then if you receive at least 50% of the vote, which is 500 votes, then you are inducted. And that's usually between five and seven performers each year. Right. And so the induction process is basically like a museum. The museum version of the 100 Greatest Bands of All Time. 100 Greatest Albums of all time. And all of the arguments that that starts. That's basically the voting and induction process every single year. Why is this person on this list? Why isn't this person on this list? Why haven't you inducted this person? This doesn't even count as that kind of music. That is exactly the induction process every single year. And everybody's right? Yeah. And I think the hall of Fame itself is kind of like I don't think they're trying to solve that anymore. I think they're just like, yeah, that just comes with the territory and stick it in your butt if you don't like it. Probably the wisest thing they could do is approach it from that way. There is a fan vote now, which is great. I don't know if they've always had it, but you can vote online and pick your top five. And the winner of the fan vote is on a fan ballot. And I believe that kind of changed things because bands like Rush and Cheap Trick finally getting in the last couple of years. Oh, yeah. There were a couple of the big ones where people were like, why are they not in there? They may not be the most popular band across all demographics, but they have some of the most devoted fan bases and have been doing it for 30 years. Yeah, there's tons and tons of people that you can say, like, why aren't they in there? Yeah, for sure. But I don't know that the fan vote is actually having much of an impact because I saw that it's added to the other thousand votes. Like all of the fan tales adds up to one extra vote total. It's not like they can vote in people now. And I learned that from D Snyder, who we were actually on a TV set with at the same time. The lead singer Twisted Sister. Yeah, he's a great guy. He was trying to rally the public to support Iron Maiden this past year and Maiden got passed up, which is agreed. Ridiculous. But apparently metal acts, like, just routinely snubbed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So much so that you would probably be like, what is going on? Why do you not like metal? Metal is definitely rock and roll. For sure. Yeah, I mean, we'll get to more of that later. Because it is very strange that Judas Priest is not in the rock and roll of hands. Sure. They also hand out other awards. The Ahmed Erdogan Award, it was the Lifetime Achievement Award originally, and it's for non performers who've had a major influence on the development of rock and roll. So we're talking Brian Epstein? Not Brian Epstein. I think it is. Epstein managed the Beatles. Dick Clark is in. Lou Adler. Leo Fender. Phil Spector, people like that. Yeah. There's also the Early Influence Award, which is basically like, you're not rock and roll, but you definitely influenced a lot of people who play rock and roll. So people get inducted in that way. Like Woody Guthrie. Definitely not a rocker. But he certainly did. He influenced, say, like, Bob Dylan, who's considered a rocker. You know what I mean? So it's a good way to get in is to just travel in time, release a bunch of records in the 1920s and sit back and wait for your induction after your long day. Louie Armstrong. Billy Holiday. Robert Johnson. Arnold. Les Paul. Like, we own him, he's with us. Then there's the award for musical excellent. This is the artists of musicians and songwriters and producers whose originality and influence creating music has had a dramatic impact. Only 22. They don't do this every year. Ringo star. Leon Russell. Nyle Rogers. The East Street Band without Bruce Springsteen. Nyle. Rogers is in there. I was reading about him. He's had one of the most amazing careers of all time. Yeah. I mean, if he just did Chic Alone, that would be fine. But that was just a small part of his career. Yes, it was. I mean, the most recent thing he did was win three Grammys for working with Daffpunk on their most recent album, I guess their last album. There you go. So there's some things about being inducted that are kind of anomalous and interesting in that, like, you can be inducted more than once in different capacities, right? Yeah. If you're a solo performer and you are in a band. Like, Stevie Nicks is the only woman to be inducted two times as a solo performer and is a member of Fleetwood Bank. No. Tina was inducted twice, and so was Carol King. Well, they are being inducted this year, so technically okay. I got two more weeks before I should have known better, Chuck. I'm sorry. I think October 30. So Carol King was in there as a songwriter, I guess. Yeah, I believe so. And Tina with Icantina? Yeah. I had to be. Yes. Can you believe that they inducted her with Ike before they inducted her as her solo career? Give me a break. I believe that chronologically, but it doesn't have to go chronologically. It says nothing about chronological order. But let me ask you this. When you think Tina Turner, do you think rolling on the river? No. Or do you think private Dancer? Private Dancer. Okay. You think sexy? Sweaty saxophone. Yes. Solos? Yes. Totally. All right, fair enough. I'm thinking about one right now, which is why she's in there twice. Eric Clapton's in there three times. Not once, not twice, but twice, obviously. Yardbirds, Cream, and it's a solo guy. All the Beetles are in twice. Yeah, they're the only band all inducted as solo artists. Yeah. I can't think of another band that might hit that mark. I can't either, because not many people going to be just as big as a solo performer. No, it's very rare, for sure. And I think it's nice that they gave Ringo his own, too, in 2017. That was great. That was a very nice ceremony. I watch it every year. Oh, really? Ceremonies? Oh, sure. I love it. It's fun because they induct the people. Someone who loves that person is inducting them. So that's always great. And it's always like somebody you might not expect. Like Harry Styles inducted Stevie Nix. And I didn't even know Harry Styles. Like Stevie Nicks, and turns out he loves Stevie Nicks, so it's stuff like that. And then they give their speech, which is great, or a complete disaster, which is also fun. So this is from Amanda patricia. Patricia. Sorry. Amanda from the New Yorker back in 2017. And she said the televised ceremony proceeded about as expected. Gentlemen with exacting hairstyles wore sunglasses inside, hugged each other reluctantly, and squinted at a teleprompter. I was like, you just took me there to the induction. Well, what's funny is some of the features are really nice and awesome, and then some people are, like, up there with bands that they broke up with and they hated each other. Yes. Oh, my God. Have you seen the acceptance speech for Blondie? No, I saw it live, but I don't remember what happened. Blondie wouldn't let, like, three or four of the original members play at the ceremony. Debbie Harry wouldn't. No. Yes. Sorry. Debbie Harry would not. And one of the original guys begged her on the microphone during his speech, and she said no and kept saying no and was like, no, you're not playing tonight. Really? And it was really deeply uncomfortable. 15 years later, watching it on YouTube, I was like, I'm going to throw up. I'm so uncomfortable right now. Well, sometimes people don't show up. Like, Paul McCartney didn't show up for the Beatles induction because supposedly he was in a lawsuit at the time with Yoko and Ringo about something. The talking Heads managed to get together and play together. That's the other thing. That's where I was headed. You have your speech and then you play together, usually as the original band. Sometimes if it's like Journey, steve Perry didn't sing, but he gave his blessing for the new guy to sing. Sometimes they'll have both like Guns and Roses will have the two drummers there and they'll take turns even though Axel wasn't there, not mid song. And then sometimes people can't get it together at all. And they're just like, no, we hate each other. We're not playing. We're not showing up. Sometimes Mike Love will get up there as a member of the Beach Boys and be a crazy freak. Just watch his speech if you want to see something very deeply uncomfortable, okay, I can't wait. He, like, flat out challenged people on stage. He just got really salty, like, halfway through, and he's like, I'd love to see the Mop Tops, the Beatles get up and do 180 shows a year, or I'd like to see Mick Jagger get up on stage and do what I do. He's a legendary jerk, but it was really something else. He does not live up to his last name. But to me, that's sort of the fun of watching the ceremony, is all these really deeply personal relationships of these people that are suddenly thrust back together and do they work it out and are they amicable and cool or not? Bunny. Carlos played with Cheap Trick, which is cool. They're a drummer that left. But sometimes, like, Axelrose, in a full on legalese statement that not only didn't say, like, I don't want to come, but he was like, no one is allowed to induct me. No one is allowed to speak for me. I think we have to read it, Chuck. Yeah, read it. It's pretty great. This is from Axel Rose. I strongly request that I not be inducted in absentia, and please know that no one is authorized, nor may anyone be permitted to accept any induction for me or speak on my behalf. Neither former members, label representatives, nor the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should imply, whether directly, indirectly, or by omission, that I am included in any purported induction of Guns and Roses. Oh, man. He really didn't want to take part, and yet they got back together and are playing again and seemingly enjoying himself. What's his problem with Guns and Roses? I mean, I knew they broke up or whatever, but why does he, like, hate Flash or what's the problem? Yes, he and Flash had problems, and I don't know. They worked it all out, but they hugged it out. Who knows what goes on behind these closed green Room doors, you know? Sure. Was that the song? No one knows what goes on behind Green room doors, I think. Is that a Bob Seger song? I think so. Okay. Maybe we should take a break. All right, let's do that. All right. We'll be right back. We're going to wrap this thing up. All right. Should we talk about some of the famous snubs? Yes, definitely. We can just do that for the rest of the show. Well, I mean, I'm looking at the list. I'm going to go ahead and throw out Alison Chains and Big Star. Like, throw them out like you don't include them. Throw them out like they should be in and they're not. How about wait for this one? Dick Dale. That's just nuts. We talked about that in the Gibson Fender episode. How about the Smiths or MC? Five. I know, it gets weird. It's like, who screwdoo to me belongs in there. But they were a very small band. NX was a huge band. Jane's Addiction is not in there. Jane's Addiction up. Being in there is pretty surprising and just objectively wrong, for sure. I totally agree. Motorhead. Well, Motley Crue. It's so subjective. It gets so weird because people poopoo stuff like disco and they poopoo stuff like Ozzy Osbourne or metal. Ozzy should be in there. Yeah, for sure. But that kind of gets at the heart of why a lot of people are like, wait a minute, what's going on here? Because hip hop acts have started to be inducted into it starting in 2017 or 2007 I'm sorry. With Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. I think the most recent one was Jay Z in 2021. Is that right? He's due. We said earlier that it hadn't happened yet. By the time this is out, it will have already. Oh, got you. Okay, so he's part of this year, part of this class. Okay. Tupac got inducted. What do you think about that? One more felicuti was nominated this year, but he didn't make it, finally. So there's this guy that Dave turned up that I think makes a really great case. His name was Troy L. Smith. He works for Cleveland.com. One of the triumvirate of writing about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he says, look, man, if you are talking about rock and roll, of course it would include hip hop just as much as it would include, like, alternative or new wave or punk. Like, they're all branching off the same tree. Because if rock and roll is the trunk, if you go a little further down, the roots of that tree are, like, blues, jazz, gospel, boogie woogie duo. Like, all this stuff combined to make rock and roll. And if you're saying, like, rock and roll is just a white guy with a guitar somewhere between 1967 and 1990, you're talking specifically about rock. And that's actually different than rock and roll. And this isn't the Rock Hall of Fame. This is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So, yeah, you could make a really strong case to include not just hip hop, but also, like, R, amp, B world music, like Phala, Cooties, Afrobeat stuff. All these people were influenced by the same tree. And that's what Troy Smith is saying. And I got to say I agree with him on that one. I just have mixed feelings. I do agree. But then just call it the Music Hall of Fame, maybe. Yeah, that's what some people suggest. It's weird that, like, Willie Nelson's not in there, but like, another country artist might be. Well, like Hank Williams is in there. Johnny Cash. Yeah, like, they'll include jazz and now hip hop, but not metal. It's just I don't know, man. It starts to sort of fall apart in a way, the more you expand it. Because there is a Country Music Hall of Fame. There's probably I don't know if there's a jazz hall of Fame, is there somewhere? Should everyone have their own hall of Fame, like, every genre? But then where do you stop? Is New Wave a genre like it is, but is it under the more all inclusive banner of rock and roll? It gets really like a cat chasing its own tail at some point. So there was this kind of Twitter discussion, which means a flame war between Ice Cube and Gene Simmons from Kiss when NWA was being abducted. Right? Gene Simmons was poopooing the whole thing, and Ice Cube was defending it. And Ice Cube had a pretty good point. He said, the question is, are we rock and roll? Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll is not even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit. It's not conforming. It's outside the box. And then he finishes Rock and Rolls NWA, which I could not have read that more squarely than I did. But if you go a little further and read Gene Simmons retort, too, he's saying, like, yes, he's criticizing. Hiphop is not, like, actual music, because they sample and they talk rather than sing, so therefore it's not rock. I disagree with that. But he also says, I'll tell you what, when Led Zeppelin gets inducted into the Wrap Hall of Fame, then you'll have proven your point. And he makes a good case in that situation as well. But it kind of dovetails in with your idea, like, should each genre of music have its own hall of Fame? I don't think so. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a wide enough umbrella that it includes hip hop and other stuff that's not rock. Yeah, that's not a great look to say stuff like that either, though. No, I know. Of course, there's allegations of racism and sexism and homophobism. Set a word. Sure. Homophobia, I think, commonly. Of course. But Amanda patricia. I'm sorry. Amanda, she points out, like, how much this ties into that same hatred of disco by the same people who are into rock, but at the time when rock was new, these are the same people who never aged out of that. It's all rock. It's all white guy with the guitar from 1967 to 1990. That's rock and that's rock and roll, and that's just not true. That's the type of rock and roll that's not the end all, be all of rock and roll. Yes. That's my take on it. I'll stop saying it. I know I've said it at least twice now, but it's just so true. It is. I saw who was coming in this year. I thought that might get you excited. Who? Well, in the performer, it's Tina Turner, carol King the Gogos Amazing Jay Z Foo Fighters and Todd Run Grin. But the early influence award, my friend. Craft work. Oh, really? They're getting in, huh? They're getting in as early Influence, along with Charlie Patton and legendary jazz poet Gil Scott Haron, who I totally think Wyatt Sinek should play in a biopic. Oh, yeah. You mean a biopic? In a biopic? I think why? It would crush that role. Sure. And I think I've even told him that. Yeah. What was his response? I don't think I've told him that because he would probably be like, I don't need career advice from you. That's right. Zip it. That's why it's famous for saying musical. Excellent award this year is ll Cool J billy Preston and Randy Rhodes. Not bad. Okay. Ozzy's not even in there. And then Clarence Avant is getting the Ahmed Erdogan Award, and I don't know who that is, and I feel like I should. I don't either. So, Chuck, they have purple hazel lyrics. I think we've established that multiple times. What else do they have at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that would be worth paying $30 to go see? By the way, Clarence Avant is known as the Black Godfather. Entrepreneur executive and film producer and American music executive. Very nice. Got to shout him out. They got the instruments. They got a whole room of clothing and legendary outfits. They have the handwritten lyrics. They have archival, like, original master tapes where in listening rooms, they have this really cool thing now that just opened a couple of years ago called the Garage, where it's literally like a garage set up with a full band. And you can go in there, you don't have to know what you're doing. And they'll try and teach you how to play instruments. That's so cool. You just want to wash your hands afterwards. Yeah, you do now, for sure. And you're like, always. And they have a great music education program with working with the schools in Ohio and in Cleveland. So they do a lot of cool outreach and hands on stuff to get people involved. And if you go to the garage, the website for the garage, and you see, like, these sort of people who can tell never picked up an instrument before playing the drums or playing the bass just a little bit and, like, the delight on their faces, it's pretty cool. That's where the museum staff who've transgressed are punished. They have to go hang out at the garage and watch that. Now they're teaching them. They're teachers. Well, the only other thing I want to point out is if you're looking for highlights from over the years, in the end, they had this all star jam where a bunch of people come on stage and play some songs. And I think probably the most legendary moment that's ever happened, and it was passed along more recently after his death, was at George Harrison's posthumous induction and All Star jam they were playing while my guitar gently weeps and prints comes out of the shadows and destroys the stage with a guitar solo that is unlike anything I've ever seen. For sure. And he's the coolest dude on the planet. He finishes his solo, takes his guitar off and throws it up in the air. And you don't know this, but his guys out there to catch the guitar and he struts off stage and Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne are just standing there. Danny Harrison. Like, oh, my God. What just happened? That's pretty cool, man. It's amazing. So one last thing. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame try to expand. They finally tried to open something in New York, and they did in, I think, 2008. Yes. So they finally got that New York outpost right. Chuck and then within two years it was closed. And they tried another one in Tokyo in 2017. It closed in five months later. And Dave Rosen nails it with this last line. I guess Cleveland really was the right choice after all. Wink emoji. Yeah. I mean, they need to keep expanding, Cleveland, because you've only got so much space. Yeah, for sure. But, I mean, that was the place to do it. It turns out that that was absolutely correct. So that's good. Sometimes big decisions don't always work out, and this is one that did. And by God, god bless you, Cleveland. We got to get James addiction in there. Sure. I think we also really even more so, maybe need to get like Iron Maiden in there or Judas Priest or both. James was nominated once and didn't get in. War has been nominated three times and hasn't gotten in. No, sheik has been nominated eleven times and hasn't gotten in just because of disco. That is ridiculous. I read an article making the case for weirdow, but then also saying why Weirdo will never make it in because he makes 17 years snubbed never nominated. Maybe someday weirdo, but I also get the impression Weird l doesn't care. Well, maybe he does deep down. No, I don't think so. Okay, since we said Weird Al doesn't care, obviously that means that it's time for a listener. Now, let me see here. Which one should I read? I'm going to call this lemon song. Every morning as we get ready for work, I'd like to throw in an episode of Stuff You Should Know. The excitement that came over me this morning and two of my favorite things briefly combined into one is indescribable. Josh's mix up on the Lemon Song gave me a good chuckle, only because Squeeze My Lemon is, of course from the Lemon Song. And I can only guess that the song about friendship that he's speaking about is the song Friends on Led Zeppelin Three. Maybe. As soon as I heard the beginning of the episode, I quickly sent a text over to my dad. He's the reason I'm such a big Zeppelin fan. We both got matching Zeppelin tattoos when I graduated from college. And I am the reason he is. The stuff you should know, fan. While we don't live close, I'm in Denver and he's in Phoenix. A small moment like this is something that gave us both a good laugh and a reason to chat this morning. And that is from Lauren and Denver. Nice, Lauren. Thank you very much for that. We love bringing families together, don't we, Chuck? And splitting them apart an evil fashion. If you want to let us know how we brought your family together or split you a sunder, you can email it to us to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-09-13-sysk-alexander-hamilton-final.mp3 | Alexander Hamilton: Most Influential American? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/alexander-hamilton-most-influential-american | Alexander Hamilton, the "ten dollar founding father," is more than the toast of Broadway. In fact, he just may be the most influential American in history. A brash genius, Hamilton wasn't much of a politician. He was all about policy. Learn all about Hami | Alexander Hamilton, the "ten dollar founding father," is more than the toast of Broadway. In fact, he just may be the most influential American in history. A brash genius, Hamilton wasn't much of a politician. He was all about policy. Learn all about Hami | Tue, 13 Sep 2016 16:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=16, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=257, tm_isdst=0) | 47397087 | audio/mpeg | "This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website. Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. And that was Lynn Manuel Miranda in the original Broadway show cast Cat of Hamilton. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Great song. Do you listen to that stuff, like Broadway show sometimes. Recordings and stuff. I don't necessarily seek it out or whatever, but I'm not like, turn it off. Have you listened to Hamilton? I have not heard a second of Hamilton. Even still, because that song was put in in post production. I've still never heard a second of Hamilton. I've seen, like, video on mute, but that's it. Well, it is no wonder that show has become a runaway hit because of two things. One, the music is great and the book is great and it looks great. I've not seen it yet because I'm not wealthy, man. Don't you have to be? Yeah. If you want to get a ticket to Hamilton that's sold out. Yeah. You got to pay thousands of dollars. Can't do it. And the second reason is because Alexander Hamilton is finally getting his due as perhaps the most influential American in history. Those are big words, buddy. Show me someone else saying you haven't been influential. Americans, I think, tops them all. Yes. I can't disagree. I think you're absolutely right. Most controversial founding father, for sure. Youngest founding father by far. Yeah. He's an outsider. Wasn't even born in the United States. No, he wasn't even born in England. He was an immigrant bastard child, which was a legal term back then. Yeah. It had a lot to do with how he turned out in life. Yeah. He had a chip on his shoulder. Well, yeah, you can put it that way. I would put it like he had extra drive that a lot of those hoy toy, blue blood aristocrats founding fathers didn't have because they didn't need it. They had a lot of money. They had a lot of opportunity. This guy picked himself up from the bootstraps like the first American, Horatio Alger, I think. Yeah. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. Yes, I get that impression. But the thing is, he was right most of the time. Well, yeah. And if someone came out and disagreed with him, he wasn't a good politician. He was not skilled at being deferential or didn't know how to bow. Certainly didn't know how to curtsy. No. He would come out and say, no, you're completely wrong for these 14 reasons. Right. And you're ugly. I'll explain it. Links. Yeah. He'd like, poke them in the belly, be pull on their jowels a little bit, tear their wig off. Yeah. I saw there's this really great American Experience episode from 1997. I saw it. Okay. PBS. Yeah. Great. Did you notice there were some recognizable actors in there? Yes. One guy was like I was like, I recognize that guy from Frazier and The Wire. Yeah, there were a few dudes who recreated the roles of right. But not like, oh, great actor. Do you mind gaining to be in this American Experience? It was like, hey, hungry actor, your agent called us, and we have a role for you, because it's like, back in the 90s. Was it 90s? Yes, 97. I looked it up. Really good episode, though. Yeah. And if you look at the website for it, you can tell it's from 1997 for sure, but it was great. And in it, one of the historians put it pretty plainly, he was an excellent statesman, maybe one of the best United States has ever had. Terrible politician. Terrible. One of the parts of being a politician is to have finesse. Again, one of the historians called it finesse. Yeah, he had no finesse. He didn't learn it. No one taught him. He was orphaned at age, what? Eleven? No, 13, possibly 15. Is there some dispute over really when he was born and if he lied about his age? Well, yeah, I mean, let's just go back to the islands of the Caribbean, back to Nevis, 1757 or 1755. Is that the two dates? Possibly, yeah. If you look at the official records in Nevis, which I did before this episode, I went down there, and it has him listed as having been born January 11, 1755. He always said January 11, 1757. And there's actually a good reason why he would have fudged his name. We'll talk about that in a minute. Tantalizing we'll talk about that in 48 seconds. So his father was a Scottish merchant, and his mother, her name was Rachel Fawcett. She was an English French planter's daughter. His dad moved the family to St. Croix and then left his family. Mom died in 1768. And it's interesting. I was watching this great documentary on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Same Thing by Peter Bogdanovich. And these music historians make a point that there's something about a father who rejects you or a mother who dies when you're young. And they say in the case of Tom Petty, he had both. But they listed a list of rock stars, like from Bono to Tom Petty. I can't remember. Jimi Hendrix were either rejected by their dads or mothers died young, or both. And they said they have something to prove. And I was like, Dude, that's Alexander Hamilton to a T. Sure. He spent his whole life with something to prove. Lin Manuel Miranda just went, yeah, he's way ahead of us on this, but apparently we're the only podcast he does not listen to. Or he politely ignored that. Come on. Yeah, that's all right. So let's talk about, though, his early life, his early situation, he finds himself an orphan. His father abandoned him and he never saw his father for the rest of his life. And I was like, boo his right. But I saw elsewhere and I couldn't find it again. But it was explained that his mother had been married before, and even though she was divorced, she was not capable legally of being married again. So her husband or Alexander's father left her in the family to prevent her from being accused of being a bigamist and possibly going to jail. I saw that, too. So maybe that was it. But I only saw that in one place. Most other people just say the father left and Alexander never saw him again. And as a result, he was not able to inherit any estate. His mother there wasn't much of. No, but it would have been pretty helpful to have anything, especially when you're 1315 and apparently had a kind uncle who tried to help him out and secure the estate. But no, it didn't happen. It actually went to his mother's first husband. Yeah. And he moved in with a cousin who then committed suicide. And so he said he hasn't had good experiences with being taken care of. Right. Left to his own devices. He got a job working for Beakman and Kruger Mercantile. And this dude at 14 was running a major company not just a major company, a major company on what, until the last couple of decades, had been the largest income producing colony in the English empire. It made more money from tobacco and then sugar than the other 13 colonies combined. And it was just this little tiny speck of an island. And this kid is running the major company on this major island. So it was even bigger than it seems at first blush. Yeah. He was a child prodigy. He wrote newspaper articles at 14. He wrote poetry, published poetry. And it was clear to everyone at the company, they were like, this kid, he's going places. He's going places. So let's start a fund to get him out of here and get him to New York City. Yeah, because in New York, you can be a new man. Yes. I'm Broadway. That's from Hamilton. Okay, I'm going to drop those in. You're not going to know. No, I'll struggle to make sense of them, though, to keep it up. So they did. So they raised some money and he went to King's College, which later became Columbia University. Yeah. And for those of us who saw a UK tour, they remember that Alexander Hamilton shows up at Columbia University to plead with a rioting crowd. Remember? Yeah, apparently he did that a couple of times. Yeah, I noticed that, too, in that documentary. I was like, he spent a lot of time arguing with crowds with torches and pitchforks on the steps of Columbia University. All right, so he goes to Kings College. He's doing his studying there. He really makes a name for himself in writing political pamphlets, which was kind of the thing to do of that day. There weren't magazines. There wasn't Tiger Beat. No. So, like, if you wanted to get a lot to say, he didn't have square space. Right. That was a free one. Yeah. You like that. So he would write political pamphlets, and they became very well known. Yeah. He was railing against the British monarchy. Yes. And was very much in favor of the loose confederation that the colonies had created amongst themselves and their joint suffering at the hands of the British colonies, which were like the British crown, which was actively trying to punish them and keep them in line through taxation, representation, all the Asians that you wouldn't like. Right. That's right. And Alexander Hamilton definitely saw this as a potential for revolution to occur. And he actually wrote in his journal as a younger man, back when he's, like, 12, 13, 14, that he wished there a war would happen so that he could prove himself. It would be a great opportunity to prove himself. And he probably saw that opportunity and this unrest that was going on that was being aroused in the colonies, and he was fanning the flames of it. Yeah. And this is sort of a side note. He was the most consistent abolitionist of all the founding fathers throughout his entire life for two reasons. One, he thought it was wrong, but very practically, he thought, some of these people might be able to do great things for this country, and they're not allowed to. And he's like, that just doesn't make sense, to not let people live up to their potential, but to make America better. Yeah. But at least equally is important. He personally found it abhorrent and despicable, like he was against slavery from the time he was a kid. Amazing. Well, he saw it firsthand, too, when his family moved to St. Croix plantations there. Yeah, he encountered it, and it had a real impact on him. All right, so, 1776, the revolution is underway. He joins as a captain in the continental army. And I was amazed at this little factoid from the PBS thing. His artillery unit that he founded is still around today. It's the only surviving army unit from the revolutionary War. Wow. That's pretty neat. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, he founded a lot of stuff that's still around today. Yeah, lot. Well, in our customs episode, we touch on that a little bit. In our lighthouse episode. He popped up in that, too. Yeah, he's all over the place. He's got his fingers in a lot of pots. So he fought like a champ in the revolutionary war and impressed George Washington, who was pretty important guy at the time. And he said, you know what? I like the cut of your jib, kid. Why don't you join me? And he surrounded himself with these young men who as his team and his family he called them, that he thought were bright guys in the future of this country. And he said, you will be my aide, Decamp. You will be my assistant. And I got a lot of good dudes around me. They're great military minds. But you're the only one that can write like you can write yeah, like a mug. He did. He said that? Yeah. You can write like a mug. Yeah. Is that in a Broadway show? It should be. I honestly don't know. Could be. It sounds like that could definitely be in a Hamilton rapid. What's your name, man? And he said, Alexander Hamilton. Okay. That's from the show too. Okay, how about this? Indicate it's from the show by making jazz hands. You know what? That's the last of them. Okay, well, if you want to keep it up, that's fine, but I'll say everyone who hasn't seen the show, tucks making jazz hands. All right. And then Jerry will ring a bell post production. Okay. All right. So he's Washington's assistant. Yeah. And actually, one of the again, the historians on that American experience said if you look at Washington's writing at the time, his correspondence, his diaries, I guess probably not his diary. I don't think he had to write his diary. Well, his speeches and things. Right. The best stuff is just obviously written by Alexander Hamilton, like, indisputably, so right. But it made Washington look really good, and Washington was eternally grateful, and he also had a definite soft spot for Alexander Hamilton personally and will for the rest of his life, for sure. He stands by him through thick and thin. Yeah. And our own article does a good job of pointing out that he wasn't just some kid that was like, yes, sir, anything you say. Like, from the very beginning, he's like, you know what? This army is messed up. It's disorganized. We need funding, and this is a big mess. Right. They keep killing people. Yeah. In Washington was like, I like hearing this. He didn't want a yes man around. Yeah, well, maybe a couple. Right. He needs a couple of lickspittles to keep his boots clean. Lickspittle? I never heard that. Mr. Burns used to one. Really? Yeah. I love that. So Washington I think actually Hamilton was a victim of his own success. Like, Washington, like, having him around in this position as an aide to camp so much that Hamilton was like, okay, let's keep rising through the ranks. I want to actually get out there and fight. And he really railed against his position for a while, and finally, Washington was like, okay, fine. Go get out there and fight. And he did, actually. He really honored himself on the battlefield, particularly in Yorktown. He led his regiment into battle. Led? It not like I'm on horseback back here, but I'm leading you. Like, he was the first guy breaking through the lines and jumping into the trenches with the British and fighting them hand to hand. He's a late teenager, right? Yeah, he's about 20. Okay. So he definitely put his money where his mouth was. He wasn't like, yeah, I'm going to get out there and fight. And then when the time came, he was like, I'm going to hang back here. Right. He got out there and fought. I get the impression that he ran through more than one person. Yeah, he was a little dude, too. He wasn't trying to think of some big tough guy, and I'm drawing a blank. The Rock. He wasn't the Rock. He was Kevin Hartish. Who's that? You know who Kevin Hart is? Oh, Kevin Hartish. I thought you were saying Kevin Hartish. Like, that's a person. He's bigger than Kevin Hart, but yeah, kevin Hart is like, five teeny. How big was Alexander Hamilton? He's five seven. Well, he's way bigger. Well, those three inches matter when you're five. Washington. He was giant. He was a big dude. Wasn't tall. Yeah. So the war is over. That's the quickest description of the Revolutionary War ever. Who won? The US. Won. Okay. Or America, I guess. And it's interesting, too, that documentary pointed out at one point, they were like, I don't think anyone gave much thought to what literally they were going to do the day after the war. They were so, like, gung ho for it. And then afterwards, like, whoa, we're in bad shape. We're a bankrupt nation. Right. But even more than that, the people who were running the show were pretty content with the idea of their state being an independent country now. Oh, yeah. There were two schools of thought. Like Thomas Jefferson referred when he said my country, he was talking about Virginia. Yeah. And he was basically of a similar mind to just about everyone else we would consider a founding father. There weren't too many people who are thinking like Alexander Hamilton, whose idea was, hey, let's get together. There's going to be a lot more peace, a lot less infighting, and we're going to have a lot less headaches with things like multiple currencies and all that stuff. Let's just come together and create a centralized federal government. And all these guys are like, whoa, are you nuts? A centralized federal government. It sounds an awful lot like a monarchy. And we just threw those cats off. Why would we want to go back to it? So Hamilton saw very clearly that a central, very powerful federal government that was in control as an umbrella over the 13 colonies, turning them into states assembled under this federal government was the best way to help these colonies turn states and now turn country to mature, to keep going, to progress forward. But he had a real uphill battle to climb because there was nobody really who saw things that way. Yeah. And he knew that the only way to do this was to have a document behind him, pushing him along and he saw the US. Constitution is a great chance to do so. Right. And we'll talk about that right after this. So, Chuck, a lot of people don't really recognize that the Revolutionary War ends in 1776, but it wasn't until 1787 the Constitution is written, right? That's right. And in between that time, people were just kind of like, okay, what do we do? There was the Articles of Confederation. Yeah, they were great, but they weren't so great. Actually, I thought they were pretty great. Okay, well, the founding father skunk founding father, they showed up in, I think, Philadelphia. And we're called there to say, hey, let's figure something out about this article. The Confederation, the country is bankrupt. We're going nowhere. Everybody's hooked on drugs. We don't know what's going on. Everybody come and let's figure out how to make the Articles of Confederation better. And these Founding Fathers all showed up, these delegates, including Alexander Hamilton, who is a delegate from New York. And they really looked at it and they're like, this is terrible. Let's just start over. So they crumple it up, threw it over their shoulder, pull out a fresh piece of paper, said, okay, debate. That's right. And through that debate, the Constitution of the United States was drafted. Hamilton actually was not there a lot for the debates because of business. And so he wasn't actually a key member in drafting the Constitution. And of course the Constitution was the document that indicated a strong central government and a powerful President. He came into play when it came time for saying, this is the document. We're going to go forward with you for getting a ratified. They needed nine of 13 states for it to pass and there was a lot of strong opposition. Like you were saying, we just got out from under Britain's rule. Why are we going to draft this thing with these taxes and the central government? And we like all of our little small states making all their own decisions. And it turned out to be a big deal when he and John Jay and James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers. Right. Forming the Federalist Party and really coming out hard. Have you ever read even the first Federalist Paper? No. It's amazing. And Hamilton wrote that, the introduction. And in it he basically just says, here are all your questions answered and here's why you are all wrong and here's why this is the way forward. No questions asked. Right. And I know in it. Basically he and Jay and Madison used it as an opportunity to address every single opposition to the Constitution and the adoption of it. Including things like. Well. We have a court to interpret the law so that it's constantly evolving and that kind of thing and just explaining why we needed a powerful executive. But that it would be balanced out by these other branches of government as well. And it worked. These things were getting published in the papers, and it helped to really change the minds of a lot of people. Yeah. And remarkably, the Federalist Papers have been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States more than any other document, including the Constitution. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, it really is, because, I mean, if you think about it, just these guys are saying, here's our opinion of the Constitution and why it works. Yeah. And the Supreme Court says, we're with you, buddy. That's right. So he got married along the way in 1780 to a woman named Elizabeth Schiller Skyler. Yes. And a big thing happened in 1788. They had the first presidential election. Washington won. And as his confidence, he appointed quickly Hamilton as the Secretary of treasury. Probably the most powerful Cabinet position of all. Yeah. And like we said, we were nearly bankrupt from the Revolutionary War. We borrowed money from everyone from like, they owed money to the army. They owed money to individuals who supported the army. They would just go take equipment and money and say, here, we're going to pay you back one day. And they literally owed money to American citizens to the point where they couldn't pay it back. And it was a disorganized mess of records. And Hamilton got in there and most people would have shied away. And he was like, this is great. I can really get in here and do what I do best, which is get this on the right track. Yeah. He's a big picture guy. If there was ever a big picture guy. And historians now look back at Hamilton and say they actually say, the man who made America. It's one of nicknames. Right. Which is not for nothing, saying something like that. Yeah. He had a vision to where the strong central government could create the nation that the states comprised or composed. And it was based on four points. Right. One was tariffs, which we talked about in the Customs episode. Yes. One was a central bank and investment in infrastructure. And then a big one called Assumption, which was taking all the state's individual debts and the federal government assuming it. And he has a lot of trouble with that one because a lot of people were like, why would you want to do that? Oh, we understand why you want to make the central government that much more powerful. Because we'll owe you now. Right. So it's way more than that. Not only will yes, you guys will owe us, but it's a gesture of goodwill, but it legitimizes the federal government. And it also allows it, once there's an establishment of a national debt, to borrow more money and to issue cheaper, though. Right, and to issue bonds against those debts, which can be traded on the open market. And everybody's like, Whoa, wait, what? Yeah, he's like, Just trust me. And he was faced with that a lot, where he understood the steps forward and he faced opposition at just about every turn. And I get the impression that a lot of it was, like, from people who weren't getting what he was getting across because they were radical ideas, very like some of them a century ahead of their time. There was a panic in 1792, a financial panic, where somebody tried to corner the market on treasury bonds and almost collapsed the federal debt. Right. Just almost ruined it single handedly. And under the guidance of Alexander Hamilton, the national bank that he had established stepped in and became what's called a buyer of last resort, where they were buying treasury bills at less than what they were worth, so that you had to be really desperate to go and sell them to him. And that wasn't, I guess, legitimized by economists until a full century after that. This guy was just operating on a totally different level, like, very much ahead of his time. Well, the idea of creating a national purposely creating a national debt seems crazy, right. And no one understood it. And he came out with quotes like, the national debt will be the cement of our nation, and basically these creditors are going to have to get on board and support the federal government so they can get paid back. Exactly. And it really had a unifying effect. He had a problem getting assumption passed through. It was blocked on almost every level with politicians. And one of his neighbors in New York at the time was one Thomas Jefferson, one of his biggest foes throughout his career. And he worked out a little deal at a very famous dinner called the Dinner Table Compromise, wherein Jefferson wanted to move the capital to essentially what would become Washington DC. Yeah. To Virginia. And Hamilton was like, no, I like it here in New York City. He said, but here's what we'll do. You can move your capital down there if you throw your support and Madison was there, too, if you guys throw your support behind assumption. And they said, Great, that's what we'll do. So he sacrificed New York City as the capital, his own people, because he was like a true New Yorker through and through by this time. But he was a transplant. A transplant. And historians point of that is saying, like, he didn't have the kind of ties that native born New Yorkers had to it, necessarily. But that's why the capital ended up in DC. And that's why the assumption went through and it changed history. And we also talked in the Customs episode about how tariffs paid for the United States, like these high taxes on imports, especially imported British goods. Yeah. But that money didn't just automatically funnel into the infrastructure that built the United States industrial revolution that was directed by the policies of Alexander Hamilton. Yeah. Because Jefferson was like, we want to be farmers. Like, I want to be an agricultural society. Small government. Yeah. And he said, no, where it's at is big government in a big industrialized nation. That's how we're going to get ahead. And you can actually trace the two political parties in the United States or actually the fact that we have political parties back to the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and how they saw things. Small government, agrarian based and big government and infrastructure based, industrial based. Yeah. The new party was the Republicans and then the federalists. Nothing to do with Republicans of modern times. Right. Although there is, like, a whole small government bent that's kind of a big deal with Republicans. So we have these two parties. Things got really ugly. They weren't nice guys with each other. They weren't afraid to argue and yell and scream about the I mean, this is the direction of the country at a very tentative time. We could have gone one of two ways. So it was a big deal. It wasn't just a matter of passing a couple of laws was like, what kind of country do we want to be? Yeah. And Hamilton kind of won. He definitely won. He left public office at 1795 when he resigned as Treasury Secretary. But he was far from leaving politics. He's still very heavily involved. Oh, yeah. He kept his thumb on the Federalist Party as much as he could, and he actually ended up basically screwing up the party's chances of the presidency from that point on when he became involved in, I think, the 1800 election. Right. Yeah. He kind of destroyed his own party. So John Adams was the country's second president, and Adams was a Federalist, but he and Hamilton didn't really get along. They didn't see things eye to eye. They couldn't stand each other. And they were both members of Washington's Cabinet. And Adams was very much older than Alexander Hamilton, and he kind of got pushed to the side whenever there was in their rivalry, whenever Washington was around, because he kind of favored Hamilton more than Adams. Right. I'm picturing paul Giamatti shoving around win manuel Miranda. Right. Okay. Right. One of those guys is cooler than the other. Who? It's Paul Giamatti. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. Paul Giamatti is kind of a cool cat. No. In fact, I knew someone who worked on a movie with him locally and our buddy Craig, and he was like he went out with us a few times drinking, and he was, like, the coolest guy. That's neat. Yeah. I expect that from they're in a tie for cool dudes. Okay. So Paul Giamatti is like, I don't like you, lim Manuel And Lin Manuel is like, I don't care. Sucking egg on Broadway. You just had an HBO show. Right, exactly. So when Adams comes to power, he very much freezes Hamilton out of the Federalist Party. Oh, yeah. He said some really nasty things. He questioned his integrity. He called him a bastard. A bastard Creole immigrant. He was not nice. Okay. So Hamilton doesn't like this. He starts writing about Adams and just what a terrible person he thinks Adams is. Yeah, he went after him hard, but he didn't go after him publicly. It was actually Aaron Burr, who, from what I understand, is a pretty big scoundrel. He got a jerk. He got his hands on these private papers, I think private correspondence, and published them just in time for the 1800 election. And in the 1000 election, john Adams was up for re election for a second term. And then Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were running against him, both as Republicans. Right. And with the publication of this basically slander against John Adams at the hands of Alexander Hamilton, it created enough infighting in the Federalist Party that they were out of the race. And it was down to the two Republicans. They actually tied and Congress decided who would win, if I remember correctly. Right. Yeah, I think it went to the House, and there was a tie there. Then it went to Congress. The Senate. Say what? The Senate went to the House and then the Senate. Yes, I believe that's correct. Okay, so they ultimately voted for Jefferson. And at the time, if you were the runner up in a presidential election, you became vice president. So Aaron Bird became vice president. But it just tore Hamilton apart that he had to figure out who to support in this. He didn't like either one of them, but Bird was just a jerk. He was an aristocratic rich kid who clearly was getting into politics to become more famous, to make more money. He was impure of heart and intention. And despite how Hamilton felt about Jefferson, I mean, this is his mortal enemy, basically. Yeah, well, one of them, he had a bunch. But despite how he felt about him, he's like, at least Jefferson, I think, isn't a jerk and wants, like, good things for America. And I can't even say that about Burr. Right. So, like, if Alexander Hamilton was a great statesman, terrible politician, aaron Burr was a pretty good politician, terrible statesman. Yeah. So he threw his support behind Thomas Jefferson and against Aaron Burr, so much so that apparently he made a remark at a dinner party about Aaron Burr's character that got back to Aaron Burr, and it was vicious enough that he challenged him to a duel. And we'll talk about that right after this. So we did a good episode on duels many years ago, and we covered this dual, but we would be remiss not to go over it again. Hamilton has been challenged to a lot of duels over the years, which is no surprise. He was not afraid to mix it up. But at the time, duels were like, they didn't often go down. Like, you could almost always talk your way out of a duel by doing a certain amount of apologizing without fully destroying your reputation as someone who stood behind his words. And in this case, Hamilton very much tried to get out of this duel, went so far as to almost offer a full retraction, which is a miracle for Hamilton, but a Burr was having none of it. He really wanted this to go down and it went down. It did. It was at Wheehawkin, New Jersey, which is like along the shores of the Hudson. And three years earlier, Alexander Hamilton's first born son, Philip, who the family had put basically all of their hopes and dreams into, was killed in a duel himself. There. Yeah. Sticking for his dad. Yeah. There was a guy who is slandering his dad publicly and Philip demanded a retraction and the guy said, no, do down the gauntlet. Yeah. Philip challenged him to a duel and they met at Weehawken and Philip was killed at that duel. And three years later, at the same spot when Alexander Hamilton met Aaron Burr, historians think this is on his mind and that he actually purposefully missed Aaron Burr because he saw what can happen in a duel. But Aaron Burr was like, thanks for the free ride, jumped and shot him in the stomach. Yeah. Nobody knows for sure what happened. There are conflicting accounts whether or not he purposely missed, whether he didn't shoot at all and got fired upon and then accidentally fired his weapon. No one actually saw it go down. They do know there were two shots fired, though, because of the noise. And, yeah, he got a bullet through the liver and through his abdomen and immediately said to his confidant, who rushed up to him, he's like, this is it, he got me. Yeah. This is a mortal wound. And some people even say that he was goading Burr into killing him that day with the way he handled the duel and like, he was taking his time putting on his glasses. He had a special gun that had a hair trigger, which would make it easier to aim. There's all these weird, conflicting accounts. It's kind of frustrating that no one knows the actual truth. I think it is frustrating. That's very odd that he would have wanted to die. At this point, it doesn't seem like his life was replaced. I don't think he thought he was going to die. I think he thought he could destroy Burr's reputation by being a gentleman and firing into the air and then Burr actually shooting him. He lives and is a bit of a martyr. I got you. A living martyr. That didn't happen. No. He died. No. And before he died, his reputation had gone down quite a bit, thanks to an extramarital affair that he had starting in, I think, 1791, while he was still the Secretary of the treasury. Right. So he met a woman named Maria Reynolds, who showed up on his doorstep in Philadelphia and said, hey, I am in great trouble. My husband left me with this kid. I'm from new York. I know you're from New York. Can I have some money? And it just kind of went from there. Right. So he ended up having, I think, a three year long affair. Well, he gave her some money, and she said, how can I ever repay you? And he went, Well, I have one idea. She said, okay. Right. And that kind of became the arrangement. Yeah. So again, this went on for three years, and it turned out that Mrs. Reynolds husband was a criminal himself and that this was all an extortion attempt. He hadn't left her at all. They had plotted together, and they were extorting money from Alexander Hamilton. When Mr. Reynolds, james Reynolds, was caught in another scandal. He said, hey, get this. You guys should take it easy on me because I got some great information you're going to love. You know the Secretary of the treasury. Well, me and my wife have been extorting him, what I can only assume is federal money for years now. Go talk to him. And they did that's. Right. Hamilton one thing he couldn't stand for is for his integrity to be questioned. And in this case, not integrity as being a faithful husband, but integrity in stealing from the government. Right. And he's like, I won't stand for that. I'm going to come out and say, you know, I was having an affair and I was making payments, and they were for my personal funds. Here's the letters to prove it. Yeah. Which was pretty remarkable. He destroyed his political career in the process, but he was like, no one's going to accuse me of pill freeing money from the country that I love. Yeah. And originally he was approached by a delegation of investigators, I think, including James Madison, who said, no, James Monroe, I'm sorry, who said, hey, man, you're being accused of using government funds as hush money. You want to speak to this? And he produced the love letters that exonerated him privately. And Monroe and the other investigators agreed to just keep the matter private because they saw that was a false accusation, that he'd been using his own money to cover the extortion. Yeah, but he let them walk with the love letters, provided they kept him confidential. Well, one of them gave him to Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson was like, oh, baby, yes. Thank you, God, for dropping this in my lap. I hate this guy. He's my political rival. I'm going to see to it that these things are published. So they got published, and as a result of them being published, that's when Hamilton was like, well, I'll publish my own explanation. And he did. Yeah. He went large with it and went wide, and everyone knew. But like I said, at least he was proven out to not be ripping off his government. Right. So everybody was like, Good for that. But at the same time, you just confess to an affair in a publication that you published yourself, so that's the part we're going to remember. So his star definitely waned as a result of that. He wasn't as important in the Federalist Party. He didn't hold any civil office any longer, and by the time he was killed in the duel 49 years old. Yeah. And his finances have been pretty stretched. He built a place called The Grange on 35 acres in what is now Harlem. And it almost bankrupted his family, apparently. Yes. And like you said, he had stretched himself too thin. He was out of the public eye for the most part, and once he died and was not around to vigorously defend himself right. People like Adams and Jefferson and Madison jumped on him and started writing these things about he wanted a monarchy. He wasn't a good guy. He didn't have the best interests of the country, which is really a shame. And for many years, I think that had a big impact on how he was viewed in America. Sure. Like, he doesn't have a statue in Washington, DC. No, he doesn't have a memorial in Washington, DC. Yet. Are they trying to get one? I'm sure. Lynn Manuel Miranda is like, come on. Well, the one guy that one historian is really great at the end, he was like, America is his memorial. Like, oh, yeah, you're living in his memorial. That was a great line. Pretty powerful. Yeah. So now scholars have gotten on board and they said, you know what? This guy was actually perhaps the most influential person in our history to the America that we look around at today. Yeah. The Coast Guard lighthouses. Lighthouses. That's it. Well, just the whole structure of our economy. The fact that we have a central bank, the fact that the government intervenes in financial crises. He's credited with coming up with the stock market after that panic of 1792. He got the biggest traders around to meet him in New York and say, hey, let's all sign a letter of cooperation. And that became the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah. And he's buried steps from the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah. He founded the bank of New York. That was one of three banks that he founded, two national banks and the bank of New York. And the bank of New York actually was still in continuous operation until, I think, 2008 or 2011, when Chemical Banker City Group took it over. But it had been operating continuously since, I think, 1784. Right. Yeah. Founded the New York Post newspaper. Yeah. What was the original name? The New York Evening Post. Yeah. Which became The Post. Right. And he founded that so he could get his word out. Yeah. It was a federalist newspaper originally. Yeah. Pretty amazing guy. He did quite a bit. And yeah. He is starting to get his due recognition. Yeah. And you mentioned the Grange. It was the only home he ever owned in New York. He lived downtown for most of his life in apartments, but finally bought that land in the suburb of Harlem, and in that home was donated to a New York church. If they moved it 250 ft, which they did. And then in the 19th, 60s, it fell into disrepair, basically. And they said, now it's part of the National Park Service. We need to honor this house. Let's find a location for it and restore it. And it took about 30 years. And then finally, in 2011, September, $14.5 million later reopened to the public near Saint Nicholas Park. Pretty amazing. And he's buried right there behind Trinity Church, around the corner from the stock exchange. Lasting legacy. He's on Broadway. Immigrant bastard child. Amazing. Pretty amazing. I wonder if he got a musical written about him. When that first came out, I didn't know a lot about him. I was like, why is somebody writing a musical about him? And then you read up on it and you're like, oh, that's exactly why. True underdog. Yeah, he was. He was great. I like him. If you want to know more about Alexander Hamilton, go to Broadway. And you can also type those words in the search bar@housedeforce.com. And as I said, Broadway. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this rare shout out. Hey, guys. I know this isn't your usual mo, but I was hoping you'd be able to publicly thank my friend Jeff Beverage. This guy's name, it's a great name. He's my best friend for 15 years and it's been like a brother to me. He's the one that got me hooked on your show. Recently, he has stepped up even more after my family suffered a pretty devastating house fire. We had lots of family and friends reaching out to support us, but he offered to take in my pet turtle and tortoise that we didn't have room for in our rental house. It's hard to fathom just how we will be able to repay and thank all of our family and friends. I know the best way to thank Bev so they call him would be a shout out from you guys. Even better if you would call him a schmuck, which is a combination of a schmuck and a jump. Oh, I don't know if we should do that. Well, I mean, it sounds like it would make Bev's day. Okay, i, for one will say, Bev, sir, you are a first rate schmumt. Schmp. What if we just made him cry? I doubt it. I hope you had a great UK tour. We did. And we look forward to hearing some of the tangents from the travels. You might. Thanks for all the hours of entertainment. And that is from Kevin Barrett. Nice. There you go, Kevin. Your wish has been fulfilled. You're a schmuck, too, Kevin. Thanks for that. Thank you, Bev, for being a top notch person. And if you want to get in touch with this, you can hang out with us on Twitter at syskpodcast. You can hang out with me, too at Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook. Chuck has his own Charles w chuck Bryant. Right. That's right, sir. I've got one called Super Josh Clark. Check it out. Yeah, good stuff going on in those places. Yeah. And then, of course, you can hang out the official Stuffysheno page@facebook.com, stuffyshow. We're on Instagram. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athousofworks.com. And as always, you can join us at our HomeBuilder boat on the Web. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-22-sysk-meals-on-wheels-final.mp3 | How Meals on Wheels Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-meals-on-wheels-works | Meals on Wheels is one of the great charitable organizations in the world, providing much-needed nutrition for elderly people in need. It also has a pretty interesting backstory, starting in multiple places in different countries almost simultaneously. Le | Meals on Wheels is one of the great charitable organizations in the world, providing much-needed nutrition for elderly people in need. It also has a pretty interesting backstory, starting in multiple places in different countries almost simultaneously. Le | Tue, 27 Mar 2018 15:22:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=15, tm_min=22, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=86, tm_isdst=0) | 45838914 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paper boy. Or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing Hooza. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned, mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. It's just the two of us today. We had guest producer Tyler here for a second. He pressed record and left. And it's just us. Yeah, one of us needs to get our index finger working so we can do that. Well, remember we used to say we were going to replace Jerry with one of those dipping bird? Yeah. Is that what they're called, dipping bird? I don't know. I just remember my grandmother had one where the bird would dip its peak in the water. All we have to do is arrange so we can press the space bar. We should be better than this, Chuck, because this is a very nice, wonderful, humane episode. Humane and human, even. And humanities. Yeah, this is one of our we like to do a little awareness shows every now and then. And Meals on Wheels, which, by the way, for the past two days, in my head, I've been going meals on Wheels. What is that? It may have been a local thing when I was a kid. There was I think it was called World of Wheels. I don't know if it was a car show or, like one of those monster truck things, okay? But that's what they used to do as World of Wheels. I got you. That's funny you say that, because I've had my own thing in my head. There was a thrill kill cult song that was in the movie Cool World called Sex on Wheels. Wow. So I've been going wheels on wheels. Meals on Wheels. That's weird, though, that we each have just kind of had some weird loop in our heads. Maybe that helps us research, maybe. And maybe Meals on Wheels, and we'll get to the funding part of it at the end, but maybe they would have better chances getting federal funding if they had a cool theme song. Yeah. Like by the thrill kill coal. Sure. That would surprise everybody, I think. So we are talking Meals on Wheels today just to do our due diligence up front. We just want to tell everybody, in case you don't know what that is, but I'm sure most people do. Meals on Wheels is a meal delivery program here in the States and Canada, australia, I think. It's all over the place. Yeah. Where usually if you're a senior citizen, senior adult, not quite sure what they go by these days, and you are homebound, basically, where you're able to care for yourself and your home, but you're getting up there in years, and you haven't gone into an assisted care facility, but you don't have a lot of contact. You might not have family around. What Meals on Wheels does is they bring you a meal once a day, five days a week. She leave lunch and say, hey, how are you doing? Feeling good. Okay, well, we'll see you tomorrow. Enjoy your meal. And just that little simple act of doing that, just apparently, and research bears us out completely changes the life and extends the life expectancy of people in that situation. Yeah. And it's not just we'll get to some of the other things they do, but the main three prong reason for the home visit is the meal, like you said, the visit. And then the final thing is the safety check component. Right. Which is, Mr. Muldoon, you have a wire hanging out of your wall, and it's sparking. So let me see if I can get some help with you. Get some help for you on that, sir. Right, exactly. That could turn bad on you. Exactly. So there's this whole idea that just by showing up at somebody's house with a meal, you can just really vastly help improve their lives. And when I think about Meals on Wheels or when I research this stuff, it's like if you've lost faith in humanity, just look into Meals on Wheels. Yeah. It cancels out so much bad in the world. And it takes, like, this population that here in the west, it's very easy to become disconnected from your family because you're offspring. Your kids, as some people call them, they grow up, they get their own jobs, they move around where a highly mobile culture Western civilization is. And you can find yourself basically alone. Like, if you're friends with your neighbor and your neighbor dies or moves away, you don't know the new, younger neighbors. Maybe they don't care about you. You can find yourself isolated, and being socially isolated is a huge problem. So the idea that there's people out there who are strangers to you, who will come to your house and bring you a meal to make sure you're taken care of, there's humanity right there in a nutshell. Yeah. She's moved away now, but our older and jeez. I had no idea how old she was. She was one of those ladies, Ms. Jessie, our neighbor, who could have been 70 or 106. I have no idea. Is she the one with the goats? No. Okay. We fed the goats again this morning, by the way. Good. No. Ms. Jesse and Mr. Otis lived next door. Mr. Otis had daily dialysis, passed away, which was very sad because he was just great. But Ms. Jesse was really nice. It took us a little while to earn her trust, but she had her daughter, Connie. He would come by and give her what she needs and bring her groceries, but we would always offer, we're going to the store, Miss Jesse. You need anything? And she would never take us up on it. But I think just us talking to her on a daily basis because she was one of these that would, like, she would open the blinds every time she heard a noise in the neighborhood. She was very honest. Got you. Which was great for when we went out of town because Ms. Jesse was the best watchdog you could ask for. Did she give you a list of teenagers that she spotted while you were gone, whenever you returned home? No, she just said that near dwell. That guy is up to no good. Anyway, she's a very sweet lady, and I think eventually we earned her trust. And I really got the sense that just us having a conversation with her for five minutes, getting out of the car, meant a lot to her. Yeah, that's apparently what research shows that that kind of thing has a pronounced impact on the life of somebody who has become socially isolated. But she moved away. Oh, yeah. She's like nuts to those two. Yeah. Someone bought her house, but she's doing great. That's the good end of that story. She did not pass away. She moved away. Right. Got you. So where did she move? Did she move to an assisted care facility? Did she move into another house? Did she move in with her daughter? I think she may have moved in with her daughter, but it was funny. She meant a lot to us, but it was sort of like, So long, suckers. We didn't like a cheerful goodbye. All of a sudden, we were like, you're moving? She's like, yeah, sold my house. And she was out of there. Right. Flips you the bird on the way out. Yeah. Well, then this one's for Ms. Jesse. Yeah. There you go. Okay, so let's talk a little bit of history about Meals on Wheels, because despite how utterly human it is, it was started by robots. It was robots who are trying to win us over before they take over. Very strange. It hasn't been around for as long as you'd think. Although I think that it came about right around the time when the need first arose, because I was doing some research. And it seems like with industrialization and the rise of factory work, that is where a lot of the schism between our traditional society that was usually a grain based and this new modern society we live in really began. And around that time is probably when you would have started to have found some isolated seniors is like a growing population. Yeah, that makes sense because I found it interesting that and we'll dig into the history here, but I found it interesting that it seemed to pop up within about a 15 year period in many countries around the world, and not because they had heard of it. It's not like they read on the Internet in 1954 that, hey, someone in England is doing this. So I think that has a lot of merit to it, that the need was there kind of all at the same time. Yeah. And it also kind of underscores just how basically human and idea this is. All right, so World War II raging, england being bombed, neighborhoods and regions being devastated, it became clear that people, like, literally just their home or kitchen were destroyed, so they couldn't do simple things like cook the meals they're used to providing for their family. The woman's volunteer service for Civil Defense came around and they said, you know what? We're going to start delivering some meals, some home cooked meals, to people whose houses have been devastated, who can't cook for themselves right now. They deliver them at first in baby carriages, which is where the Wheels that's where it came from. Yeah, that's what everybody around town called it. They called it Meals on Wheels. Pretty neat. It was not capitalized or anything like that. It was just kind of like the slang term, what the cool kids call it. About ten years later or so in Philly in Pennsylvania, a woman named Margaret Toy, who became the first director of Meals on Wheels in the United States, she organized something called the Platter Angels. And just by coincidence, there were some British students in Philly doing some social work at a community center where Mrs. Toy volunteered. And they said, hey, this is a lot like what we've got going on in England with the Meals on Wheels. Right? Ditch that platter. Angles, Angles, angles. You're thinking of Joseph Angles. Ditch the platter angel's name and call it Meals on Wheels. And I don't think they said ditch that name, but they just be some pushy exchange students. You know, those pushy British exchange students, they're the worst. They surrounded poor Mrs. Toy and poked her on the shoulder and, like, blue cigarette smoke in her face. Hey, Platter Angel. Yeah, she smacked a meal right out of her hands. So that's how it became Meals on Wheels in the United States. And then over the next 20 and 30 years in the US. They started popping up all over the place. They did. And here's what you're kind of referring to earlier. So that was 1954, that same year in September in South Australia, which is where Adelaide is. Shout out to Adelaide where the Sommerton man is from. Right. A woman named Doris Taylor came up with the same exact thing and from what I understand called it Meals on Wheels as well, is that correct? Yes. She was something else. Man yes, she was. She was disabled. The best I can discern is she had a fall when she was seven, which gave her a limp, and then another fall when she was eleven that paralyzed her from the waist down permanently. That was it. That was it. She was wheelchair bound from that point on. Yeah, from that point on. And despite the fact that as an eleven year old in a wheelchair for life, she had a big heart and realized that there was a need to provide for people in her community, just like what was going on in America and Britain and said, hey, what about bringing a meal to people? And then in September 1954, like you said, Meals on Wheels of South Australia, which I had to look up on a map, I figured it was in the south. Yeah, and in Australia it is, but it's a big chunk of land, at least. I don't know how populated it is. Well, if Adelaide is there, it's great. Well, yeah, of course it is, but that has grown. She actually lived long enough to see that grow into a huge organization and I know they have this all over the world and all over the country here in America, but we just wanted to shout her out specifically for being disabled herself and going on to do just this amazing thing. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. So you think like, oh, okay, big deal, she's wheelchair bound, she can use her arms, she can juggle, that kind of stuff? No, she had rheumatoid arthritis, crippling rheumatoid arthritis on top of all of this. So she was just basically she had no use of any of her limbs and she still was out there raising like she used her mind to get other people to get off their dust and help people less fortunate. Yeah, she was an amazing person. It's pretty great. 5000 clients in South Australia now, 90 branches, and this is all because of Doris Taylor. And then Chuck, speaking of South Australia, you were on to something huge chunk of land, not very populated. Adelaide is the capital with just under one and a half million people, and that's 75% of the population of South Australia as a whole. Well, there you have it. There's a lot of unused land there. Should we take a break? Oh, sure. All right, let's do it. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM. Let's create learn More@ibm.com hey, everybody. If you want a great quality website, you want to do it yourself with no must and no fuss. Then there's nowhere else to look than Squarespace. That's right. Squarespace has every single thing that you need to put together an awesome website. Everything from growing and engaging your audience with email campaigns, collecting donations for your cause through Apple, Pay, Stripe, Venmo, PayPal. Plus, you can also make your website optimized for mobile, which is great for your user on the go. That's right. And if you're into selling stuff, square space is everything to sell anything. They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yes. Don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. So Wheels on Wheels starts springing up as, like, these community programs all over the world, right? Yes. Just because there's a few spiritually aligned do gooders out there who have this good idea, and it just spreads and spreads and spreads. But the thing that they have in common, aside from the basic we bring a meal once a day to someone who can't get out of their house, they also had in common that they were community grassroots organizations. That's how they operate. That's how they were funded. That was it. And that was the case until, I believe, 1965 with the Older Americans Act, when the Feds finally said, all right, okay, a good idea is a good idea. We'll cough up some money for your Meals on Wheels programs. And it's been that way ever since. Customarily, the Older Americans Act provides about 35% of funding for the Meals on Wheels programs in America. I should say yes. And then the rest. It's an early public private partnership where the rest is meant to come from state and local governments, private donations, foundations, grants, wherever they can get money from. But the Meals on Wheels program has meant ever since 1965 in the US. To have been able to rely on over a third of its annual budget coming from the US. Government to provide that foundation so they can get the rest. Yeah. So that, like you said, is specifically because the OA and delivered through the Office of Health and Human Services and got a shout out, corporate donations. Because I feel like people like to bag on big corporations, but part of their funding does come from corporations chipping in. And then you talked about grants. There are three specific block grant programs. The community development block grant, the social services block grant and community services block grant. And just put a pin in that because that'll come up again later. Right. So again, though, most of the funding comes from things other than the federal government. Right. And there's another way that this program is funded, and this is kind of surprising to me, but it's from the people who are the recipients of this aid as well, which is co op. It is. And this is actually another Doris Taylor innovation, at least in Australia before it was, well, this is charity, so here, just take this. She was like, yes, we're going to incorporate volunteers. And the volunteers don't need to be paid, obviously, but we still need to pay for the food. We still need to pay workers to prepare the meals and kitchen space. Yeah, obviously some of that could be donated, but yeah, sure. Not all of it. You just can't rely on that always to be donated. You can kind of always rely that there's going to be somebody there who will fill in for somebody who didn't show up that day in meal delivery. Right? Yes. Or you can go do that yourself. But the more skilled stuff, you need to be able to pay somebody so that they will show up and do this stuff. Right. So the idea of having the people who can afford it pay for the meal, that is kind of innovative and it helps keep the program going. The thing is, if you can't pay for the meal, you get it for free. And then there's a continuum. There's a sliding scale between I can afford a little bit for this meal, here's some and then I think the people who are physically able to, but are financially unable to afford a meal are asked to volunteer to be a part of the Meals on Wheels program themselves. Yeah, I'm a big you can call me an old hippie if you want. Oh, I always see but the sliding scale is one of my favorite things. An old hippy hippies. Like the sliding scale. Sure, man. Everything from when I was a young, broke, mid 20 something and I wanted to go to a shrink. I found a shrink at a sliding scale. Like, there are people out there that'd be like, you know what? What can you pay? Right? And it wasn't some government program. It was a private therapist. And this is across the board. There are all sorts of people who offer sliding scales, like Meals of Wheels check. If you can pay a dollar, then that helps. If you can't pay anything, we'll give it to you. If you can pay full price I didn't see what full price was for a meal on Wheel. I saw somewhere and this is just Meals on Wheels like, a volunteer who wrote something on Vox said that they are usually about $2.25. That's full price. Yeah. Oh, man. Which is ridiculously low. Well, yeah, because I guess they're only paying for food costs and they're getting bulk they're getting gallons of mayonnaise at the warehouse. Yeah. But you have to order about 10% overage for mayonnaise to cover shrinkage because everybody's always got their fingers in the mayonnaise as they're walking in and out of the kitchen. That's what Pappy used to say. Yeah, that's what Mr. Otis always said. He probably did. So there is money, there is financial contributions involved. But for the most part, being a part of Meals on Wheels as a recipient, it's based entirely on need. And I think the first thing that they look at is your medical need. Right? Yeah, for sure. So how able are you to get around your house? How able are you? And this is one I hadn't thought of, but I'm like, okay, well, you can get up and get around your house. You can cook for yourself. Can you also go to the grocery store? Huge. So you may be physically able to hang out in your house and maybe Play canasta do whatever, but getting to, like, let's say you lost your driver's license or you don't have a car any longer, or it's just getting to the grocery store and shopping and then getting back is just way too much. You would probably qualify to be a Meals on Wheels recipient. Right? Yeah. There's a range of people. They also have centers where they feed a lot of people, like, in a cafeteria setting, and they encourage you. If you can get out, you can still get your really nutritious, because I don't think we've said that yet, but that goes without saying. These meals are specifically catered to the needs of the elderly. Right? Yeah. I think ever since 1972, there was, like, an amendment made to the Older Americans Act that said, maybe get those single cigarettes out of that tray that you're bringing to the older seniors. Let's actually make this a nutritious meal. Yes. So you can go to a place and eat with a bunch of other people like you and have a good conversation if you can get out of the house. But the real focus and the core of the program are those we call them shutins at our church. I don't know if that's I think homebound is what they normally call them. Yeah, I think that's probably an antiquated Southern Baptist term. Right. But we would deliver meals to shut ins through our church. It wasn't like Meals on Wheels, and there are plenty of other programs that do this, but Meals on Wheels is definitely the biggest and broadest. Yeah. I get the impression, too, that Meals on Wheels isn't particularly concerned by competition. No, I don't think so. They're like, okay, it's fine as long as everybody's getting their meals right? Agreed. So let's say you qualify medically as somebody who is a Meals on Wheels recipient. Next they would look at your finances. What can you afford, what can't you afford? And they're not going to go through and dig through your checklist. They say, hey, give me your wallet. Right. Let me see what's in there. Yeah, you go to grab it from them and they just put their palm on your forehead and hold you back, right? No, they're not going to do anything like that. They're going to just ask you what can you afford? Or what are you living on a month? How much extra income maybe do you have? It's probably going to be the extent of it. I get the impression that it's largely an honor system kind of thing, right? Probably. And then if you're like, I just can't afford it. They'll say, okay, great. Depending on where you live, you will either be put into the rotation or you'll be put sadly, on a waiting list. And if you're put on a waiting list, you might be waiting a little while before they can include you. The whole reason anybody would put you on a waiting list is funding. And we'll talk about funding later on. Let's stick to the good stuff right now. Yeah. So the meals that you're getting are or they're delivering. They can be hot meals, they can be cold meals, they can be frozen, if that's what you want. If you don't want to eat it. Right. Then they can be shelf stable or canned. If you live way out in the sticks, you can probably arrange to have, like, a week's worth of meals delivered frozen. They really try to work with you because their goal is to say that there is no community in the United States that we cannot serve. Right? Yeah. I think if you live out in remote Alaska, they're going to be like, can we just bring you a week's worth of frozen meals? Can we just drop an elk off on your front porch and a buck knife? Yes, in a buck knife, that's right. And you'll say, yeah, that'd be great. Well, the elderly Alaska would say, well, I'll just put it with my other $19 knives and my other three elk. Right. And they would say, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got that many elk? We're going to share it with the rest of the community. And you'll say that's wealth distribution. New socialist. So here's one interesting stat, though, that I saw that less than 5% this is an estimate, but less than 5% of eligible older Americans receive meals and that on average, they receive less than three meals per week. And that is sad. It is sad. And I don't know if that's because the program can't be robust enough. I'm sure there's a million different factors involved, but I would be very surprised if the leading factor was not funding. Yeah. Because there seems to very much be a will. There seems to be a pretty great system, decades old system in place through communities throughout the country. I would guess that it's just having enough money to add another person to the list, you know? Yeah. That's a sad wait list, I would guess. Also, volunteers are they're probably another factor as well. I was looking into volunteering, actually, after doing this research, I was like, man, because not only do I want to teach, like, having a kid really can inspire you to be a better person because you start to think, oh, well, they're going to be looking to me and what I do. Yeah. And it's great to donate money to stuff which is we're good about. But volunteerism is a really big thing that I think not enough people do, and I certainly didn't do enough of that. I'm going to try and teach as an example going forward. Fantastic. Like, man hours, person hours is vital to every program like this in the world. Yeah. Like, money is one thing and funding is super important, but it goes lockstep with people showing up and saying, I will help you do this. Yes, it is. Well put, Chuck. Well put, ma'am. Because, yes, donating money is great. You can be like, wow, we've got 10,000 meals, but they're all just sitting here rotting because we don't have anybody to deliver all of them. It is very important. Emily did it in high school, actually. Oh, yeah, I'm totally not surprised. Meals on Wheels. Yeah, she's a candy striper and did Meals on Wheels and she said it was tough sometimes this is the only human contact these people have in a day. And she really takes stuff on emotionally and it's hard for her. And she said as an adult, she said, I don't know if I would be able to do that. Like, I'm going to try something else. But she said all I would think about is I need to help that one person. I need to try and help move them into a different current house. Right. And then the next person. Exactly. But she said it's tough. A lot of these are very sad cases. And if you have in your mind, like, I just whistle zip it, dude. And bounce around the neighborhoods and drop off meals and have a quick chat. It can be that. But it takes an emotional toll. So, like, hats off to people who are able to do this and put it in the right place in their own emotional life. Right. Anyone can be a Meals on Wheels volunteer, right. No matter how emotionally invested you are in other humans. Right. And the reason why anybody can do this is because we neglected to say there is an organization called Meals on Wheels of America, and they are basically like the lobbying central umbrella unit of all the independent Meals on Wheels programs. There's like 5000 of them. Around the country. Right. So they do advocacy, they issue grants, they figure out best practices. And one of the things they've said is like, here is what you as a volunteer should expect, right? Yes. You are going to be confronted by people you want to help, but all you have to do is all that's expected of you and you can get as involved and invested as you want. But all that's expected of you, and it is enough to bring a meal to this person's house. Say, hey, how are you doing? Good to see you. You're looking fine today, and I'll see you tomorrow. You take care of yourself. See you tomorrow. That they figured out that that is enough to keep people from being completely disconnected from society. And again, the food that you're bringing them is helping keep them alive. I read that something like 3000 to 5000 seniors in America died of malnutrition every year. Wow. Every year. This is not like a 1917 statistics. This is this year, actually it was based on 2006 data. I can't imagine it's gotten too terribly. Much better. Yeah. But the fact is that if you volunteer just doing those basic things, it's enough to have a major impact in the life of somebody. You want to take another break? Yeah, let's. All right, we're going to go deliver three meals and we'll be back right after this. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa like jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. 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Head to squarespace. Comsok and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com. Sysksk. Squarespace. I'm glad you said that before break about this is like, what all you have to do. Because I didn't want to scare people off by volunteering because of Emily's taking things on emotionally. There are people that will do a great job going out there, checking in on people and can successfully do that. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And I'm sure Emily would tell you that there's probably recipients out there like, good Lord, that person's a jerk, or this person is sweeter than that person, or this person's really easy to talk to. I'm sure just the experience on both sides is different for each interaction as well. For sure. Yeah, I think that was worth saying. We should just say, though, when we were talking about what you're expected to do yes. So there's basically three things you are doing just by visiting, and they said that they can arrange your Meals on Wheels volunteer schedule. If you want to volunteer, just go look up Meals on Wheels America and they will connect you to whoever's got a program going in your community. It's easy as pie. Whatever your schedule allows, that's great. They'll take it. That would be fine for them. If it's like, call me if you need somebody to fill in, or I can do this once a week, or I can do this once a month, or I can do this five days a week. What they typically say is you don't have to be independently wealthy. You don't have to be unemployed. You can do this on and typically, if you have an hour and a half for lunch break, they can put you on a Wheels route. Yeah. And they typically try to fit the meal deliveries into that lunch break. And it's a midday delivery. But if you're like, man, I can't get away from my job, so sorry, I can't help you. They'll say, no, we'll find something for you to do. After hours, there are always plenty of things to do, whether it's helping out in the warehouse or if you want to volunteer in the kitchen. You can do stuff like that too. Yeah, for sure. Especially, I would guess if you have food prep experience, like actual experience, they would probably say yes, I'm sure there is a need for that. Yeah. So volunteering is very easy. The program is really good. What you're doing again is you're showing up with a good meal. Usually I saw somewhere it's like a third of the daily calories of people who are receiving the meal. And just that alone is worth bringing a meal for, even if it's the biggest jerk in the world or you're the biggest Misanthrop in the world. Just giving them this meal can do things like help them recover from disease faster, illnesses or conditions faster, keep them mentally acute. There's a lot of just benefits to having nutrition on a daily basis that you take for granted because you can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like it's nothing. But imagine if you can't make it to the store to get peanut butter or jelly or your handshake is too bad to spread the peanut butter and the jelly to be able to have that meal. That alone does it right. But then the fact that they added in these other two layers that there's the keeping social isolation at bay. What they call Meals on Wheels. Just a friendly visit where you're chitchatting, saying, hi, how's the weather? You don't have to be a particularly great conversationalist, but just say hi, basically. And then ask them if they need anything. Looking around, making sure that they haven't fallen as a big one. Like just keeping tabs on this person five days a week, just having people who are going to their house. It's going to cut down on the amount of time between something happening to them, like a fall and somebody noticing that they're not answering the door any longer. Yeah. And that's not all. I didn't realize this. And because there are more than 5000 Meals on Wheels programs in the United States, it really varies per community as to what it's like, but they all fall under that banner. But in some programs you can get pet food delivered for your cat. Right. Sometimes they can offer home repair services. Sometimes they can offer transportation services if you have to go the doctor. If there's bad weather coming up, you can get emergency meals. They're just all sort of like hospital discharge programs to reduce readmissions. Sometimes they have gardens that they grow their own. Like the Meals on Wheels garden will grow vegetables. It's like a farm to table meal delivered to your home. Exactly. You're like, I've had better bak choy, but thank you. So it's pretty cool, man. I mean, it's hard to there are so many great organizations in the world that help people, but Meals on Wheels is like they're really up there. I agree wholeheartedly. If you talk to anybody in Meals on Wheels or anybody that has anything to do with aging, you'll find that they're like biting their nails and looking around nervously while they're talking to you. And the reason why is because remember the baby boom that happened after World War II? We did. And they turned into hippies and then they turned into stockbrokers and then they turned into kind of born again hippies a little bit after they made their millions. Well, now they're the biggest population in the country and they're aging. And they're aging fairly fast. And we are not set up at this moment to handle what's being called the Silver Tsunami. This massive influx of aging people into our economy, into our social structures, needing social services, needing health care. We might be set up for it, maybe, but we're certainly not funding it correctly. And one of the programs that is really poised to take a big hit is Meals on Wheels. Yeah. So are we going to go with the funding talk here? I think so. March of 2017, there were a bunch of big headlines made when the President's budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, said they released what's called their skinny budget, which is basically where everybody can look and see in a broad sense of what's being funded, what's being cut as far as their budget goes. Meals on Wheels was one of the things mentioned, and Mick Mulvaney said that it's a program is one of many that is just not showing any results. Right. What's his quote? Which is, I think they call that foot and mouth disease because it was a really dumb thing to say, no matter who you are. Yes. What I want to know is, where is he getting that? Like, what does that mean? Because there have been plenty of legit, peer reviewed studies that show that Meals on Wheels is a very effective program. Right. Because just almost immediately, people started tweeting and reporting on studies that show that there's actually really good results from Meals on Wheels. In addition to just keeping people alive, it actually is shown to improve their lifespan, to improve their nutritional health, to reduce social isolation. And the point of it the biggest result, too, is there's this big push, and there has been for a couple of decades now, to get what are called low care medicaid recipients out of assisted living for a couple of reasons. One, they're low care, meaning they can care for themselves. They just have been moved into a home, or whatever you want to call it. It's not a nursing home yet. Assisted living is just basically like you're at a senior living facility, but it's not necessarily you're not necessarily receiving nursing care. Right. Those people who are low care senior citizens, they can live on their own. And if they live on their own, they cost a lot less to society than if they were in these assisted care facilities. Now, if you're going to encourage people to live independently, what's called aging in place, which means you stay in your home as you age, they have to have a lifeline of connection to the rest of society. And there's a number of different programs that the Older Americans Act addresses this through, but one of them is Meals on Wheels. So if you're going to have it one way, you got to have the other thing, too, is the point. Yeah. There's a few stats here. Here's one. The average cost of a one month nursing home stay is equivalent to providing home delivered meals five days a week for seven years. Yeah. And another one 2013 study from Brown University said that in most states, increasing Meals on Wheels enrollment would result in a net savings from decreased Medicaid costs from nursing home care. Yeah. And then they found, just literally as far as the health goes, they did through the ARP, they did a study that said that there were statistically significant differences in health benefits among the three groups of people. People who got meal deliveries, people who didn't, and people who are on a waiting list. Was that the other? Yep, exactly. And basically, the people who had face to face visits, they had the highest gains. So there is something to another human being touching you physically and handing you a meal, and it's touching you physically in an appropriate manner. So I did some digging on this funding because it's really hard to go through the web of numbers on what a budget cut means. So what this budget cut is proposed is, right off the bat, cutting $3 million from the OA, which is where the 35% of the actual federal funding comes from. Right. Which is a problem because they need an increase, from what I saw, 12% a year, not a decrease of any kind. Yeah. We should point that out. This is an organization that already was hurting. Right. And with the silver tsunami coming down the pike, if the people who are going to continue to need the expanded version of Meals on Wheels, you need more funding. And apparently 12% increase a year is what they're asking for. Right. So remember earlier, I said, put a pin in those three block grants, the CDBG, Ssbg, and the Csvg. The Trump budget completely eliminates all three of those, not just the money, but there are no more block grants. Those three are gone. Right. And I have to say there was some pretty poor reporting around that Mick Mulvaney press conference, because he was largely talking about cutting block grants, which is $3 billion from the federal government. He just decided to use Meals on Wheels as a poster child for block grants that don't get results, because state and local governments use block grants to all kinds of stuff, all sorts of different things. One of the things that they customarily use them for is to additionally fund local Meals on Wheels programs. Right. But that was just the absolute worst program he could have picked, because not only is it like, no, they actually do bring meals to people and keep them alive. That's a result, number one. But then the fact that there's all of these peer reviewed studies that show that even beyond that basis or that basic need that's being met, it's better than that, that was just a terrible one to pick on. Yeah. And so trying to find out the actual money is really hard because the way it's parked out, like you said, with these block grants going in all different directions. But they finally got an estimate, they think, from a senior Office of Management and Budget official, that it looks like it would be about $48 million. That's 45 million from the block grants and $3 million from the OA. So about $48 million is their best guess of what Meals on Wheels would be reduced annually when they needed more money to begin with. Right. And it's about a $1.4 billion annual operation. So you can say it's only a 3% cut in federal funding or an overall funding, but a 3% cut when people are on waiting list and they needed I'm not going to say a 3% increase, probably needed more than that. Twelve a year. Oh, they needed twelve a year, and they're getting a 3% shortfall or cut. Right. And again, when you're talking about figuring out where to put your money, I've got another one for you. Are you ready for this? I'm ready. You kind of touched on it. The annual meal cost, according to Meals on Wheels America, the main group that kind of oversees all the independent groups, it's about $2,765. For the year. For the year. Okay. The cost of one day in the hospital, according to Mathematica policy research, is no, I'm sorry. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is $2271. For one day in the hospital. Right. So the idea that this isn't cost effective is pretty wrong. And then the other aspect of it, like the fact that being able to stay in your home and age in your home apparently extends lifespans quite dramatically. I saw one that said that a healthy, active, 78 year old person living independently has a life expectancy of an additional 15 or more years. Yeah. So 93. That's not bad. Right. But that when they enter a long term care facility, that life expectancy decreases automatically by 50% to 75%, according to this one study. So there's a really big reason to let people stay in their homes or help them stay in their homes. There's a couple of them if they want to of course, if they want to go live somewhere because there's more socializing or better food or who knows, if you want to go live in a system care facility, I say, yes. Do that. I think there should be plenty of choice, plenty of individual choice, depending on the circumstances and the needs and the desires of the individual for our aging population, no matter whether they are baby boomers or Generation X, eventually, whoever. I think once you reach a certain point in your life, you've contributed enough, and you deserve to be taken care of by the rest of us. Agreed. That's my two cent. Heck, yeah, man. You got anything else? No. It's just so sad that as you age, you should be able to have a dignified existence still. Yeah. Right. And not everyone has kids who make enough money to take care of you or to put you in the most expensive, really great quality nursing home. You might just have terrible kids. That's a good point. Anyway, yeah. That's all I have to say. So we were told that Meals on Wheels has this big push going on right now, which we were like, well, we'll release an episode about that because it's good, for sure. So they have something called americo lunchorg. I think it's like a volunteer campaign drive. And you can also donate, too. You can do both. You can do one, you can do the other. Who knows? But do something. How about that? Yeah, I mean, just go to Meals on Wheels america on the Web or America let'sdoonch org. For sure. There you go. And be human. Oh, wait, no, Chuck. We haven't gotten there yet since I said be human. Be human. It's time for listener mail. You know what? Let's skip listener mail this week, and let's say use that extra 90 seconds to go to your laptop and just do a little investigating on Meals on Wheels. Okay, we'll wait. All right. If you want to get in touch with us, especially let us know about a cool, interesting, or crazy Meals on Wheels experience. We would love that. You can tweet to us at Joshua Clark or S yskpodcast you can join us on Facebook.com. Charleswchuckbryantstepyshow. Yeah, you can catch up with Chuck, too, on Twitter at moviecrush. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Awesome. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, get epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistics made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. 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How Animal Domestication Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-animal-domestication-works | It's strange to hear, but the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, including the domestication of wild animals, is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. You can thank it for everything from kingdoms to Ebola. | It's strange to hear, but the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, including the domestication of wild animals, is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. You can thank it for everything from kingdoms to Ebola. | Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:39:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=16, tm_min=39, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=268, tm_isdst=0) | 48020742 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and our buddy Noel, who's producing us. Yeah. And that's that's stuff you should know. How's it going? Fine. Where are you at? Just a friendly icebreaker. Oh, I see. Yeah. As if we didn't just record another show. We did. It was on police interrogation. So, Chuck yes? You've heard of Jared Diamond before, right? No, it rang familiar. Guns, Germs and Steel. Okay. Yeah. He wrote Collapse. He's known for those two books. I don't think I know that one. I think it came after guns, germs and steel. But he wrote one of my favorite journal articles of all time. It's called the worst mistake in the history of the human race. About agriculture. About transitioning to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that might be. Oh, sorry. That's right. What do you guess about? No, agriculture? Well, the thing is, it may be the worst mistake in the history of the human race. I've talked about it a million times, the article that is. But he also wrote this really interesting article called Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication, which sounds extremely boring, and it's in Nature, the journal Nature. I bet it's not boring, though. It isn't boring, yeah, it's really interesting, because in it, he talks about animal domestication, and he says that it came about as a result of typically in about the same time as agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution, where we went from huntergatherers to agriculturalists to farmers, and everything changed. Like, we grew shorter in stature, our brains grew smaller, our jaws grew shorter. We got just weird in a bunch of different ways. Right. And it was as a result of agriculture. And if you look at what happens when we domesticate animals, when we take them from the wild and we plant them next to us on a farm, the same thing happens. So his point is, what he's arguing is that not only did humans domesticate animals, humans in turn have become domesticated themselves through agriculture. Yeah. There's probably nothing that's had a greater impact, no single transition or change or concept that has had a greater impact on Homo sapiens than the Neolithic revolution or the transition to agriculture boom. And a big part of that was the domestication of animals. Yeah. They kind of went hand in hand in hand, which to me is hilarious, because consider this. I think this is the funniest thing I've ever thought of in my life. Wow. Imagine being an alien come down to Earth, all right? And you're just walking along, taking everything in, and you see a human riding horse. And us, it's a human riding a horse. It makes it a complete sense. But if you're an alien, you see an animal riding another animal. Yeah. And that would have to be the funniest thing you've ever seen, ever. If you're a marching yeah. An animal riding another animal. Yeah. Like those little cowboy monkeys that ride dogs and stuff like that. It's hilarious in that same thing. It's the exact same thing. Or when you watch Planet Apes, an ape riding a horse. That sounds funny. That's unsettling. That's terrifying. Yeah. That is the funniest thing you've ever said. Yes, it is. So, man, that was a good setup. Thanks, man. It's been a while since we got an old Josh story. I get really excited about anthropology. Well, we are covering domestication and I guess we should say off the bat that not everyone is on board PETA. I had to look this up because I wasn't sure what their actual stance was regarding animal domestication. You had to look that up? No, about pets. Sure. I wondered officially, they are against petkeeping. Sure. But they know it's too late. They hate pets, but they know it's too late. They're like what they are not for is for setting these animals free. Here's why the original co founder, I think, is Ingrid Newkirk, is an animal abolitionist. But Peter is like, it's way too far gone. We don't want you to set these animals free, so we're going to fight our fight on spaying and neutering and reducing that population as much as possible. Right, but they are still officially against pets. Right, but their position actually does make sense, is extremely realistic because there is a strict definition of a domesticated animal. Yeah. And domesticated animal is a species that was formerly wild, that has been taken in by humans and whose characteristics have been so radically altered by humans that they can no longer feed themselves. Typically, yeah. It's when we actually change their genetic makeup. Yes. And part of that change, part of the characteristic change is that the food supply is controlled by humans. So if you put, say, an average dog out, my dog Buckley would be dead in three days. Yeah. And somebody said, well, they would forage through garbage humanity. If you took a dog out of any kind of human area and put it in the area, it may return to a primal state, in which case that dog is reverted to a feral state. Now, a feral animal is one that was formerly domesticated and then went back to the wild. If you take a single wolf and you teach it to jump up and grab beef jerky out of your hands, what you have there is a wolfie. That's a tame wolf. Now, a tame wolf could still go fend for itself. It's a tame individual. A domesticated animal is one that's born comfortable associating with humans. Yeah. And there are exceptions, of course. Cats, the domestic house cat being one. You could drop a cat out in the middle of the woods and they would survive. They would hunt mice and eat mice or whatever, squirrels. And the domestic cat is its own species. Yeah, but that raises some questions. Under Jared Diamonds definition, the stricter definition of a domestic animal, if a cat can just go take care of itself, is it technically feral or is it ever really domesticated? Yeah. Or is it just an agreement? Hey, I'll catch the mice in your house and I like that wet food every day at 05:00 p.m.. So I'll just hang out here. Exactly. And I like to sleep under your chin. Like, the cat has found an agreeable arrangement that it could take or leave at any time. Yeah. Mutually beneficial. And as you will see, that's a consistent thing in the domestication of animals is that some people believe that it's good for the animal, it's good for the human. And we have learned to scratch each other's backs in many different ways, literally, even in some cases. So a little bit of a good background for this one might be to listen to our show on natural selection. Yeah, well, it covers natural selection, but there's another kind of selection called artificial selection when it comes to domesticating animals, and that is not the same thing. That is when humans are choosing these desirable traits and making it so through breeding. Like the original horses. The first domesticated horses were they smoked cigars. They did. We broke them of that habit. No, they were small like ponies. There were little ones, a little wild horses in Mongolia, I think they call them the Zoalkis. You brought a family in Pittsburgh? No, it was a Russian army officer that they're named after. But when you start your name with three continents, I never know which one is silent. Okay, so how do you spell it? P-R-Z. So I was not going to guess that spell Ewalsky, so I'm just going to say Zoalski's horse. But people were at one point like, man, I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small. To find the biggest one that's a male and find the biggest one that's a female. Make them go have sex and maybe they'll have a bigger son and then make that one mate with someone big. And eventually these things are going to be big enough to where we can ride them and then by proxy, throw away the ones that don't fit the criteria that we want or use them for something else. Sure, food. But that's what we did with dogs, too. Like, you got a bunch of different ones, right? It's a big, small, soft, furry, fast cuddly. And we said, well, we like this one for this and we'd like that one for that. And so artificial selection was still going on. We were just spreading it out all over the place with like, say, a horse or something. We want it bigger and stronger because we wanted to ride them. And we also wanted to apparently drink their milk, which I did not know. But it makes sense that horses produce milk because they're mammals. But apparently our ancestors used to drink horse milk. You never had horse milk? No. I want to know if there's anyone out there listening who's tasted horse milk. Please describe it. Is someone out there is drinking horse milk right now while they're listening to the show? One of our Mongolian listeners, straight from the teeth. I think they use the horse for all sorts of stuff, the Mongolians. They're also, like, excellent riders. Yeah. I think that Zoeki's horse is in Mongolia again after being nearly extinct. I might be wrong about that. So in addition to selecting the big horse, we also did some cool stuff with sheep we selected out there. They had longer, coarser hair that we didn't want. That's the Kemp. We wanted the softer stuff that was inside, aka the wool. So we bred sheep that had more wool than Kemp, and basically, you can't find Kemp and sheep any longer. And they were one of the first domesticated animals, right? The sheep? Yeah, they were. Chickens don't normally produce eggs as frequently as they do once they've been domesticated, and, like, a Rhode Island Red will produce five to seven a week. That's a lot of eggs. Yeah. Apparently the original chicken, too. I didn't look this up, but I remember a friend of mine that was a vegetarian. I witnessed an argument between a vegetarian and meat eater, which is always fun because I don't get involved in that stuff. And I think when I was like, well, look at the chickens. What else are they going to do? What are they good for? And he was like, Dude, the original chicken wasn't anything like this chicken. Yeah, the original wild chicken was, like, taller and leaner and ran super fast road Runner and did all sorts of chicken things that weren't just being slaughtered for food. And apparently the first chickens were domesticated, they think, for cock fighting. Yeah, for entertainment. Crazy. We have a shameful history, don't we, as people, humans. Yeah. So, diamond, you would think, if we can domesticated animals, why don't we just domesticate them all and use them for purposes? And diamond writes that only about 14 animal species out of 148 Canada have been domesticated, and that's because we can't domesticate every animal. There are certain things, there are certain criteria that even opens up the possibility. Yeah, there's like a six point checklist, basically, and it's not progressive. If any one of these characteristics or traits isn't met, it pretty much just throws off the whole deal. So you got to have all six. All right. The first one is the right diet. If you're a picky animal. What's the one that only eats bamboo? The bamboo toad. Those dumb koalas. Koalas. Now they eat eucalyptus. Yeah, man, I'm glad you remember that. Yeah. You're not going to be able to domesticate a koala, because what you want is something that you can feed in mass quantities on cheap, accessible food. Oh, well, actually, bamboo would be the way to go. It's eucalyptus. Yeah. I don't know how eucalyptus because if they bamboo, they'd probably be domesticated in that. Well, no, by cheap, accessible food, I think they mean, like, millions of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough. Bamboo is like one of the fastest growing plants on Earth. Not realize that. Are we still talking about eucalyptus? But this bamboo thing have you heard about bamboo? I have a company that grows it. Oh. Josh's bamboo floors. The number two thing is a fast growth rate, so I got to be able to grow quick. And so you can use them. Yeah. So, like, if we'd figured out how to use gorillas to build skyscrapers, that'd be awesome. But it would take forever to build a skyscraper because gorillas only reproduce fairly infrequently. Okay, so we need something that can build a skyscraper fast. And that's why that didn't work right when they tried it. Yeah, but that one gorilla wearing the hard hat got a lot of laughs, friendly disposition. That's pretty clear. If you're a kodiac bear, you're not going to be domesticated. They tried that. They tried grizzlies at one point. That's a failed domestication. Oh, wow. Yeah. Zebras very famously can't be domesticated. Yeah. Because imagine people would be like, man, I want to ride that thing. It's cool looking. Yeah. And it'll bite you to death. Really? Yeah. Apparently in the Jared Diamond article, he says that zebras account for more injuries to zookeepers than any other animal at the zoo. Man, yeah. That is one pissed off stripy horse. They're not horses at all, though, are they? They're related, for sure. The zebra is one, and then koalas, too, apparently are like ferocious little animals while they're tired of eating bamboo. Eucalyptus. Right. 1234 easy breeding. That's pretty obvious. You got to be able to pump out little baby puppies quickly. Yes, because some animals just shut down when they're captive. Like, they don't breed. Like, pandas have a lot of trouble breeding in captivity, too. Is that why it's always such a big deal when they're born at the zoo or when twins are born, like, at the Atlanta Zoo? Oh, yeah. Man, I don't know about zoos. Well, we did a podcast on that. I think that's the conclusion we came to. I think that was the title of it. Man, I don't know about zoos. Yeah. What is it called? Our zoos. Good or bad for animals? Yeah, that was a good episode. Yeah, it's one of those long lost, overlooked ones that are so good. That's Polarizing, too, man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales in captivity, and people really feel passionately about, like, blackfish, about supporting SeaWorld or not supporting SeaWorld, and that blackfish is a bunch of bunk. And apparently Blackfish was highly manipulated. The documentary was. But at the end of all that, I was like, I don't care. I just don't think they should be kept in captivity. This one particular thing. But that was just me respect of a social hierarchy. That's a big one, because if you can't be the alpha dog and the leader of the pack, then you're going to have a very hard time domesticating that animal. Yes. But with a cat being an exception. An animal that does follow a social hierarchy is basically prearranged to be domesticated. Because you just take that alpha male. You punch them in the face a couple of times in front of everybody. Make them cry. And then now you're the alpha male and you say. Start laying eggs and they listen to you and then they're domesticated. At least in that respect. After you punch the chicken. Yeah, but that's a big one with that social hierarchy. It sets them up. They're predisposed to our method of domestication, which is listening to humans. And like sheep, it's mind blowing, because sheep, they are a herd animal that follows an alpha leader. Right? Yeah. And so we have gotten so we're just show off when it comes to animal domestication. We're so good that we've taken one of our domesticated animals, the dog, and put the dog in charge of the sheep as the alpha male. As the sheep, yeah. That's how sheep are herded. That's just showing off the aliens. That's another good alien laugh. The double domestication. Yes. The dog leading the sheep. And it's funny, too, if you ever had a dog that has the herding instinct, when you see that play out in your own home we used to see it all the time with Lucy. She would totally hurt us. And when we let her out in the backyard, she would walk the perimeter of the fence instead of running through the middle of it. Very interesting stuff, those original tendencies. And then the last one is they won't panic if you have an animal that freaks out behind the fence like deer. Yeah. You're going to have a real hard time there. But like we said, there are exceptions because wolves were fierce and cats don't follow a pack leader. And we're going to get to dogs and cats a little later. But first, right after this break, we're going to talk a little bit about the history of domestication. Chuck, you know who makes a cool website? Yeah, you do. If you use Squarespace.com. That is absolutely right. And Squarespace is not only the great functional engine for making the best websites, you can possibly make it's easy. It's intuitive. It uses drag and drop, for Pete's sake. That's right. You're going to have a beautiful, clean design. Your website is going to look super great. Your content basically is going to become the focus of your website, which is what everyone wants. Yeah. And if you get jammed up, man, you just get in touch with Squarespace. They have 24/7 customer support through email and live chat. That's right. And if you're interested in selling some of your wares. All plans have commerce options, which is really cool. You can host an entire store. You can accept donations for your personal blog, makes it really handy to make a few bucks, and your site looks good on every device. Plus, you can try all this risk free. Go to squarespace. comStuff. And because you know Chuck and Josh, you'll get a 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. That's right. And if you like the service, it's going to cost as low as $8 a month, and then it's going to include a free domain name if you sign up for a year. All you got to do, once again, is use our offer code stuff, and you'll get 10% off that first purchase. That's right. So go to squarespace. comStuff right now. So if you listen to our show on Caveart, you know that and on Egyptology, you know the animals. What else? Mummification. Yeah, probably so. You know, the animals have been tied to humans for a long time and revered by humans for a long time, as evidenced by the fact that they buried them and they mummified them and they painted them on their walls. Painted pictures of us riding them. Yeah. They think that the first animal to be domesticated by far was the dog. Yeah. How awesome is that? Huntergatherer Society and the dog were pals long before agriculture ever came along. But about the time of the agricultural revolution, which is and get this. Check this out. Yes. 10,500 years BP to about 4500 years BP. No, it's BP before present. Is that the new one? Yeah, that's like the scientific way of saying it. There's no zero year or anything like that. It's just 10,500 years before present before present. Before present. Not British. That was New Zealand. Basically. At some point about 10,500 years ago, what they think happened is the Earth's climate changed. Maybe we killed off enough of the megafauna through over hunting or through climate change. They just went extinct. And about that time, some plants came around that we noticed we really liked, and maybe accidentally we started growing them. And then we figured out that we could just select these ones, and through a process of artificial and natural selection merged together, we got agriculture. And about that same time, we started to domesticate pigs, sheep, and cattle. I think we're the big first three, and they still are the big three. Oh, yeah. Like, those are the money domesticated animals, you know. Well, yes. And like you said, it's tied to human natural selection as well, because if you are the tribe that has figured out how to keep cattle, then you're going to do better than your neighboring tribe that hasn't yet. And so you are going to be more successful as a civilization. Yes, you are. And you're going to conquer like we talked about. And I think the royalty one, we talked a lot about tribes conquering other tribes through agriculture, through exporting agriculture. And as a result, Jared Diamond points out, 88% of humans alive today speak one of seven language families, and they come from two places in Eurasia, which were the first places for agriculture to take root. So basically, those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today, we still basically the vast majority of speak one of seven language groups. Wow. That's crazy. Years. All these thousands of years later, that's how effective agriculture was. It asserting authorita we should do one on agriculture. The birth of agriculture. I can't believe we haven't yet. Yes, let's do it. Agreed. So, back to animals. Here's a little breakdown of where some of your favorite animals came from. So in Southeast Asia is where you first got your goats, pigs, sheep and dogs. Southwest Asia? Yeah. Move on over to central area. It's like Mesopotamia. Okay. It's the birth of it all. Yes, it's Central Asia. You're going to get your chickens and your two hump bactrian. Is that how it's pronounced? Yeah, it looks like it. Camel. Central Asia. Yeah. And those camels were actually well known for long hair and they can survive in cold climates. Yes. They're not just desert dwellers, right? No. Apparently when they were domesticated, it created such a revolution that some societies stopped using the wheel because they're like, we don't need the wheel anymore, we got camels. Like the wheel left altogether, and then came back when someone said, cars are pretty cool, too. Yeah. Actually, it's much sooner than that. Arabia is where you have the Arabian camel with a single hump china, they domesticated pigs, and the water buffalo and dogs move over to the Ukraine and you've got the wild Tarpon horses. And so what most folks think are the OG, the original horse. Right. Even though I read about the small ones in Mongolia yeah. Was new ski or the Kolalski. Yeah, the Kofski family. Yeah. I'm going to have to look that up. And then Egypt, you've got your donkeys, and then South America, you've got your llama and your alpaca llama as a beast of burden, and the alpaca for their soft wool and the guinea pig for their meat. Oh, really? Yeah. In South America? Yeah, the Andes. I don't want to eating any pig. That's what they were bred for originally. Really? Yeah. Wow. And those were some of the earliest ones. And Jared Diamond again, I know I keep citing him, but man, this guy's great ideas. Is he live? Yeah. Okay. He's a modern man. Yeah. He's got a little beatnik pointy beard and everything. Really? Yeah, he's a good guy. Let's get in touch with him. Okay. Attention Gerry Diamond. Please contact us for reasons we'll figure out later. Yeah. Stuff podcast at How Stuff Works put in the subject line, I'm Jared Diamond and now we're going to get $500. It'll be Lou Bega posing as Jared Diamond. Nice one. So diamond pointed out that over the last 1000 years, only one substantial animal has been added to the list of domesticated animals. So basically, we were good at it to start, and we did everything we could. Basically, almost all animals that are going to be domesticated on Earth have been domesticated. Was it the hamster? It was the reindeer. Oh, the hamster was until 1930, though. Yes, I know. And if you read that, that's technically attained animal. Oh, it's not domesticated. Not under the strictest definition where it's like the animals are born and they're genetically modified. They're comfortable around humans. They're born that way. With a tamed animal, you're like inventing the wheel with each individual organism. Got you. With a domesticated animal, you've taken a wild species and you've selected it enough so that when an animal is born, it's cool being around a human. Whereas if you're around like a gerbil or a hamster baby, it's not going to be cool around you. It doesn't have thousands of years of genetic information telling you that from birth, it can be comfortable with you because you're going to give it some pellets to eat. Okay. Whereas a dog, a puppy will just automatically snuggle up with you. Right. But think about getting close to a wolf pup. It's going to be problematic. Let's go try right now. Did you ever see that movie Never Crywolf? The Disney movie from the mid 80s that was so good. It was live action. Ethan Hawk. No, it was way before his time. No, I totally know what you mean. I can picture the guy in my head. He goes and lives with the wolves by himself. Man, it's a good movie. Yeah, he was in I can't remember he's in another movie. So when we did domesticated, like I said, we took a wild animal, underwent a process through artificial selection to where it just became something different. And there's certain traits that they're not quite sure how they happen, but they are clearly linked to the genes that lead to domestication, that take an animal and turn it from wild to tame to domesticated. That have outward signals and signs like floppy ears. Yes. The only other animal in the wild that has floppy ears is the African elephant. Yeah. Every other animal in the wild has perky ears, but it's almost like it's a signal, like, okay, we're tame now. Our ears don't need to perk up. It totally is smaller brain size. Yes. They don't need to be as smart over the years if you're feeding, as evidenced by my dumb dog Buckley. Like I said, he wouldn't survive two days in the wild. Yeah, my neighbor one time left his dog out all night by accident. And I was going out to the car the next morning and this big Rottweiler comes running over at me. And I was like, at first I was like, oh, man. And then I realized it was Carter and I went and banged on his door, and he finally woke up and he's like, Carter's in here? I was like, I don't think so. And he had come home from a long night and let him out and forgot to let him back in, and little Carter just slept on the front porch. It's like the sweetest thing ever. But Carter survived is my point. But sleeping on the front porch? Sleeping on the front porch and, like, scratching on it. Please let me in. Yeah. Smaller brains, curly hair, sharp sense of sight and hearing. Well, it's lessened. Yeah, it's lessened because they don't need that stuff either, right. Because they're being cared for by humans. The humans are saying, you just get dumb. We're in charge now. Yeah, we'll teach you everything you need to know. We got a lot of this data, this information from a Jared Diamond very no, not even a very famous study that went on for about 40 years by a Russian geneticist named Dimitri Balaev. And Belayev said, hey, I'm going to figure out how domestication actually works, and I'm going to take silver foxes and I'm going to compress the domestication process. And basically, over the course of like, 30 or 40 years, even after he died, his colleagues and interns and assistants carried on this experiment. So it's been going on for maybe 50 years. And they found that you can get predictable results from domesticating animals. And they've domesticated some silver foxes. Their ears started getting floppy, their skulls started to get smaller, they started to get curly hair, some of them started to bark, and they were born comfortable around humans. Yeah. And here's the thing. If you've seen there's a really cute video on the Internet about a little fox getting his belly rubbed. He looks sort of like dogs. But they are DNA evidence. They have pretty much proven that dogs are descended from the Asian grey wolf right. And have nothing to do with foxes. But that's just proof through this experiment that taming and domesticating this animal can lead to these traits. Yeah, because a lot of people are like, how do you get a Pomeranian from a gray wolf or a pug from a gray wolf or something like that? Have you seen that picture of that pug who is clearly messing around with a crawfish and gets his tongue bit and it's like in midair, and they have huge eyes that are bulging out. Anyway, he's trying to have sex with the crawfish. No, like he was sniffing it and the crawfish, like, grabbed onto his tongue and now the crawfish is hanging onto his tongue and mid air is the pugs, like squealing or whatever. It's hilarious. Anyway, they figured out that because of domestication, these traits change. And like I said before, with different kinds of dogs, you get different kinds of well, different looking dogs that we've selected for over time. Yeah. And it didn't take that. Long, apparently. Apparently with canine, specifically, selective breeding can affect the species really rapidly. And there's been evidence of pekinese dogs as far back as first century Ad. China. So they weren't wolves for long once we decided. And there's different theories on how that very first happened. One of them, which I like, is that people found abandoned pups and it's just a natural human instinct to see a little puppy and care for it. So they said, well, let me take this little wolf puppy because it needs a home. We should talk about the science of cute. Sometimes it's really interesting, like why we find things cute in email the other day. We'll have to do that one. So, yeah, that's one of the theories. The other one is that maybe some of the more tame wolves would rummage around our garbage for food. And so if you were a more tame wolf, you're more likely to survive. Eventually that would evolve into a more dog like species. Yeah, because the human garbage pile was much more reliable source of food than, say, like, whatever was growing in the wild. Exactly. That's natural selection basically through artificial means almost. Yeah. But either way, they think that dogs descended from wolves or diverged from wolves as long as 100,000 years ago, but they didn't really start to undergo the drastic morphological changes until maybe 15,000 years ago. Yeah. And again, all of this predates the advent of agriculture. So that means that huntergatherers and dogs were friends for a while. And they think that the reason that happened was because they figured out that a dog could go flesh out some Corey a huntergatherer could spirit and then tear off a piece and give the dog some and eat some himself. And they had a symbiotic hunting relationship. That was aces. Yeah, like we said earlier, mutually beneficial. It was great for the dog. They were fast and fierce and we were smart. And because we already mentioned dogs innately want to follow a lead dog, an alpha dog. It was kind of like the perfect relationship. And it has been ever since. Yes. And one of the other cool things about the domestication of the dog is in ancient Rome, apparently, women is where they had the first evidence of little lap doggies because they were supposedly cured stomach aches, which, of course, they didn't. But I think it just made someone feel better having a little dog curled up on their lap. So how's your tummy feel now? We selected them for that. So we selected them for that. We selected, oh, I don't know, sheepdogs to herd and terriers to catch rats. And that explains all this variation in dog breeds. Yeah, I saw a Cold special on it the other day. I think it was on Animal Planet, but it wasn't one of those just like, look how cute everything is. It was kind of like the science behind the history of these animals it was really cool. Got you. So let's take a break, and we'll come back and we'll talk about cats and other stuff, too, right after this. Okay, so cats don't follow an alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how they could possibly have been domesticated. And if you talk to certain people, they may not have ever really been domesticated. Yeah. Cats don't look different than their ancestors. Right. Which means that it makes it tough to go back and compare modern cats to the cats in the fossil record and say, oh, they diverged x number of years ago, or whatever. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things about cats, is when you look at a cat in the backyard, crouched down to leap on the bird, it looks just like a big lion. Right. About the leap on the big bird. The thing is, they're pretty sure that cats did not diverge from big cats like lions. They think they came instead from a couple of different wild cats, a European wildcat and an African wildcat. And both of those are still around today, and they think that that's what the cat's last common ancestors were. Yeah, if you look up the African wildcat, it looks like just a bigger version of a tabby. Yes. And they don't know exactly when they were domesticated, but there's evidence that as far back as 9500 years ago, there's at least one grave site where a cat was clearly buried with a human, which indicates some sort of importance and familialness with a cat. Yeah, they love cats and dogs. Right. And I think cats even had, like, a religious significance, or maybe both of them did, because anubis, that was the dog. Right. I don't remember. I just remember Horace was the hawk. Right. But ancient Egyptians love their dogs and cats. It was Horace, the dog. I think Anubis was the dog. So, again, cats probably are not technically domesticated. Well, the reason why we took them in, though, is the same reason that some people still take them in now is because they're good mousers. Right. That's pretty much the explanation for domestication in a lot of ways. Like, the animals were useful for work. That's right. So some of the other animals, very ancient domesticated animals that we domesticated for work, and I guess I should say it wasn't just for work. Probably initially, we domesticated animals for a food supply, like their milk things, like cattle, cows. We domesticated them for milk, of course. Yeah. Their ancient ancestor is now extinct, called the AROC. That's what led to modern tame cattle, apparently. Right. Oxen, we domesticated them for work. Although there's milk from them. You can pretty much drink milk from anything. Yeah. Mammal, you can milk anything. Just a little milking. The ox, I think, was even stronger than the cow, and they would pull initially sledges, like, put a bunch of junk on that thing and pull it over here and then eventually plows and of course wheeled wagons and some say that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were with the wheel if it hadn't been for things like ox. Yeah because we would have had to pull it. That's no good cheap. We eventually figured out that we could breed them for their wool. Although apparently there was a 5000 year differential between the time we domesticated sheep and the time we started using wool. Oh yeah. Before the loom or before they started weaving by hand. Yeah goats are great because they'll eat anything so they're super useful. You can be on infertile rocky land and a goat is pretty happy. They're great. Climbers eat them. Yeah. Got meat unfortunately make cheese out of their milk. Did you know that cashmere comes from goats? Yeah. Did not know that. Did not know that. I think they're just good for looking at and thinking they're cute. Sure. Just one thing pigs of course are descended domesticated from the wild boar and pigs were domesticated mainly because they would eat waste and trash and so they were handy to have around because they would eat our trash and then we would eat them. Right. You know it's interesting north America has a pretty fascinating history as far as domesticated animals go with pigs in particular the wild hogs in North America were not around. There are a couple of pig like animals but there's no true wild pigs in North America or there weren't until the 16th century when DeSoto brought a bunch of domesticated pigs who wandered off some of which wandered off and became the wild hogs of the Americas. Well that's the same thing happened to the horse. Exactly. They originally came over on the Bering land bridge and then went extinct and then the Spanish brought them over and they said hey I don't know why there aren't horses here already because this is pretty great. Yeah the horses said that and some of them went feral. And now you have the horses on Cumberland Island. Yeah. They're still wild aren't they? Yeah that's pretty amazing. Unless they're faking it. No, Cumberland Island is here in Georgia for those of you that don't know. We're not talking about some South American country. No Cumberland Island. Yeah right here in the south. And what's cool is for me this is the fact of the podcast after the horse the next step forward and speed transportation was 5000 years later with the steam train. Yeah that's why we're still 5000 years. Horses were as fast as we could go and tie up twelve of them to that stage coach and we'll be twelve horses strong. But yeah for 5000 years it's just amazing. And then finally they invented the steam engine and the horses were like all right fine, we'll go over here. But apparently at first they were used for their meat and their milk. Yeah horse milk again. And then they were used as a mode of transportation. Donkeys also good for transporting, like you said, Egypt. Yeah, they came out of Egypt. Camels, good for transport. And you got a couple of different kinds, the bactrian and the Arabian camels. And just using animals for transport and for work kind of allowed for not only the agricultural revolution to take hold, but for it to spread as well through trade routes and stuff that allowed humans to just move longer distances faster. That was another big way that domestication changed humanity. It helped us spread like a plague over the face of the Earth so we could ruin everything. Yeah, I guess we can talk about some other smaller livestock, like chickens and roosters, like you said earlier. This is, I think, maybe the second factor that show is possibly domesticated for entertainment as cock fighters, which is sad. Turkeys. I didn't know this. They were one of the few indigenous North American domesticated animals. Yeah, mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew? I didn't know that either. Although if that floats your boat, you should read 1493, because stuff like that comes up another line. I just need to read both those at some point. I can't believe you have it. I know. Here's another one. Bees. We domesticated bees, I'm sure through a very long and painful process. This is discussed in 1493 as well. So we domesticated bees and we use bees to help us with another domesticated organism, the almond tree. Oh, yeah. So that's another one. That's like sheep dogs herding sheep. Oh, yeah. But this is bees pollinating almonds. Yeah. Well, bees. We did a great episode on that. That's how we sweetened everything for many years and still do. Using honey, I did last night. It's still delicious. In a cocktail? No, on a biscuit. Oh, nice. A little honey on a biscuit. Did you make the biscuit yourself? Yummy, did. Nice. From scratch? No, from the can. Yeah. Okay. Those are good, though. Oh, yeah. You know what's real good, I've noticed is the frozen ones in the bag instead of the can. They rise a lot more like a traditional Southern biscuit to me. We wanted just like a nasty, buttery like layer biscuit. The flaky layers. Yeah. Man, those are good. And it's always fun to open the package, too. And it's delicious with honey. But thanks to a man named Ll. Langstroth, he is the guy who really made beekeeping. There are a lot of people working with frames already, but he's the first guy that made removable and movable frames, which apparently bees will have a tendency to tie their honeycombs into the wall of the box, let's say. And with those removable and movable frames, they couldn't do that anymore. And apparently that made it really easy to manage them. Yeah. So thanks to him, in 1852, smart guy, we could domesticate those bees for their delicious money. And so here's where it comes kind of falls apart from me. I could see saying bees are domesticated. Sure. They don't sting you? They're used to being around people. Yes. Silkworms? No. Rabbits? No. I would say that you can tame a rabbit, but for the most part they're not domesticated. Okay. And then the same with hamsters, which I didn't realize that they were this recent. Yeah, from 1930. And another fun fact is supposedly the entire population of domesticated or I'm sorry, tamed hamsters derives from that one hamster family. Yeah, because they make so many little hamsters so quickly. So you take issue with silkworms, rabbits and hamsters? I do. As tamed, but not domesticated. Yes, like the elephant. Just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant to ride and chuck. Just before we wrap up, I mentioned that humans, in turn have been domesticated by agriculture. And we have like, we've undergone a lot of the same changes that domesticated animals undergo when we domesticate them. Like, our reproductive period has increased because we don't have to carry a kid like 10 km every day because we're not hunter gatherers. So we can have more kids. Yeah, just go on the horse and ride all over town. Exactly. And one of the other ways that we've changed, in addition to some of us becoming lactose tolerant into adulthood, is we've become ravaged by and also immune to a lot of diseases, a lot of epidemic diseases which couldn't have ever existed prior to the advent of agriculture for two reasons. One, it needs a dense human population that agriculture supports for it to be spread around and contracted and to really gain steam. And then secondly, it also requires a lot of repeated close proximity to animals. And it turns out that all of our epidemic diseases come from the agricultural revolution and are hanging out with livestock a lot. Yeah. Like, for example, influenza came from pigs and ducks. Measles and tuberculosis came from cattle. Possibly smallpox came from cattle, if not camels. And then get this, the very fact that almost all of these worst epidemic diseases have their origins in Eurasia mean that's because our domestication took place in Eurasia, which means that the people of Eurasia were able to develop resistance and immunity over the generations to these diseases. So they don't get these diseases as much. No. And when we came over, that's what wiped out the North American New World populations, because they didn't have any resistance to these diseases. So you can really make a case that agriculture changed everything more than anything else ever has. Wow. So that's that. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Then you need to read 1490, 114, 93. I'll do that tonight. Okay. If you want to know more about animal domestication, you can type those two seemingly boring, but rather fascinating words into the search barhouseofworks.com. And that will bring up this article. And then, since it's a search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Nielsen family. We heard from quite a few I got quite a few people that showed pictures of their little, like two and $3 packets. It's kind of neat. I don't think it's even $5 anymore. I think a couple of people just got $2. Apparently they give you two to sweeten the pot, and then once you do it, you get more. That's what I think. That's what somebody, I think said, well, this is from a real deal Nielsen family. They got paid. And they're from Atlanta, from Grant Park. Apparently our address was picked at random by their computer program and they sent out a representative with a gift set of ugly tumblers to convince us to participate. We agreed because they pay you about $200 every six months if you let them track your TV and computer usage. Rob, who was the representative, came by, installed the TV box and computer program, and we check in on us in person every six months and ask a set of questions about our life and purchasing habits. They always asked about table wine, which I thought was interesting. No, every time we turned on our TV, they would have loved me because I would just be drunk on table wine the whole time. Every time we turn on the TV or open up our laptop, we had to press a button about who was watching, and using the computer wasn't that hard, but it became annoying after a couple of years. So we were happy when our contract ended. Apparently they were really excited to have us as a part of their program because we were what they call a Grand Slam family, which means we were young, under 30, with over the air TV, no cable antenna, and we owned a Mac. So that's a grand slam? Apparently. TV? Yes, I guess so. It seems like we are pretty rare find in the world, in their world. So rare that when our two year participation ran out, they offered us a year long extension. We also got a bonus payment for being a minority household, which is hilarious because both of us are white as can be. But my husband is half Cuban, so that is from Laura and Chris right here in Atlanta. Nice. Laura and Chris Nielsen. Yeah. There's the Nielsen family. No cable, under 30 Mac users. The Grand Slam. Grand Slam. If you are a Grand Slam family of some weird sort, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. Stuff you shouldn't do. You can send us an email to Softpodcast at Housework Works.com and check out our Home on the Web stuffyoushinenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
Evel Knievel Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/evel-knievel-part-i | Evel Knievel was perhaps the world's most legendary daredevil. He came along at a time when the world ate up this kind of entertainment, partially in hopes that he crashed. And crash he did. A lot. Learn all about this icon in this special two part episod | Evel Knievel was perhaps the world's most legendary daredevil. He came along at a time when the world ate up this kind of entertainment, partially in hopes that he crashed. And crash he did. A lot. Learn all about this icon in this special two part episod | Tue, 09 Aug 2016 12:59:44 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=12, tm_min=59, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=222, tm_isdst=0) | 36628759 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is sponsored by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website. Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. And this is that You Should Know, the one where Chuck and Jerry, who are old, reminisce about evil caneval. We're all the same age. Nobody that's true. We're all in our 40s. But I wasn't suddenly catapulted or imbued with memories of evil and evil. So you don't have any? I had a I guess not. His star was fading by 78, 79. Let me ask you what the Stunt Cycle was like. Was it a ramp where a man on a motorcycle was wedged in, and then you pulled a rip cord and it shot off? Well, that's what Jerry was just talking about. The version I had of the evil can evil stunt Cycle was a little unit that had a ramp that this little motorcycle and doll on the motorcycle action figure. You could click it into place, and then there was a crank on the side. Okay. And you crank it, cranked it. And then I think it was a button or something you hit to release it, and it would go flying off. Okay, but Jerry, you had the rip cord one. She's misremembering. I think she realizes I had something with the rip cord. It was like a knock off of it or something. You had the awful canafel. Nice, fun Chuck. Which we'll get to. That's actually a real thing. That was smart. Not a real toy. No, there's a real human who lived and died in butte, Montana. But evil Caneva was a big deal for me as a kid, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I was right in there at, like, six and seven years old when he was doing his biggest stunts on ABC wide world of sports, seemingly every weekend. Yeah. No, by the time I was becoming aware of the world, he had already spent all his money in his bankrupt. Right. Like, you were, like, 17. You're like, whoa, where am I? What's going on? Why is everybody looking at me? Why am I still wearing a diaper? So part of this inspiration for picking this was I saw the documentary being evil a few weeks ago. The Johnny Knoxville one? Yeah. Good. It's not bad. Oh, johnny knoxville is at home going, yes. I mean, it wasn't great, but I think the bar for documentaries is higher than it's ever been as far as entertaining, you know, they're making another five or six episodes of making a murder, so I heard it was okay. That wasn't bad. Too many interviews with modern day people. Yeah. That can easily ruin a documentary, talking about what he meant to them and stuff. Yeah. Who cares? Yeah. Go take your memories and go to hell. No, I agree with you wholeheartedly, but it was good. I watched it on a plane. It was worthwhile. Oh, yeah. Wait a minute. You watched it on a plane and you weren't watching us instead? No, don't watch us. We're kind of funny. That's what I'm told. You're missing out, pal. Internet roundup is the finest thing anywhere. All right, so evil Kaneville was born in October 17, 1938, in butte, Montana. Yes. A rough and tumble mining town still to this day, I imagine. But back then, I doubt if it's genteel, but watching this documentary, he made a very strong point several times about how tough it was, and the men got in, like, there were fights every day. It was just rampant fighting and misogyny in this town. I think that's what it says, like, on the welcome to view. Of course, it was the 1930s and 40s, so that kind of stuff was a little more acceptable, I guess. Yeah. But throughout his career, he was a bit of a misogynistic jerk. Oh, yeah. He took the whole mentality and really ran with it. Yeah. But I read elsewhere that the movie that was made about him starring George hamilton, which he supposedly didn't like, is called evil caneval. Yeah, there's been several, but this is, I think, the first one. It was in 71, I think, when he was really just starting to gain his fame. It was written by the guy who wrote apocalypse now. Yeah, john millias. There's a great documentary about him, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Well, apparently the way that he wrote the movie really created in evil caneval's mind, the evil coneval persona and so he really adopted that, like, macho, bravado, tough thing. He was a tough kid before then, and a tough dude, but apparently that really kind of laid the groundwork for him to be like, oh, this is how I speak in public. And, yeah, I will go ahead and punch that cameraman's lights out. He literally adopted it in the documentary. In the movie. The John Millia script. In the movie, there's a lot of long voiceover dialogue from George Hamilton as evil and evil. And, like, I would look the beast in the eye and I would know I would have to make the jump, and then it would cut to evil and evil saying these things. Yeah. He would literally lifted dialogue from his own movie. I see. To use stuff. It was very funny. And rumor had it that when it came time to read the script, he was like, you read it to me. Oh, yeah. He had, like, George Hamilton read him the entire script. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, he did drop out of school. Yeah. So he was a kid, 1938, born in Butte, tough town, had first of two kids. His family, his birth parents pretty much abandoned him to his paternal grandparents and kind of just checked out. So long, Evil. Yeah. I'm not sure what happened to them, but they did not stick around his parents, which had to have a bad effect on him. Yeah. I have the impression, though, that his grandparents raised them as best they could. He wasn't neglected or anything like that now, but I think it was one of those situations where you tend to have a lot more free time when you're being raised by your grandparents than by your parents who have a little more energy. Yeah, absolutely. Early on in life, he kind of found he had a neck for this PT. Barnum esque way of drumming up attention, which would serve him later in life. When he was a little paper boy, he would outsell his counterparts by making up headlines, or at the very least, sensationalizing the headlines. Right. So he could sell more papers. Elk goes on killing rampage. And by the way, I got most of my stuff from the Evil Caneva website. His own website? Yeah. Which I believe is operated by his son Kelly. At least he's signed on to it. It's like an official biography. Yeah, it was a very much more complete biography than what we had on our own website. Oh, yeah. And I'll see you in the New York Times obituary. Those are always good. Those are good. There's a great New Yorker article I found about the guy. We'll talk about them later. There was a great New Yorker article. Read a good review of the Johnny Knoxville documentary. Yeah, there's some other stuff around there. Was it written by Johnny Knoxville? What is it? Brilliant. Four stars. So he goes away to the army because he got in a lot of trouble growing up with steel hubcaps and motorcycles and things. So he was faced with prison time or army. He chose army and then eventually came back to butte and married a woman named Linda bork, who he stayed married to for many years until, I think, one of the two. You just watched this documentary, man, you feel so bad for this lady. Oh, I'm sure, because she's very sweet. And you get to see the heartbreak on her face of being married to this man who just flagrantly cheated on her hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times through the years. So one of the things I saw was that he did that, but he also revered her. So how did they get into the documentary of how he managed to balance that or rationalize that or is that just not the case? I don't know, man. The documentary doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the man himself. Well, apparently that would be a very glossy thing to do because there was a lot of stuff about this guy that's not so hot. Yeah, for sure. You would have thought the guy was single because he's literally, like, on TV, leaving the casino drunk with four women, and he'll yell at the cameraman like, you want to follow us to our room? And we're in the honeymoon suite. And his wife is at home watching this on TV. Yes. It's terrible. So he went back home to bute worked at a mining company for a while. He apparently then worked on the surface of the mine and got fired when he drove a bulldozer wheelie style into the power lines, causing the city to lose power, which this is a perfect example to me of this legend of evil Caneva right here. Some of the sounds made up when you hear about it, even if it's real. Especially if it's real when you hear about it, you're like, what a legend. Yeah, but imagine, like, being on that site watching this happen, having your life just risked by some jackass and then the entire town of butte being out of electricity for hours because some guy did a wheelie in an earth mover. If you really put yourself in the position of being there in reality and seeing this unfold he's a minute. Yeah, a lot of ways. And he recounts the story with, like, a whiskey about how great it was. Right, exactly. In 1956, he finally got in some real trouble and was sent to a jail. And this is where his nickname came up, because they're in the jail with him was one William canafel, and he was actually nicknamed awful canafel. Right. That's where I made up that dumb joke. I thought it was a great joke. Well, thanks. And so apparently the guy the jailer said, we have awful canafel and evil Knieval. And later in life, when he would get a sponsorship, he would officially take on the name evil, but he changed it from an I to an E because he didn't want to be associated with being evil. Yeah, he had this really weird duality or dichotomy going on where I guess he wanted to be good, but he really just wasn't necessarily but he was always like that's why he wore the white, red, white and blue, because he didn't want to be associated with, like, Hell's Angels or black leather. Yeah. Because one of the things that evil can evil did was to introduce motorcycles to the rest of America in a nonhealth Angels way. Right. Because after World War II, everybody on a motorcycle was a member of a motorcycle gang. Right. And that was what America thought of people on motorcycles. Evil kneevel comes along and he's like, no, look, you can jump over Greyhound buses with these things. As long as you're wearing red, white and blue, you're fine. Right. And he was also inspired, too, with the capes and things by Elvis, of course, and Liberati, which might seem like an odd inspiration, but he thought Liberati was like, the greatest showman on earth, like he and Elvis. Why not? And when you saw his private life, he lived like Elvis, very lavish spender, not smart with money. Yeah. He said that's there's nothing, no matter how expensive it is, that he's not going to have two of yeah, he was one of those, like, I had two yachts, I had two planes. He said I've owned every diamond, I've slept with every kind of woman I wanted to. And apparently he had a yacht that you could land a helicopter on. It had a helipad could it land two, one on top of the other? The bottom one had to be turned off at the time, though, or else it'd be bad. Yeah, that would be bad. But he was a heck of an athlete as a youngster. He was a really good hockey player. He was a champion ski jumper. He actually played, and this is an amazing story he played amateur hockey, or I guess semi pro hockey. And with that PT. Barnum quality, he actually cooked up a real exhibition match with the Czechoslovakian National Hockey team in 1960. He somehow cooked this event up to have them come to Montana to play them. Right. And it worked. Yeah, it did work. The Czech Olympic hockey team came and played the Butte bombers. Amazing. I didn't see who won. I'm sure that they would say the Bombers won. Yeah, they didn't. So I'm just assuming the checks just mopped the floor with the Butte Bomber. They did. Here's another example of, like, what a scam, what a legend. Whereas if you put yourself in the real situation, you're like, what? Yeah. Take it away, Chuck. Well, after the match, well, he gets kicked out of the match, conveniently in the third period and disappears from the venue. And then afterward, the check team went to the box office, and they're like, all right, where's our money from the sales of the receipts, the tickets? Because we were promised a certain amount. And they're like, there is no money. It's vanished. It's stolen. Someone stole it. Who could it have been? I know. Now, here's the thing. That's not good, right? Right. But if he went back and was like, hey, fellow hard working butte bombers, here's your cut. Exactly your equal percentage of the proceeds. Yeah. The check team is going to be taken care of by the international olympic committee, which is what happened. Right? We can really use this cash. If you did that, maybe there's like a Robin Hood thing going on. If he kept it all to himself. Come on, that's just like burglary. And it doesn't explicitly say that he's the one who took it either. No, it's like this hint. All right, let's take a break, okay. And we'll get more into evil can evil after this. 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Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. Comsto register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc. comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. All right, Chuck, I don't mean to be knocking your childhood hero. Well, no, he's knocked by Knoxville. I never looked up to him. Like, I want to be just like him one day. I think a lot of kids did, though. Like, I jumped my bike and stuff and played with a toy. But did you ever hurt yourself? Never an injury from a bike jump? I got hurt. I got stitches a lot growing up. I never broke bones. Right. I was always getting cut. So he inspired you. You didn't idolize him? No. Exactly. Okay. Apparently there was a paper published in the journal pediatrics. This is from I think that new yorker article where these doctors created a term called the Evil Caneval Syndrome, where there was this outbreak of er visits by young boys who were injuring themselves across America. And it was, like, happening with enough frequency that these doctors were, like, warning parents about this. Like, your kids are watching this guy and then jumping their bikes and breaking their arms. Yeah. And it wasn't just like I remember the incentive to jump higher and longer because of him. I will say that I got you. Oh, here's a bike jump, but let's make it 2ft higher and let's stretch it out. And then let's put something in between. Like, your friends are going to lay down on the ground and you're going to jump over them. It definitely brought a different element to play. Got you. So I can verify that I got you. But I never got injured. Maybe I should have my friends hold a ring of fire. Well, I told you that other show that I used to light the Ring of Fire and jumped the Stunt Cycle through it. Awesome. All right, now, we're in the 1960s. The first motorcycle action he gets into officially was a motorcycle racing circuit. So he would race bikes getting wrecks, and you'll see this over and over. He would crash a lot. Yeah. One of the things about evil kneevel and what he was doing is he wasn't very good at it. Well, whether he made it or not, it didn't matter. Yeah. He still got paid and he still got the publicity and more. So if he crashed. Right. He was well aware that if he did crash, it would draw more people out to the next one. Because I think he said people didn't come to see him die. They came to see him defy death. Right. So he was never all like, you just want to see me die, you pack of jackals. Yeah, he kind of got that. People were like, yeah, maybe this guy's not going to make it, and I don't want to miss that. But I do want him to make it. But if he doesn't, I still want to see well, see his head come clean off. And here was the thing, too. By watching this doc, he didn't study the physics or was not even advised on the physics of these jumps. Wow. Like, you need so much ramp area, this much speed in order to reach this kind of height and this much length. He would just eyeball it and be like, I'm just going to go fast as I can with whatever space I have. That's fascinating. And he knew going into a lot of these jumps that he wasn't likely to make it. He wasn't like, oh, yeah, I've got this one. But one way. He was a very stand up guy was he always did it well. That was one of his things, is that he said that keeping your word was extremely important. Yeah, he was in that way. That's what he said to kids. Yeah. He didn't back out of a jump. Although, again, dichotomously, he was famous for not paying his bills. Dichotomous is right. So he's racing motorcycles at this point. He's crashing all over the place. He eventually gets a job. He kind of had a bunch of little odd jobs over the years selling insurance. Well, that wouldn't seem to come really close to being a career for him. Yeah, he was good at it. Yeah, he was very good at it. And they wouldn't promote him, so he quit. But before then, he really got good at selling insurance. Yeah. And supposedly he wanted to become vice president after three months on the job. Oh, is that what it was? Yeah. Okay. Wow. So he's done a lot for himself. Yeah. To say the least. He supposedly sold 271 policies in one day to mental patients as an institution, and then there's that. Eventually he would move to Washington State. Moses Lake. I like Moose's Lake better. Sure. And open a Honda dealership. Honda motorcycle dealership, which was a bit of a tough sell at the time. Honda motorcycles were not and just regular motorcycles, like you said, weren't all the rage. No. But especially not Japanese ones. No. A couple of decades after World War II. Absolutely. So he started thinking of ways to draw people in. Well, he offered $100 discount to anybody who could beat him in arm wrestling, but that was implied that you had to buy the motorcycle, but you get $100 off. Yeah. There's something about these dudes, like the PT. Barnums, the Harry Houdini's, the Sarah, the barracuda's husband. Sarah Palin's husband. Sarah Palin's husband. Yeah. Remember, he's like they call him the first dude of Alaska. Really? Race, snowmobiles, do donuts in, like, the town square and stuff. Yes. That guy, then. Yeah. Oh, he was very much in this vein, although he wasn't a self promoter. He was just a dude. Oh, got you. You know what? I wasn't selling a lot of Honda bikes, so he would offer to arm wrestle for money, and he started to do tricks, like to do wheelies in the parking lot and the old trick where you ride through the firewall, they set, like, a wooden wall on fire, bust through it on your motorcycle. Right, yeah, the firewall. Yeah. What do you think I said? Firewall. So sort of minor motorcycle stunts are going on at this point in his career. Well, and this came out of meeting a guy named Jim Pomeroy who raced motorcycles, and he worked at Jim Pomeroy's brother's, I think, dealership or shop. And he learned a lot of stuff from that guy. That was huge. And then prior to that, he had worked for a dude named W Clementstone at the insurance company that he worked for, w Climate Stone, and co authored a book called success through a Positive Mental Attitude. It was a self help book. And I guess Evil Kaneville picked it up and read it. And that really helped form another vital part of his personality. Which is like. You get out there and you do it. And whether you want to or not. Hard work will help you persevere just that whole kind of like raw. RA. All America can do spirit that he just basically personified. Apparently it came from that. I'm surprised he was a good candidate for Scientology. Here, I want you to read this book called Dianetics. So the other thing he was inspired by as a kid that he harkened back to later in his life was going to a stunt show from a guy named Joey Chitwood, and he was a motorcycle daredevil. And little Robert Kennedy, he was a car driver. Oh, he wasn't a motorcycle. No, that was evil Kinieville's. Big innovation. He's like, I'm going to do this on motorcycles. Yeah, because it's even more dangerous. But he was inspired as a little kid to do something like this, and eventually he said, you know what? I'm going to cook up my own show. I'm going to be the promoter, going to be the marketer. Right. The press release. I'm going to be the MC solid. Yeah, he did everything he did, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, he was a tenacious guy. He did not fall into his money by accident. I'm going to single handedly rob the box office. I bet you how he robbed the box office is basically going up and saying, hey, Jeannie, just go ahead and give me all the money. Yeah, of course. This is your show. Sure. I'll call you later. Yeah, exactly. All right, where are we here? He's at his first show that he did everything for, and I can't remember where it was. This is where he jumped to the rattlesnakes and the mountain lion. Yeah. So he got himself a bunch of rattlesnakes, put them in a box, tied up two mountain lines around the box, and then put a ramp on either side of this whole setup and jumped it and apparently almost made it, but the back wheel of his bike knocked the box over, and I guess the rattlesnakes all escaped toward the crowd. That sounds like a bit of a stretch to probably how it really happened. That's just a guess, though. Yeah, but I guess the allure there was kids showed up literally thinking he might crash and be descended upon by lions and snakes right in front of our eyes. Can I please go? Mom and dad? Because you know what snakes would do if a motorcycle crashed by them? They would say, Go get them. That way they wouldn't slither off in fear for their life. Right. They'd be like, Now's our chance. Now is our chance to take this guy out. So he was putting on more and more of these solo shows, and he realized he needed a sponsor if he wanted to really kind of kick it up a notch. Yeah. Because he needed help. He needed to not have to write all the press releases himself. Sure. So he could hire folks. He got a sponsor named Bob Blair who owned ZDS Motors, and he kept them flush with motorcycles in cash. And he started his own stunt show. And this is where he finally changed his name. Originally it was called, I think, bobby Kneevel and his motorcycle Daredevils. And then the sponsor said, now everyone knows you as Evil Knievil. Call yourself Evil Knievel. He said, all right, but let's spell it with an E because everyone knows I'm a good guy. I'm a role model. Yeah. So then in 1966, he debuts that show in Indio, California. Yeah. And it was big success. Crashed through Firewalls. Yeah, it was a success. But he also was injured. Right? Sure. Well, this one was when he tried to stand there on the ground. This was a big trick he did. And he would leap up into the air, spread eagle, and a motorcycle would drive between his legs. Okay. So the one in India, California, went without a hitch. It was the one a couple of weeks later in Barstow where that didn't go so well, that trick. No. And you can see this footage. Oh, it's out there. Oh, yeah. I didn't see that one. Yeah. The motorcycle helmet of the driver hits him square in the crotch, and he flips up, like, 15ft in the air and lands on the ground. And he's not wearing a helmet and pads on this because he's on the ground. Why would he he's not the one on the motorcycle. Yeah. So it did not go well, to say the least. Yeah. He went into the hospital for a couple of weeks, but when he came out, he went right back and finished the show, like, a month later. And that became a hallmark. If he couldn't finish the show, then he would come back to the same town and complete the jump that he crashed. And the crowd wouldn't be allowed to leave the Coliseum until they came back a month later. We've been living here for four weeks. It gets pretty gamey in those places. So then he decided to do his own solo performances. The Daredevil show broke apart, and he said, I don't need those guys anyway, and started doing his solo shows. And in Montana, Missoula, he kind of had his first big car jump where he jumped twelve cars in a cargo van, and he crashed that one as well. He crashed a lot. He did crash a lot. I think I saw that he landed as often as crashed. But from going over, like, his stunts, it seems like he crashed more than he landed. And he would usually crash upon a semi successful land. Right. Like, he would hit the ground, and for a second you think he made it. But keep in mind, he was jumping a 300 pound street cycle. Like, they modified it some over the years, and he would eventually end up with the Harley XR 750 as his main bike. But these were not the bikes that they used to jump in the X Games. Oh, yeah. Not light, not close. Like the things they use today are built exactly for that. Right. And did you see the world record jump, the current one? No, dude, it's nuts. How far is the guy go? He jumped a football field. Oh, wow. I don't remember how many feet it ended up being exactly, but it's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen. How far this guy jumps and how smooth it all went. Like, the take off, the approach, the landing. It was all just like butter. Was it Tony Hawke who did it? I think it was. But you watch, like, this guy's jump today and how this flawless and beautiful and graceful it is. Watch. And evil canevil. Evil canevals jumps. And it's funny by comparison because he was clearly a skilled motorcycle rider. I'm not saying that oh, man. He could, like, ride a motorcycle standing on it, doing all sorts of cool tricks. But yeah, the \u00a3300 is a definite handicap. And jumping cars and things. And buses. Oh, yeah. When you look at the footage compared to today, what your immediate thought is this guy had no idea what he was doing. And he didn't he wasn't studying the science of it. His whole thing was when he would come back to the same town to get people to come, he would just add another car, too. Just make it bigger. Sure. People want to see longer, farther jumps. Or a different kind of car. Like in Yakima, Washington. He once jumped or tried to jump a number of Pepsi trucks, I think like twelve or 15 Pepsi trucks. Yeah, it didn't make it, but that's unusual. Pepsi trucks. Who's ever tried that before? Probably got money from Pepsi. They was sponsored by Pepsi or Greyhound busses. He jumped, though. Or stacked cars. I think he might still hold the record for the number of stacked, crushed cars because no one does that anymore. Jumped on a Harley. Specifically. A Harley. Right. Which I think probably ties in. I didn't understand it before until you said that. That probably ties into that that the record is on Harley because you have to be nuts to do that these days. There is a guy ineval well, there's a dude now that's trying to recreate some of his jumps using that same bike. Oh, really? Yeah. Is his name? Eddie Bronn. I don't know. I didn't get his name. There's a dude who's a stuntman, pretty well known stuntman named Eddie. Braun or Brown. I'm not sure. Okay. He's recreating the Snake River Jump. Oh, really? This September. Oh, I saw that in the news. Yeah, like, it was in the news yesterday. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. All right, let's take a break. Evil and evil star is rising and my eyes are getting heavy. 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Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Tele doc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teletoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teletoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD. Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS so Chuck, evil can evil in 67, he'd started to make a name for himself. He'd been on the Joey Bishop show. Sure. And he was going to see a heavyweight fight in Vegas. And while he was there, he noticed the fountains in front of Caesar's palace and he was like, I think I should jump those. Yeah, they spoke to him. Apparently that'd be a fine thing to jump. And so he started to try. His star had risen, but he wasn't nearly as famous as he would be in the next few years. So he couldn't immediately get in touch with the president of Caesars. Right. Which he needed to, because you got to get permission for that kind of thing or sponsorship or money or something. Yeah. So he needed Caesar's CEO. I think Jay Sarno is his name. He needed his blessing or his help with it. And so to do that, get this, he decides he's going to jump Caesars in November. After just two months, he's got the whole thing set up and is doing the jump. Yeah, but he had new Year's Eve 1967. That's what happened. He had to hound the guy, though, to get him to do it. And he actually kind of duped him a little bit. Yeah. He made a series of calls as different people. Sometimes he was a lawyer calling Sarno. Sometimes he was an executive from ABC TV. Sometimes he was from Sports Illustrated. Yeah. Asking like, is this jumping to happen? I keep hearing about this. And he would take care to mispronounce evil and evil's name, his own name. Very smart to make it sound like it wasn't him. Yeah. Because what man would mispronounce his own name? And so I guess Sarno was like, I don't know who this guy is, but everyone's calling me all of a sudden, right. They all sound similar, but they all pronounce his name differently, so it couldn't be him. And it worked. And I think he'd already been on ABC's Wide World of Sports before, right? Yeah. And so he went to them and said, hey, dudes, you guys want this? And they said, no, but film it, and if it's awesome, maybe we'll buy it from you. Then it was awesome. Yeah, it was very awesome. He had already his own film crew to the filmmaker John Derek Bo, Derek's later husband. Okay. At the time, he was married to Linda Evans from Dynasty. Dynasty, who actually filmed this. Yes. The very famous shot of the crash was her camera. Supposedly, she was the operator, the lady from Dynasty. So he privately hired people to film it. He made it over the fountain. It was a beautiful jump, hit the ramp, and he hit it with such force that his hands were just ripped off of the handlebars, and he looked like Super Dave Osbourne going over the handlebars, and he just looked like a straw dummy flopping around on the ground. And it was a magnificent crash. It really is. It's tough to watch, but I think magnificent is the right word for me. Yeah. Spectacular crash. And he went back to ABC, and they were like, oh, we definitely want this footage. And he said, well, it's a lot more expensive now, so it kind of worked out for him. We needed foresight. So, Chuck, when ABC buys this and puts it on Wide World of Sports, evil caneval star is made. Yes. Right? Yes. Legit star. And that's it. That's the end of Evil caneval. That's the end of Evil Caneval, part one. Oh, yeah. We're going to do a two part, huh? Yeah. This story is so robust that we're going to have to split it up into two parts. But we'll do a regular listener mail and sign off, right? Yeah. But if you want to know more of evil and evil, just you wait for part two. Agreed. And in the meantime, while you're waiting, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this oh, interestingly. It's about ad breaks. Hey, guys. Love the show. You guys are the dope show for sure, right? I am already a researcher by trade, but your amazing podcast makes me the annoyance of all my friends because I suddenly seem to know about something from everything from poop to nuclear bombs to Barbie. But I'm writing in because I've noticed that when you, Chuck, prompt a commercial break, he always poses a question to you, Josh. Like, Josh you want to take a break? Josh always so willingly complies. Do you ever think he'll say no? Have you ever said no, Josh? Has there ever been a time where you're on such a role and Chuck asks and you just want to say no in Defiance go. And let you answer that. Sometimes I will actually suggest an ad break, and Chuck will say, no, let's finish this one part. And they'll say, okay. That gets edited out, though, right? That's what she doesn't get. Likewise, Chuck, if you ever worry that Josh will deny a request for a commercial break in a coup style, I don't know. But every time Chuck says, should we take a break? I just sit on the edge of my seat waiting to see if Josh pulls a fast one on it. Anyway, you guys are great. Keep on being you, eagerly awaiting the uprising. All right, Ash Hill. Well, keep an eye out for it, then. Maybe we just will do that. I will do that. All right. Yeah. I'm sick of getting kicked around with the ad break things. Great. Thank you very much for that email. We appreciate you. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Instagram. Also at SYSK podcast, you can join us on Facebook.com. Stuffychannel can send us an email to stuff podcast@housestepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffytournow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leaving brands? 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02c64642-3b0e-11eb-947e-8ffed629b04b | What Causes Inflation? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-causes-inflation | Inflation seems super boring, but if you know how it works (important point: no one really does) you can exist as a functioning human being in a modern economy. | Inflation seems super boring, but if you know how it works (important point: no one really does) you can exist as a functioning human being in a modern economy. | Tue, 01 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=152, tm_isdst=0) | 45330673 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can and serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell. Anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Wayne, Wayne Stern, Wayne Tran, Wayne Bryant. And there's Jerry. Jerome, Roland over there. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah, kill me episode. Whatever, dude. This is fine. I knew I was going to say that. I know. Again. We just did an economics episode. What was it? I don't know, but I think economics is literally right there besides, like chemistry and physics for me now, maybe worse, because at least those are interesting to me. Chemistry and physics still makes sense because they're really hard to understand. Economics doesn't make sense because it's BS. That's the key to understanding economics. I'm good here. I'll tell you what, I'm going to need help. I'm good. Except for like, four paragraphs right there where it says kill me. It really does say kill me right there. And then right there where it says, wake up, listeners. Whatever. I need your help. There the rest of us, this is a personal challenge to keep everyone interested. Okay, that's funny, because on the John Murray document, I have blah, blah, blah over. Oh, boy, is that where we're headed now? People are seeing how the sausage that's like year one stuff. Yeah, we've been doing that forever. I think we generally are into one another's topics. Yeah, it's not the topic. Phony. And I think economics is boring as heck. I don't think we'll talk about John Mirror in the John Mirror episode. How about that? I was about to defend my position on will that have already been out? I don't know, man. We'll find out. I think people should play these back to back. You should. Especially the Cleft episode, because the listener mail from the Cleft episode really sets up some of the jokes in the Night Trap episode that follows right so don't listen to those two. Out of order. Well, those are too fun to listen to. I think if listeners listen to these two back to back, it's like Thelma and Louise territory right into the Grand Canyon. What does that mean? Have you never seen Thelman Louise? I have, but I don't get how it applies to listening to these episodes. Out of order. Spoiler alert for Thelman Louise everybody. Well, you already kind of mentioned the Grand Canyon. Hey. Driving to the Grand Canyon at the end just straight off that cliff. And that's what would happen if they listened to both of these episodes back to back. I'll tell you what, if you watch Thelma and Louise, okay. Good movie. It really is. Actually, I've only seen the last 10 minutes, to tell you the truth. Really? Yes, really. You're like, what was their problem? Yeah, why did they do that? Seems a little overreacting. If you listen really closely, I mean, like, turn your volume up so loud that you can hear the fuzz of the video, the grain of the video making it sound you can hear I can't remember who's thelma why did you ask me? I always get these two confuses. Jerry is mad right now. Gina Davis is thelma I thought she was Louise. Okay, Jerry's got it. Jerry's so mad right now. So it is. Thomas. Gina Davis says to Louise, well, we can thank John Mur for this beautiful view on the way to our desk because no one else cared about the natural environment until he came home. That's absolutely right. He's still alone. No one thought the way that he thought. That's great. So we're talking about inflation. Obviously, that was the most fun part of this episode, by the way. No, it's not, Chuck. I refuse to believe that we're talking about inflation. And the reason that I picked this is because inflation is kind of a thing right now. There's a lot of fear. Until today yeah. I think until today when the Fed came out and said, everybody calm down. Stop being dramatic. Joe Biden is not ruining the country. There's not going to be an inflation fear, or there's not going to be inflation. Right. Stop your fears. And as a matter of fact, the fear stopped. Everybody stopped worrying about inflation because the Fed came out and said something. Really? Yes. But the reason I picked this is because it's good to know what people are talking about when they're like, we should be really worried about inflation right now. And all you have to do is understand a few basic things, and all of a sudden you're in the convo, baby. Sure. And we're going to explain those few basic things to everybody. And then the next time inflation starts to go crazy, you can say, everybody just calm down. Yeah. It's just cost push going on. Yeah. You'll be like, at every party you go to, you can talk about that and you'll be the equivalent of Colin Robinson. Who's that from what we do in the shadows. The energy vampire. Oh, yeah. He probably sits around and talks about inflation. Yeah, he threw me off with the Colleen. Well, that's how yes, I understand. No spoiler alert. We're watching that again a little bit, just because it's good. What we've been watching is and just finishes. I'll be Gone in the dark. The great documentary about the Golden State Killer and Michelle McNamara's research and dogged pursuit. What's it called? I'll be gone in the dark. Is it Netflix? No, it's HBO Max. But it's great. But it's so heavy. We will then cleanse the palate with reruns of what we do in the shadows. Very smart. The great palate cleanser. Which is what I'm going to do right after we record this. Okay. Are you done stalling now? Yeah. So one of the things that really kind of gets people about inflation is the idea that if you go back to the 60s yeah. The good old days, you could buy, like, a brand new car for three grand, cost nothing. Brand new car. And that's when they made them big and shiny. Yeah. Very unsafe. Do you want a house? Right. Give me, I don't know, $22,000. It's yours. And that's a nice house, too. Very nice house. Like a ticket to a movie costs a dollar now. If you pay a dollar to see a movie, you have to see something terrible, like Hidalgo or national security or something. That's like a dollar movie today. This is like good movies. Yeah. The dollar movies were a penny, right? Yeah. Basically. So all of this sounds like or it makes it sound like the good old days were just this cheap, idyllic paradise. But that's just not the case because of inflation, where you can't really compare today's cars or today's houses or today's movie ticket prices without using adjustment for inflation. Yes. Because I think in 1967, if you made a lot of money, you made about $19,000 a year. That was a lot of money. Yeah. 60% of American households earn less than $8,300 a year. And so, yes, they have all these inflation calculators. It's one of our favorite things to do, is go look at inflation calculators online on West Egg. Yeah, West Egg is one I use mostly, but there are a couple of more because I think one of them sometimes doesn't go back far enough. But honestly, when it goes back too far, it's just a little bit of like I don't know, this seems about right. Well, that was the thing. Do you remember when I can't remember we were talking about but it wasn't too long ago. And I was saying, like, I don't think this fully captured this adjustment for inflation. I think things were cheaper where things were more expensive. And that's the point of tracking inflation, is to say, actually, yes, things were more expensive back then, things do actually get cheaper over time because technology becomes more less novel. Yeah, some stuff, sure. So, for example, like a TV, if you wanted to buy a new color TV when it came out in the 60s, you paid probably about $1,000 for that TV. Right. That's a crazy price. Back then, it was an enormous price. That would mean that in today's dollars, that you would pay something like ten for a new TV. Yeah. And TVs, when they first started coming out with the new flat screens were really expensive. And then, like you said, the technology gets better, and they get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Well, now you can get it. I mean, it depends on what kind of flat screen, but you can get a good flat screen for $500, tops. It's a decent one for $500. Yes. I mean, you walk into custody, they just give you one for walking in, and it's huge. They're huge. They're much better. They're enormous. They're lighter. They look better, and they're cheaper. I think a TV today, like a 60th TV, is about a 20th of that how much it would cost the person, 1954, buying that color TV. So all of this kind of goes to say, like, prices may go up over time, but they actually relatively might actually be going down, too. Right. Or they could just be going up. Thankfully, there are people who track this kind of stuff, because when you look at inflation, when you look at the cost of the rise of prices over time, that's what inflation is. One way to put it, yeah. Overall prices, goods and services. It's not just like, oh, gas is a lot for the next three months, because the summertime that's not inflation. Right. It's more like Hubba Bubba costs way more today than it did when we were kids. Sure, that's a good example of inflation, but it's a general rise in prices. And if you track this stuff, you can actually track, allegedly, the health of your economy and make allegedly good decisions on how to juice that economy to keep it growing at a steady controllable rate, but ever upward. Right. Which is what the Fed does. Did we do one on the Fed, or have we just danced around them a lot? I don't remember. I know we've done one on currency. How much money there is in the world? Not bad. We did one on Stagflation, which we'll mention in a few. No, it was all right. I thought it was groundbreaking. We did a whole remember when all the rage was those superstugg guides? Yeah, the superstguide the audiobooks. We did one on economics. Remember that guy who was like chicken? He kept using chicken as an example. Really? Yeah, he was great. It was a good listen, if you ask me. Okay. I'm glad those didn't become a thing, though. Why? I don't know. It's a lot of work for Jerry and us. Jerry loved it. No, she didn't. She keeps asking when we're going to bring those back. So there are a couple of ways to look at this. And it's funny how when you look at most of this stuff, economists don't all agree there's a lot of chicken and the egg stuff going on. Chicken, yeah, exactly. Where it's like you're just saying the same thing in a different way. It's still the same thing. And this is sort of the first example. It's a little maddening, isn't it? It is. Because some people say, you know what, in a free market, in an open market, it's just supply and demand, like it always has been. If the product is greater in supply, it's going to go up in price. If it's greater than demand and prices are going to go down. And it's really just as simple as that for these products and for money in cash. And some people say, well, no, that's not true at all. Inflation is the thing that happens first. And you don't increase the supply of money beyond demand because some people say, oh, well, the Fed just increases the supply of money. Right. And they did it too much and now prices are going up. Because another way to put it is not just that prices rise, but that inflation actually is a decrease in the buying power of the dollar. Yeah. Which is, again, I know, the exact same way to say the other one. I know, but it's like the nuance. So nitpicky. It really is very nitpicky. But we're talking macroeconomics for the money of 300 million people and how it kind of moves and interacts. So if you could figure this out, if you could just kind of crack the code, right, but you can't. You could do it. They haven't been able to so far. And inflation is a really good example of that, because nobody can agree on exactly like you're saying, what causes it? So one way to look at it is that you can split explanations in a couple of ways. Is it based on a change in the demand or the cost of goods or services or the products, or is it because of money? So the first one is that money thing where there's too much money on the market. Right. If you don't get into economics, that just sounds like a mind numbing thing to even think about. But it's really simple to understand. Money is just like anything else. If there's a lot of money, there's a big supply, that means anybody has it, who cares? Which means that there's less value to it. Yeah. And that's not just cash in circulation, it's cash and credit. It's like everything we think of is kind of like buying power, I guess. Yeah. And another way to look at it is if there's a lot of money on the market, that means the average person has more money than usual. That means that they can buy more stuff than usual, right? That means that more people are requesting, trying to buy demand, right, more goods than they usually are. So if demand is increasing, that means prices will rise, which means it costs more money to buy those things. And a good way to put it is that there's lots of money chasing fewer goods. Yeah, that's how that one's explained. That's one explanation for inflation. There's too much money which causes prices to rise because there's more people trying to buy those goods than usual. That's right. And I think one example here, Professor John T. Harvey at TCU, he's who I was talking about earlier where he's like, no, that's not really true. He says inflation happens first and that they don't increase the supply of money beyond demand because you need more money because prices are going up. So then that brings more money in the market, right? That's right. Growth accompanies the inflation, it doesn't cause it. Yeah. So again, all these economists are saying, no, there's too much money and this guy is saying, no, the prices are rising which brings more money into existence. And in the meantime, everyone else in the room is like, I got to go to the bathroom, I got to go take a call, I got to go. More finger foods. Yeah, we say it every time. But the fact that you have liberal economists and conservative economists, sure, that right there, that reveals it all. It's all made up. It's all who do. Let's take a break on who do. That's a nice little cliffhanger. That was my signal. And we'll come back and talk about two other theories that are kind of the same thing right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting you know you're a pet mom when you growl back during Playtime and you insist on feeding them the highest quality food you can find. Enter Halo Holistic made with only whole meat, no meat meals and probiotics for digestive health. Our first ingredient is always responsibly sourced protein raised with no antibiotics. And bonus, our fruits and veggies contain no GMOs. It's a lifestyle and a pet bomb thing. Find Halo Holistic at chewy amazonandhalopets.com so Chuck is going to say you're doing great by the way. Well that's because I haven't gotten to those paragraphs yet. It's going to be just easy. Okay, so there are another couple of theories. Again, economists are going to agree and disagree about these two theories. They are the cost push theory and the demand pull theory. It's even right there in the title, push and pull. Essentially, it's the same action going on, but one is choosing to look at one side and one is choosing to look at the other. Right. So cost push means that it's the increase of the cost of labor or the cost of raw materials, basically anything that's going to end up getting like a loaf of bread on a shelf, including like the fuel for the trucking and packaging and all that stuff. That is what is going to push up in prices. That is the driver of inflation, which makes a lot of sense. Like apparently right now, I don't know if it's still going on, but it definitely was the spring. There's a shortage in wood, in lumber still happening. Okay. Because of, at least in part, the wildfires that California suffered last year were so devastating that it actually affected the national supply of lumber. Yeah. And I also read that the lumber people decreased production overall because they thought because of the pandemic, they thought there was going to be a big lull. They didn't want all this extra inventory on their hands. It turned out everyone was like, no, I want to build stuff now. Exactly. And they just miscalculated. So it's not a good time to build a pavilion at your family camp, let's just say that. Right. Or to try to increase the housing stock. Right, sure. That means then that lumber going up in price makes building a new house that much more expensive. So the house, the finished product has become more expensive because of the input that raw material. Lumber. That's a really good example of cost push theory of why prices are rising because of something downstream in the production process. Yeah, but there's a key little factor here. All of this is true when companies are running already at full production capacity. So that's a really key element there. It can't be a company that's like behind or whatever. It's a company that's just humming along, basically, and then something happens in the supply chain, let's say big increase in fuel or lumber cost or any kind of raw material, I think. Did Dave help us with this? This is Dave How Stuff Works article. Oh, okay. Yeah. Wow. I know, hats off. We found another one. But he uses bread as the example. The cost of wheat goes up, the cost of flour is obviously going to go up, and the cost of bread is eventually going to go up right under the CP theory. And so people like you and I end up paying more for a new house or more for a loaf of bread or more for whatever, because something somewhere that was a component in that caused this rise in prices. Right. That's a cost push example or theory of inflation, the kind of opposite of that. But I don't even know if the opposite is the right word. They say no, it's not the raw materials that caused the increase in prices. It's actually the demand for that finished product that causes the increase in prices. And so housing right now actually is a really good example of both cost push and demand pull at the same time. Yes. It's crazy. And it's also demonstrating, like, okay, we have no idea what's going on, or at the very least, that these things don't exist in isolation. And that is that people like you're saying they're the Pandemic were like, no, we want to move. I don't want to live in the city anymore. I want to live as far away from other people as possible, but only as close as Instacart will deliver closest. I want to live to Webvan. Sure. Take out one of those cars. Yeah. So it was totally unpredictable. But the upshot of it is that there is a lot of people trying to buy houses right now, and the housing market has just gone through the roof. And so that's caused housing prices to increase, and it's caused, like, all of the other components of the housing market to increase as well. So downstream, that demand for houses caused every bit of housing to increase as a result. Yeah. In the example, Dave, to stick with the bread as well, because I think it's slightly easier to understand than the housing market because it's weirdly affected by a lot of things right now sure. Is that if a lot of people want bread, the baker doesn't immediately raise the prices because of that demand until they run out of the flour. Then they got to go back and buy more wheat. And the wheat farmer might say, well, now it's a little more expensive. Yeah, there's a lot of bakers who have yeah, everybody wants my wheat right now. And so that's when the cost is eventually pulled and then increased, I guess, for the consumer. Right. So it looks like if you're just looking at it like, oh, this wheat price, this raw material rose in cost, and that caused bread to rise. And people are like, no, that's an illusion. It was actually this demand for bread that increased that caused the wheat to rise. And again, it sounds so similar to cost push demand poll does that it doesn't even matter. But it really does matter. It does matter because in this part is the key here. If you're at home and you're just like, stop talking. This is what kind of drove it home for me. The difference in those two, it might seem like just words and nitpicky, but it's really not, because in one scenario and demand pull, you've got an economy that's really humming, and people are like, I want to buy all that stuff. Yeah. It means a lot of people have a lot of money that they want to spend. And that yes, that means you have a healthy economy right then. Right. And under cost push. It's more like, hey, people feel like they have to do this repair on their house, and I'm sorry, it's just a lot more expensive. It's not like, oh, I need this new thing. It's like, I have to pay for this thing. And it's a lot more expensive because of the raw materials or whatever. The labor has gone up. Right? Yeah. It's much worse because that means, like you said, the company is humming along at max capacity, and all of a sudden it's like we don't have wheat anymore, and we aren't going to be able to satisfy demand because we don't have this basic component. It means that there's something broken in your supply chain, the mechanisms of production. Sure. And that's not a good place to be in. So it's very healthy economy where everybody has money, increasing demand or demand increases because you can't supply the basic parts to create those goods. Right. Okay. I know the beginning of this part, so I'll take it. Okay. And then I have a cot set up in the next room. Just going to go I feel like you're setting me up for failure. No, you'll do fine because there's no math. Well, there is math involved, but you'll still do fine. Where is their math involved in this part? The annual rate of inflation calculation. Oh, God. But if we get it wrong, we'll just say, Dave got it wrong. We'll pass that, we'll cost push it this way. Yes, that's a great idea. So we're talking about how inflation is actually measured now. And this is a big deal because we like to keep track every year and say that inflation what is it usually between about one and a half percent to three and a half percent annually in the US. Generally, unless it's like the 1970s or early eighty s. I think over the last several years, it's gone between negative 2.1% and, like, five point something percent, which is five point something, is pretty high. It's generally in the two to three range. It is for our experience. But in the early 80s, it was as high as almost 14%. That's bad. It was very bad. But not as bad as, like, the Weimar Republic, Germany or Zimbabwe, which we've talked about a million times, where their hyperinflation was just out of control. Yeah, we'll get to that. Okay, so we have to measure the inflation rate because we like to keep tabs on our economy so the Fed can do their weird black magic. And so the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, is who sets this stuff by working through a big data collection system called the Consumer Price Index. It's nuts. It is nuts how big it is. What they try and fill up is what's called the CPI market basket. And it's basically if you imagine a grocery basket that includes everything basically like 80,000 items. Yeah. Not just groceries. They have 200 categories of products in eight major groups food, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education, communication, and then other, which is basically everything else. Funerals and manicures, basically, is other saunas. Yeah, definitely. That might be under recreation, you think? I think it might be. Or medical care. It's good for you. Yeah, for sure. Depending on how progressive your Bureau of Labor Statistics agency is at the time. That's right. So every couple of years thank you for waiting until I finish that, too. The Bureau of Labor Statistics interviews 24,000 American families on the stuff that they bought. Yeah. Because if you want to figure out what 80,000 items you need to include in the basket, you have to find out what Americans are actually buying. Yeah, I bought you a slide whistle. That's right. They called me up, and I said, I bought a slide whistle. That's the only thing about this year. They said you're the one and they said, that must have been for a very special guy in your life. And they said it's true. Well, I'm blessing right now. Then they have another 12,000 families that are keeping a spending diary, basically. It's kind of like Nielsen a little bit for that one. It did kind of remind me of that a little bit because they're just trying to get a big, broad overview of what a typical schmuck here in America spends. Sure. And you say, Where's my three or $5? And they just go they hang up real quick. Exactly. Call somebody else. And then every month, they have a big team of assistance that records the prices of those 80,000 things. And this is an effort to get just a good look at what that big market basket looks like. Yeah. So two years, they figure out what they need to be buying or what Americans are buying. They use that data for another couple of years, but every month they go and price all 80,000 items in that market basket. Every single month? Yeah. If you get to figure out inflation, you got to be as current as possible. Yeah. So to figure out what item needs to be in the basket. So there's like, 200 categories, eight broad categories, 200 subcategories. So, like, transportation will have, like, auto insurance category, subway fares. Exactly. Or food will have, like, cheese will be one. But in that cheese category sample, I think they call it, there's a bunch of different kinds. Not everybody buys, like, craft singles. Some are velveeta sliced people like me. Man, I used to love velveeta. It's still good. I haven't had it in decades. I will buy you something. Do you get blocks of velveeta? No, we don't get blocks of velveto. You get slices now. Okay, but it's not cheese, right? Isn't it cheese? No, I said no perform cheese, but I think it still qualifies under the cheese sample in the market basket. But if you're making a chili cheese or something, you got to use it. Sure, yeah, that's good. But it's good for grilled cheeses, too, of course. So that particular brand, but not just that brand, like the 16 slice package, you find it makes up 70% of the market for that type of cheese. So they'll pick that one, they use that for four years and then they go reevaluate it. This is like the level of detail the pls is putting into their basket. And so they take all this and they price it every single month. They literally go to the store and I meant to say literally that time, and say, oh, well, the velveeta cheese slice 16 pack is 349 right now. Is that about right? Write the price down. I think so. Okay. And then they go back and they type in it, and every month they say, this is how much that this cost. And they compare it strangely to right, take it from here, Chuck. Well, was it okay, that was the baseline year where they said, all right, here's our CPI index. It's an index, it's not a dollar figure. I know. I looked everywhere. I'm like, how much is the 80,000 item basket cost in real dollars? Every they won't sorry, index, buddy. Yeah, they'll talk about UFOs sooner than they'll tell you how much is in that basket, how much that basket costs. So 82 is when that baseline figure was set, which was the Consumer Price Index is 100. Yeah. In 2006. It hit 200 in April 2006, which basically at that point, they should have just reset it and said, we have a new base year because we doubled it. And they didn't know. And I'm not sure why, really, they just sort of left it, I don't know, in 1982. Maybe they're just used to that math. It seems like it would be a lot of extra math. And no, it wasn't that they doubled it. It was that it was the exact same in 1982, I think. Or was it that they doubled it? No, it was doubled. Okay. But they said they should I mean, some people say they should have said like, all right, well, we have a new base, I got you, but they're still using the 1982 yes. I just don't know why. I don't either, or why not. Maybe it makes perfect sense. The actual number that they come up with is a number that's relative to the amount that it costs in yeah, this is where I kind of got a little foggy. So, for example and by that I mean I fell asleep on my desk. In 2019, the CPI, the Consumer Price Index for that basket of goods was 249.22, meaning that that amount of goods cost almost two and a half times what that same basket of goods would have cost you in 1980. $2. Sure. So you say, okay, I don't care how much it cost in 1982. I want to know how much it's affecting me now. And they say, well just settle down, settle down. They can take that number and say, well, how much was it last month? Yeah. Or how much was it last year? So they can compare, say, like the 2019 and 2020 CPIs and find that there was a difference of something like about 3.26 between those two numbers. Then they divide that by the 2019 number and they get the actual percentage that says the CPI. The Consumer Price Index, the amount of basically what it costs people to just live in 2019 was 1.2% less than it costs in 2020. Which means that inflation rose 1.2% between 2000 and 22,019. Right. And when you hear about annual inflation rate, that is generally what people are pointing to. But as we will see, that is not how everyone likes to look at inflation. There are other things to take into consideration. I think the Fed likes to look at core inflation, which is that CPI minus volatile things like food and energy. Things that like the prices kind of go up and down more volatile? Sure. Is that a word? And then the Fed also looks at another data set compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It gets a little wonky, but it actually does make sense. The difference between the BLS and the Bea indexes comes down to the fact that if chicken costs a lot more money all of a sudden because of some supply shortage or whatever, or increased demand, rather than people might go to the other white meat, right, and say, well, I'll start buying pork then. Yeah, that was explained by Benjamin Applebaum from the New York Times Economics blog. Binuman. Okay. Yeah, he said, I swear to God, I nailed it. Apple bomb. Apple bomb. Okay, yeah, that's my imaginary friend Benjamin Apple bomb. So he was explaining it like that. That's the difference that people adjust. Like we're not just like Automatons, we're like, okay, well we're buying chicken and that's all we eat. And we also buy X amount of hot dogs. It's like, yeah, if the price of chicken goes up, you're going to eat something else that month. It's how people do. And so he was saying that the Bureau of Economic Analysis really is much better at taking that into consideration. And so since about 2000, the Feds kind of relied a little more on that one than the CPI. The CPI is still very much the most broadcast one, but it turns out that economists use whichever one suits their needs in politics. Given months, absolutely. Our policies are right and yours stink. That's a great place for a break. And we'll come back and talk about why inflation even matters and what we can do about it, which is nothing. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more Sherpa line jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. And you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeves. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. It automation. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive, health, heart and immunity. Support healthy skin and coat hip and joint support and strengthen energy. Find Halo elevate at Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn more@halopets.com. Today's episode of Stephanie Shannon is brought to you by SimpliSafe home security. SimpliSafe believes that your home should be the safest place on Earth for every family. So they offer advanced whole home security that puts you, your home, and your family safety first. With 24/7, professional monitoring simply saves agents take action the moment a threat is detected, dispatching police or first responders in an emergency, even if you're not home. Yeah, and SimpliSafe uses proprietary video verification technology so that monitoring agents can visually confirm the threat in order to get higher priority 911 dispatch. And SimpliSafe offers comprehensive protection not only against intruders and burglary, but against expensive home hazards, from flooding to fires. You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes@simplisafe.com. Stuff go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe.com. All right, so we're back to wrap this up. This wasn't as bad as I thought. Why is that funny? I'm glad we're reaching in here. I'm glad to see that you've come around a little bit. You did great explaining everything. Oh, I appreciate it. So strength to Dave's research, I think. Sure. It's not like the John mirror person. Dave is wonderful at his work. He is. He's great. So inflation can be a bad thing because of some sort of obvious things, but one is if you have a fixed income and you're living off a pension or something, a lot of times, most times that pension isn't going to go up because inflation goes up. Luckily, Social Security does. It's tied to that CPI, which was a really smart thing to make people not absolutely loathe Social Security in every way, sure. But yeah, Social Security will go up, but your pension won't, so that's a big deal. And that's why inflation matters. Yeah. I mean, it also stinks for those of us who are like, man, I'm paying way more for bread than I was this time last year, and why should I? It also has an effect on investments, too. Remember, a different way of looking at inflation is not just that prices are rising, but that the buying power of the dollar is going down. That includes your investment. Yeah. If you have an investment that's worth ten grand five years from now, the dollar amount is still worth ten grand, but the value of the dollar is far less than it was five years before, and so that ten grand just doesn't amount to quite as much. Another thing that can happen is your interest rates might go up or not, your interest rate will reset, but if you go to buy a house or something, the interest rate might be higher, because a bank might say, I think inflation is going to be pretty bad this year, so we're going to have to charge more money on that loan because we're losing that dollar value. Right, exactly. And banks don't like losing money. There's also, like, a lot of uncertainty that could come when inflation is going on. Remember I said there are a lot of inflation fears until today. That has a really deletrious effect on business in that it's harder to plan for the future. They don't know how much the cost of the goods that they need to make their finished products are going to be. Right. So you don't know if you're going to buy a whole bunch of mealworm spray for your flour to make bread with. Is it better to buy it now, is it better to buy it later? And how much am I going to price this bread for? It's just a catastrophe. And then eventually just give up and go home and watch Judge Judy. Yeah. I got to say that's, like, with Emily's small business, I think, especially with small businesses, she can't just be like, oh, well, shipping is a lot more now because fuel costs are going up or packaging increases, so she can't just raise and lower her prices willy nilly. When you're a small business selling soap and lotion and candles, which is funny, because that is one of the major explanations for inflation. I know, but you just can't do that as a small business. You can be like, oh, soap is a quarter more all of a sudden. It's true. Or a quarter less. Like, she kind of has to lock in for a little while. Like, a price increase for a small business, like that is sort of a big deal. You got to really think it through. Absolutely. Yeah, I do. And that's actually another problem with it, too. It's like if Emily can make less money selling her wares, but she's paying more to make them, her profit margin declines. In that sense, she might have less to expand, to hire more people. Totally. That has a ripple effect through the economy, where it can affect employment. Higher prices can actually lead to lower employment. Yeah, like, she gets killed on shipping. That's her big one. She loses money, a lot of money every year on shipping costs, but she's not Amazon, so she can't ship for free. And you can't also charge what it really costs to ship. You just have to kind of take the hit. Yeah, it's interesting. I guess we can talk about hyperinflation a little bit. We've covered it a few times over the past 13 years. But we really have. The one big one that people always talk about is, like you mentioned earlier, the Weimar Republic of Germany when the mark exploded from 2000 marks to the US dollar in 1022 to 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar less than a year later. Isn't that nuts? That is I mean, you can't even wrap your head around and remember in Zimbabwe and yeah, that was the other I can't remember what decade it was, the 80s or the 90s, where they were like, using wheelbarrows to cart trillion dollar bills to the grocery store and still could barely buy bread or toilet paper with it. Yeah, the US. Like I said earlier, it had its own brush with, I don't know if you call it hyperinflation, but definitely much higher inflation than anybody was comfortable with. And that actually came. I was researching this today. A lot of people blame the OPEC, oil embargo, a lot of other stuff, but it apparently can all be laid at the feet of Richard Nixon, who juiced the economy. He fired his Fed chairman and replaced him with a sycophant who had no formal economics training and then started telling them what to do. That sounds familiar. To juice the economy to get reelected. And it worked for a minute, and then all of a sudden it was like this plane going up. And then the gas was no longer in the fuel injector, and it started to just tumble back toward the earth. We had almost 14% inflation, unemployment. That's a real number that makes an actual difference in American families getting what they need, right? Yeah, for sure. Gas and food and paying bills. Yeah. So it took a good decade or so to come out of that death spiral that it was in. And it took the Fed this was actually a big reason why the Fed play such a big role in the economy today is because of that. The Fed had to step in and basically do the opposite of easy money and basically get money off of the market to basically say. All these people who have money right now. We need to take some of their money to lower demand. To cause prices to go down. And it was a really hard time to be an American in the late 70s, early 80s, because it causes the great inflation and then pretty big recession. Yes, there are a few things that the Fed can do. One thing that you might see on stupid Facebook comments is like, just print more money. Fed, that's all they do anyway, just put more cash into the economy. They don't do that. The Fed doesn't just print more money they can influence the money supply, though, in a few ways. One is there's something called the reserve requirement, which is basically they say, you know what, if you're a bank, you have to have a certain percentage of your customer deposits that you can't touch. You got to leave it in there in reserve so they can lower that requirement a little bit. Meaning that in theory, more money can be in circulation because they're loaning out more or they're able to loan out more. Right. So that's one thing they can do. They actually buy and sell bonds. This is where it gets so crazy to me. It just sounds so weird. But I mean, there's a whole market there that actually is basically how money gets on or off the market in the economy. There's sales of bonds where companies can buy bonds, companies can sell bonds, and the Fed will buy or sell them too. And when the Fed buys bonds, it's putting money on the market. And when the Fed sells bonds, it's accepting money, it's taking money off the market, creating those bonds for money, and making sure that that money isn't in circulation anymore, at least temporarily. That's what's happening today. They're going to auction off $100 billion in bonds. So $100 billion will not be in the economy tomorrow after this auction today, because the Feds taking it off the market, which was enough to calm those inflation worries. Everybody said, oh, the Fed stepping in, it's fine. Well, no, they're like 100 people that understand that said, okay, and everyone else just read the headline, TLDR right, said, all right, we're not supposed to worry, so I won't worry. But at the same time, you made reference, though, earlier, that it was like Joe Biden screwing up the economy, that they were blaming those stimulus checks for everything from people not working purposefully to there being too much money and increasing demand for regular stuff. And whether that's true or not, the Fed stepping in and saying, well, it's going to get some money off the market. Another thing the government can do is the opposite of something like stimulus checks. It can actually raise taxes. Sure. And that's another way for the government, rather than the Fed to get money out of circulation by taking it from people's end of year account. Right, end of your account, sure. And then the final thing the Fed can do is they can lower their discount rate, which is the rate that is going to charge a bank for a short term loan. And in theory, if a bank is paying less for a loan, then they can lend at a lower rate as well if you're going and asking for a loan. And then lastly, there's supply side economics. Another thing the government can do, which is basically deregulate industry in the hopes that it will make industry leaner, more competitive, all that stuff, and that will cause prices to go down because businesses will become more efficient when it's dog eat dog. Right. I think we've seen thanks to rigonomics, that doesn't necessarily work very well. That's what they say. That's my two cent. And hey, man, I'm just as much an economist as any economist. Sounds like it. If you want to know more about economics and inflation and stagflation and deflation and all the flat, go do some research and it will blow your mind. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this one of the many great responses from our Girl Scout episode. Good morning, Josh and Chuck. I had the pleasure of listening to the Girl Scout episode when I was sewing the badges onto my daughter's vest in time for our bridging ceremony. My daughters are fourth generation Girl Scouts and I'm a third generation leader. I love this very big family. Yeah. I had the honor to serve as one of five leaders and a multi level troop. Our troop is girls from kindergarten through 7th grade, encompassing Daisy Brownie, junior and cadet levels. We formed as a multi level troop so sisters could be in the same troop. That's really sweet. And so that their parents could have one troop to keep track of. It's a great way for the older girls to practice leadership skills with the younger girls and gives the younger girls role models. Great. Very sweet. They should do this everywhere. Yes. Everyone else is doing it wrong, she said, but no Juliet's are allowed. Yeah, no Juliet. Another unique thing about our troop is that we do not charge dues. Everything our girls do from uniforms, programs, spies and activities are funded solely through cookie sales. We ask new girls to buy their first vest for the uniform and from there, cookie sales take care of the rest. Caroline here leads the daisies in their troupe and says even at the youngest levels, the emphasis is on a girl led experience. That means they choose their activities and badges, plan and run the meetings, practice leadership skills each chance they get. It takes a lot of practice and self control on the part of the leaders to give the girls space to lead, but the end result is so rewarding. I will leave you with one last lesson that I've learned in Girl Scouts and a motto that my family has always lived by. This is great. This is what everyone should do. Leave a place better than you found it. Oh, yeah. Whether it's cleaning up a little extra garbage at the campsite or making a positive impact on the people and places you come across in life, leave it a little better than you found it. Thank you for all the many years of podcasts that are bright and many adult car ride and countless rounds and tours from my family. Except for the inflation episode. That's weird. How did you know? So that is from Caroline and Richfield, Minnesota. And she sent in pictures of the daisies and the girl bridging ceremony, and it's just adorable. These cute little girls in their masks, for sure, doing stuff. Yeah. Who is that? That's Caroline. Caroline. So I thought, thanks a lot, Caroline. There was some great info. I'm glad you enjoyed that. So we enjoyed it, too. And I guess that's it. Chuck. Yeah. I should point out she wrote back and said, by the way, my husband is going to be jealous I'm getting this on listener mail. I should mention that he went through Boy Scouts all the way through high school just so he could go camping. All he did was enough to get the badges so he could qualify for camping trips. It's awesome. That's great. So the rest of them said, we don't need no stinking bad things, right? Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Carolyn did, you can do that via email. Send us one to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs. Better than leaving brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplied plus, and select neighborhood pet stores. Hey, it's Delilah. We can all use a hug now and again. I wish I could deliver them all in person, but since that's not possible, my daily podcast, hey, it's Delilah is the next best thing. It will wrap you in ten to 15 minutes of happy, heartwarming, hopeful radio content every Monday through Friday at whatever time of day you need it the most. Find hey, it's Delilah, and get your radio hug. Get." | |
What's with this "Internet of Things"? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-with-this-internet-of-things | You may have heard about the Internet of Things and not known what the term meant. It's basically a collection of object conected to your life and the internet. We're talking everything from your smart phone to your fitness tracker. Cool stuff, but fraugh | You may have heard about the Internet of Things and not known what the term meant. It's basically a collection of object conected to your life and the internet. We're talking everything from your smart phone to your fitness tracker. Cool stuff, but fraugh | Thu, 07 Jul 2016 12:34:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=12, tm_min=34, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=189, tm_isdst=0) | 59875250 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerome's to my right. There's probably some people going, did they replace Jerry with Jerome? Jerome? Yeah. No, that's just the nickname we have for Jerry. It's an arcane reference to the librarian at the beginning of Ghostbusters whose uncle thought he was St. Jerome. Really? That's what I've always been referencing. I thought we were on the same page about it. We also call her Jersey. That's a reference to nothing. Yeah, right. Jerry. Right. That was a great Jerry. Chuck. Chuck. Yes? Have you ever been on the Internet of things? Well, you can't really be on the Internet of Things. I don't understand. Explain. Well, the Internet of things, my friend, is really just a collection of interconnected devices to make your life simpler and less private. Pretty much in front with potential complications. Yeah, but more convenient, allegedly. There's a lot of people who also say this is all just a bunch of naval gazing in a lot of ways. Yeah. Like, do we really need these apps? I ran across a vape for smoking weed, as they call it, that has an app. It's a vaping system for smoking. It's just a little pipe. Marijuana. Right. But it's just a little pipe. And it has an app that goes with it that remotely controls the heat settings and stuff. Oh, is it, like, track things like, you smoked no. 1oz of weed this month? No. Which would be pretty intriguing. I guess that would be useless. Yeah. And that's the point. There's a lot of stuff that you can point to and say, this is pretty neat. This thing feeds my cat while I spend 23 hours a day at work. Yeah, that's great. It's nice that I can keep this cat alive that I have no connection with any longer because I'm at work all the time. But this machine feeds it because I can control it remotely with an app. Right. But if you have something tracking how much weed you smoke, you're either smoking far too much or not nearly enough, or you have too much money. Is there another way to put it? Sure. Yeah. You know what? My friend Clay, I don't know if you've met Clay, but he told me something. The way as far as being concerned about security and privacy rights and things is what they do is they sell it to you first as convenience. Yeah. And then before you know it, clay never finished the sentence you did, but, you know, I don't remember exactly how he finished it. Clay said this in 1993. Oh, yeah. I think I like Clay way before he was probably just talking about, jeez, I don't even know, like a credit card or something. Right. And he was just like, just beware, man. He's like, they sell it to you as a convenience before you know it. Everyone is doing it that way. And it's fraught with complications, was essentially what he was saying. Yeah. I think that's very prescient because that's exactly the point that we're at right now. Yeah. And we'll talk a little more, a lot more, I'm sure, about security and privacy and all that stuff, but ultimately it's like you said, the Internet of things is this a lot of other people call it the Internet. Like, this is just the next wave of the Internet. This is where the Internet is going. But I guess the best description of it is it's a series of interconnected machines. Yeah. Devices that sense the environment in a lot of cases can carry out some sort of function. Usually it is a sensing function and can communicate with central servers, usually in the cloud via the Internet. It's about as simple as that. That's the Internet of things. Yeah. Like, if you think, Boy, this all sounds weird, and I don't use stuff like that. If you have anything that has the word smart in front of it, then you're probably using the Internet of things already. Right. If you've got a smartphone that connects to a smart thermostat or a smart smoke detector, or if you wear exercise tracker, that's the Internet of things. Right? Exactly. There's a lot of obvious steps that are right there on the horizon. Coming after this is like the idea that your refrigerator will be able to be like, oh, these guys are almost out of cashew milk. I'll contact Amazon and have it delivered in 2 hours. Yes. And you're like, I don't drink cashew milk anymore. Friday stupid fridge. How many times do I have to abuse you? But that's pretty neat. I mean, I think a lot of this is it's both good and a little creepy. Like, that'd be cool if I showed up at home one day and I was out of milk and it was waiting on my doorstep. Milk you wouldn't want waiting on your doorstep. Cashew milk. It doesn't matter. Oh, you don't have to refrigerate it. No way. Because it's not milk, it's cashew juice. Yes. It is what they should call it. I don't disagree with you. Right. Sure. It is pretty neat. It's pretty cool. And in five years, it'll be totally second nature to us. Right? Right. But in my experience, the more mechanized, the more automated, the more convenient. I just made air quotes. Life gets, the more difficult it is to keep up with, the more simple it is and the more horrific it is when something breaks down. Interesting. So within Simplification, you think it becomes more complicated? Yeah, because you rely on machines that can break, and when they break, you're like, I forgot how to order cashew milk. Where do you get that stuff? Do you think we're headed for Idiocracy? To an extent, but I think it's more than that in the short term. I think it's just that it's so much easier to walk to a grocery store and buy cashew milk and walk back home than it is to ensure that your fridge has all of the updated firmware and make sure that it's ordering correctly from Amazon and to make sure Amazon gets there. And you're just relying on all these other components rather than your own 2ft. And the idea that the people at the store are going to have your cashew milk. I see that in a way, but I also disagree in a way. Like, for instance, I have a few things in my life that have set to auto order, like air filters, baby formula, stuff that water my fridge water filter. This stuff gets shipped to me automatically and it's wonderful because I don't have to think about it at all. So does your fridge order itself or you just put it on a timer on Amazon? Yeah, it's on a timer. Not even Amazon like the fridge filter company I got you, you can just set it to auto deliver like every 60 days. Okay, so it's nice because I don't have to think about it. The only thing is missing is the camera or the device itself being hooked up, telling the company, hey, my air filter is over or spent. Which would be pretty awesome, to tell you the truth. If your air filter could be like, it's actually we're at 90%, we need to go ahead and order. However, you know what? I never really thought about that being a little dicey because you need a new water filter, trust me. Right. Really? But what if you get another month out of this one that you're throwing away and you're ordering early? Then they can sell another two a year to you. Right, exactly. Yeah, that's what I assume when you're trusting them. Like when they're like, you have to change your oil every 3000 miles or yeah, you need to change your water filter every three months. You're like, I never changed my oil. Yes. Forget that. It's for chumps. It's a scam anyway. All right, so that's a little personal overview. The phrase Internet of things is actually coined, they think, in the late 90s by a guy named Kevin Ashton who worked for PNG. I'll bet he has a T shirt that says, I claim the term Internet of things well, just so he can invite people to punch them in the face or give him a hug, depending on who you are. Okay. He works for Proctor and Gamble and he had a presentation there at work where he said we should put radio frequency ID tags, RFIDs on lipstick in the store and have that hooked up to a machine where we could automatically send that information and say, hey, this store is running low on lipstick. Get a shipment over there. Yeah, and he coined the term internet of things supposedly in that meeting. And apparently, though, at this time, prior to that, the 90s were a big time for something called ubiquitous computing, which is basically the predecessor to the idea of the Internet of Things, where, like, computers would just be integrated into our lives totally and completely. And the Internet of Things is in that vein a little similarly. But from stuff I've read, there's a lot of people who didn't quite fulfill the promise of ubiquitous computing. This is just kind of like, life is slightly more convenient now thanks to this. But his original idea, Kevin Ashton, makes total and complete sense. How many sales do you miss when your lipstick thing is empty until you find out it's empty and then get to refill it? Yeah. Like, if you're lipstick, the last one can be like, hey, I'm the last one here. You guys better send some replacements. Right. It's great. That makes perfect total sense. And that was ultimately the original basis of the Internet of Things. It's taking dumb things and making them, like you said, smart by giving them the ability to sense their surroundings and communicate that data to a central server where it's analyzed, and then the proper people are alerted. Yeah. And here's the thing that I also never considered, is they must have discovered that there was a need for that. And the only need I can imagine would be that the employees were so bad at realizing that they were running out of stock that they would go several days without having lipstick on hand. Right. So they were like, these people can't even do that. Well, what if let's say that you have a person whose job it is to restock lipstick, right? And they go one week, and there's like 5 million tubes of orange, so much orange, they just take a handful and throw it away just because they don't want their bosses to feel bad about the orange lipstick that's not being sold. Tubes of orange come back, right? Yes. The next week, and it's all gone, sold out. And then it's erratic like that. You've got an employee you're sending there that's just hit or miss whether you just wasted a bunch of gas in the employees time rather than being alerted, like, now you guys can come before it's too late. So that's the thing that makes the most sense to me. Kevin Ashton genius. Maybe so. I meant to look him up, see what he was doing these days if he was just wearing that T shirt, or he might be a professional term pointer. Some worked out quite as well fishing it of the future. Yeah. That kind of caught on a little bit early in the 2000s, but then it just yeah, it went away. The Dodo, which was coined by giving a great grandfather older brother yeah, Tommy Ashton. That's been around for a while since the Dodo. Since the Dodo died. All right, so let's talk about a little bit. What you've got, essentially, is a step by step system that many times starts with a smartphone that's connected to the Internet. Then you have other pieces of hardware in your home that are also connected to the Internet, and there is most likely an app for that hardware on your smartphone. Right. And then that's usually sent out to the cloud. It's not some guy or some lady sitting in a room in your guest room. Yeah. Looking at your data. 8000 steps today, just following behind you, counting, lost count. Now they're looking at the data from your wearable. Yeah. So they're just in your guest room. That's kind of neat. I don't know. Now it depends on whether they get along with you or if they drink all your cashew milk. Well, Todd drinks all the cashew milk. That's why Todd's not want it. He's being counterproductive. So then it usually goes to the cloud, which is where we send our data these days, where it's analyzed. And that's a big part of the Internet of Things to Chuck, is the cloud, because that means that you don't have to analyze the data in the little machine, in the little sensor. All it has to do is send stuff and create that data and then send it to the cloud, where you're basically outsourcing all the analysis. That takes a lot more computing power. So that was a big development that there's such a thing as the cloud now. Yeah. It kind of puts the smart into it all. And if you're wondering how big it is right now, it depends on who you ask. But some say between 15 and 25 billion devices already that are connected. And some people say by 2020 or 2025, it could be anywhere from 50 billion to a trillion devices connected, depending on how much it catches on how every day it becomes. Yeah, but it said it that way, for sure. I don't think there's any going back from this. I think they're going to stick some sort of computing hardware that taps into the Internet on everything. Okay. Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a smart thermostat. Like, they have devices now that you can tag to everyday items to keep up with things. Yeah. Or let's say cameras that let's say you have a security system at your house that you can view from your smartphone from anywhere in the world. Yeah. And maybe it automatically calls the police. That's the Internet of things, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great applications for it. And again, we're in the nascent period of this. Like, the stuff that's like, wow, holy cow, I have a smart doorbell. It's amazing, and it's awesome, and it works really well, but you basically can't apply your imagination to predict what's even going to be 15 years into the future. As far as the Internet of Things goes, like, just the change in how we deal and interact with the Internet and our surroundings is inestimable. Yeah. Who wrote this one? Is this Strickland? No, this is Bernadette Johnson. Well, she wrote a line in here that I'm just going to read because it really kind of hit home for me. She said we've essentially given common physical objects, both computing power and senses, and that explains it to a T. Yeah, she did a good job with this. There's a lot of information, like, you can make anything smart that you wanted. You could have a smart can opener. Smart tube of lipstick. Yeah, exactly. Or smart tube of toothpaste when you're squeezing the end. And how do you get all the toothpaste out? What's your method? Oh, you know, they make a little remover. I can't remember what it's called. You got a machine? No. Yeah, I have a smart toothpaste remover. It looks like remember those candy lips? The wax lips? Yeah, sure. It looks like those, but it's in my pocket right now. Okay, so pull those out. Yeah. If you had, like, a slit in the lips, you put the tube of toothpaste, like, the end of it in there, and you just kind of tilted at an angle a little bit, and it puts pressure, and you just slide it along and it pushes it to the front. Yeah, I use my toothbrush to do the same thing. How? Oh, you slide the toothpaste, brush the toothpaste tube on the sink, and just use it as a flattener squeezer. Squeezer. Yeah. That's a good one. Interesting. Yeah. I never realized you just hacked your toothbrush. What do you pay for something like what you got, like, a dollar? Something like that? Yeah, nothing too much. Well, boy, I guess I got away with it. See, now, if there was some sort of computing chip on this thing that calculated how much toothpaste was left, since that information to my app, that would be a smart toothpaste squeezer. Right. That's it. Or you come home and open the mailbox and there's a new toothpaste. I didn't even know I was out because I haven't been using my lippy device. I forgot to brush my teeth for three weeks. Let's take a break. Yeah, it's getting a little silly. Yeah. And you go brush your teeth, and we'll meet back in here. And how long does it take you to brush your teeth? Like, seven or 8 seconds. Great. We'll be back here in 8 seconds. By the way, seven or 8 seconds is not nearly enough time. No, that's washing your hands. You're supposed to do the alphabet twice for brushing your teeth, either for washing your hands or brushing your teeth. I think you're supposed to do, like, three minutes for brushing your teeth. We won't name check here in Buzz Market, but I've got a mechanical toothbrush, mechanical and electric toothbrush, and it beeps, and you divide your mouth up into four zones. I think I have the same one. Top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right and it just beeps. Mine doesn't beep. It vibrates. Really? It's already vibrating, though. How can you tell the difference? It changes its vibration. Really? Yeah. How weird. I guess maybe it's a pause in the vibration, now that I think about it. I just assumed it's vibration. Yeah. Same deal, though. Yeah. And again, there's smart toothbrushes that can keep up with how much you brush your teeth and that kind of stuff. Are they really? Yeah, they're WiFi connected toothbrushes that connect to an app. You know, my brotherinlaw, the Marine Corps general, I used to laugh at him because I was in his bathroom once and open the drawer and he had a log of his razor and shaving log. Wow. Of like, how many times he'd use the razor. And it's basically pre smart Internet of things. Smart razor. I'm sure they have those now to alert you, like when you should change your razor blades. I haven't heard of that one, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was. I just thought it was very funny. I mean, I said a lot about who he was. Oh, yeah. And no surprise that he's a Marine Corps General if he's keeping up with stuff like that. I can see him like, I met him. He's a great guy. Yeah. Just sitting at the edge of the bed right before bedtime. Petting his cat 50 times, no more, no less, and then putting it in a foot locker at the end of the bed for the night and tucking himself in. Yeah. He's the one that turned me on to peeing sitting down, too. Oh, yeah. Great debt to him. Nice. Heads off. Is he coming to our DC show again? No, man. They're transferred overseas for the first time ever. Are they coming to our UK shows? No, not that. Overseas. I'm not allowed to say where he's going. Okay, that's cool. I'm with you. Top secret, huh? I can tell you off the air. See those blinks? Yeah, I see what you're saying. It probably doesn't matter. I'm just respecting his privacy. That's cool. By telling everyone that he taught me to pee sitting down. You really are starting that national combo, aren't you? I just think it's important. We need to be talking about it. No mistakes is the motto. The tagline. No drips, no runs, no errors. Nice. Did we just take a break and we came back with this garbage? Maybe we should start over again. No, we're all right. We'll leave that up to Jerry. All right, well, let's talk about the tech. How about that? Yeah. Telemetry. Nothing new. No. Apparently this says and again, the whole basis of the Internet of things is what's called machine to machine communication. Yeah. M to M. Right. You have, like, your smart lipstick just sitting there, sensing that it's the last tube it can sense all day long and it's still a dumb stick of lipstick. Yeah, I can't tell. You right. Unless it can communicate that data to the people who need to know that stuff. And they do that through machine to machine communication. And like you're saying, telemetry was the original version of that, which apparently dates back to 19 12th. Yeah, it comes from the Greek tela means remote and metron means measure. And that's where you're basically in a remote area, you would measure something and then send that via back then telephone line. Right. Like an Arctic station or something, set up to watch animals, like deep in the jungle or something. It's like there's will the beast. Oh my God, there's a wildebeest. That was early telemetry. Exactly. And that's essentially just an extension of what we're doing now. Yeah, now it's an extension of from then. Well, we've built upon that. I mean, think like the first dial up stuff that was, I would guess, probably telemetry, the series of like the all that. I mean, you're sending signals from one machine to another saying, let me online. Yeah, it's a problem. Why are you so slow? And what's allowed the Internet of things to take root? Very simply, it gets more complicated. But the Invention of the World Wide Web by Mr Tim BernersLee in Hats Off, Ma'am. Then the ubiquitousness. Is that a word? Ubiquity. Ubiquitousness. Ubiquitousness of WiFi. Although yeah, I think ubiquity is, yeah. Is that right? Yes, WiFi. I do the Porky Pig thing where I just skip it. The widespread nature of WiFi all of a sudden, where you don't have to be physically connected to something that really advanced things. And then, like we already said, the cloud. Yeah, I think the cloud is the thing that really kind of allows it more than anything else. If you had to have that kind of computing power right there in the sensor, then it just would be very limiting. You couldn't put it on just anything. And it would be a lot more expensive too. These things that they're adding to normal inanimate objects to make them smart are very cheap to produce. They just need a few components. They need computing hardware, they need sensors, they need communication hardware, and then they need some sort of power source which you can get that from the machine itself that you plug in. Right. So like, if it's a smart coffee maker, it can draw power from the plug that the coffee maker runs off of. And then it needs Internet access, which if you have a smart coffee maker but you don't have Internet at your house, you made a poor decision in your coffee maker purchase. Yes. Pretty much everything comes with Internet access at this point. Right. In the Western world, for sure. The other thing we've kind of been talking about is your own devices in your home. But you don't have to be just hooked up to things that you own. You can hook up to other system devices. Let's say your town has devices that monitor traffic conditions. You can tap into that. I guess that's what we are, right? Or is that all self reported? I looked up and it seems to be all self reported, but there's something called Waze Citizen or something like that. And it appears to be ways trying to get smart cities to let them tap into their information, like traffic cams and stuff like that. Yeah, and apparently that's already a thing. Like if you just leave your phone open or like the Bluetooth on if you're driving through a smart city with traffic sensors, it basically uses your phone's information while you're in traffic as real time traffic information. Because your phone has something like, I'm an accelerometer in it, so it knows how fast you're moving at any given point. And if it's giving that information to just a panel on the side of the street, that panel can put all that info together and be like, oh, Peach Tree is like super backed up right now. Right. And then if we can get their hands on the information, they can send that out to their users. But for right now, Waze, as far as I know, is a social app. It relies on its users to update conditions. Right. Which by the way, Waze I think might be the best app of the 21st century so far. I didn't start using it. I had it on my phone for a while, but I never used it. But have a little bit recently. I don't interact with it much. I'll just set it to tell me where to go. Like I don't report accidents and things. Oh, you should. Does that mean I'm a bad user? You're using the efforts of other people without contributing. I mean, the point is for everybody to contribute. It makes it more robust, but it's not like they're going to show up at your house, like safely. You pull over on the highway accident. That's probably the one big thing about ways is that you're not supposed to be using it in that situation. If you're the driver, you're supposed to be the passenger, but they're also kind of telling you to well, I mean, there's a thing that when it comes up or when you try to start it'll, say, are you a passenger? Right. And they just assume that you're going to just be truthful about that. Yeah, that's like the website to say, like, tell us you're 21 by clicking here. Exactly. And then walk into the party. Yeah. 20 year old is like, no shoot. Click on this home close. Two weeks. I'll be back in two weeks. The other thing I was wondering too, like what if the lipstick, as an example, what if that's open to where you can look at your app and say, like, well, no, this store is out of lipstick. Well, that would be cool. Yeah. Instead of having to call and talk to a dumb person. I know, it's awful. Wait for them to go look with their eyes. Well, but I get it, though, because nowadays you call and say, hey, I want to check and see if you have something in stock. And you usually met with all right, yeah, hold on. And not like, sure, I'd be happy to go check for you, sir. They're like, Man, I can't wait to get outsourced to a robot. Right. But then you get to the store and they don't have it in stock. You're like, I called and asked someone. They're like, who did you talk to? There's no one by the name of work here. Sorry, Chuck. Speaking of smart cities, traffic info is a big one. Sure. So is smart traffic lights, which I wish this had been around starting when I was 16, because there are a few things to me that are more of a waste of time and sitting at a traffic light when there's no traffic going through. Yeah. Decatur, where near raila is famous for its lights not being timed or tripped or whatever. It's there forever. It's horrible. Yeah, decatur does have really long lights, and they don't even have the we found out it's either a metal detector or a weight sensor. Yeah, there's like, the lines where they obviously cut out the hard top in front of you in front of a light. If you don't even have that, that's a problem. But even those ones that have sensors don't always, like, do it immediately. It should be a lot smarter than that. And that's part of sit there, rubbing your engineer, that guy at the stoplight, you know Decaturs motto when you drive in, it says, Decatur, what's your hurry? Really? No, I can kind of see it, actually. Slow down, Decatur. What's with all the baby strollers? Another one off road. Baby strollers? What, they have those big off road, like jogging baby stroller with the huge tires? Yeah, I got one of those. Yeah, but that's you live in decay. Well, no, I mean, I don't really go off road, but that's because the sidewalks in my neighborhood are awful soft road. They suck. Yeah, it is. Off road. Might as well be like tree roots growing up everywhere, that kind of thing. Yeah, they're like, this tree is never going to grow. Let's put a sidewalk up right next to it. While you're talking about smart cities, the other cool thing potentially that they could do, they might actually be doing this, is infrastructure, like embedding sensors into sidewalks. Well, that's a good example. Like a sidewalk that becomes cracked or broken or a bridge that becomes weak. In one point, they can send the signal and say, hey, maybe you should come check out this bridge. And then eventually they will send a signal to the robot sidewalk crew who will come out and repair the sidewalk, and everything will look perfect all the time, thanks to the robots. Right. But there's 40 robots and like, 30 of them are just standing around and ten of them are working. And where did they learn to smoke cigarettes? Yeah, it seems weird. I used to get so rubbed at cigarette breaks because I didn't smoke. Oh, yeah. And I was always like, I'm just going to go stand outside, and the boss would be like, you can't do that. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, you could take a break, but cigarette breaks weren't even real breaks. Someone just like a new smoke, but you could never go, I'm just going to go stand outside for five minutes. Right. Like, you have to be killing yourself to make that allowed. Yeah. No, that dawned on me when I was a smoker too. That's when I was young. And I was more angry back then about justice. Yeah. So, again, we can sit here basically all day and talk about devices and applications for this kind of thing. Sure. But there's some hurdles that are coming up that need to be addressed pretty soon and we'll talk about those right after this. All right, Chuckers, we're back. Hurdles. So right now there's some immediate hurdles, including the idea that a lot of smart technology operates on using totally different languages, different protocols, different everything, so that if you have a house full of different smart gadgets, you probably have an app for every single one of them, rather than one integrated gap or app. It's not a hurdle. Like, you can have that many apps, but the idea of it being seamlessly integrated into gist one part of your phone would be great, and if they could talk to one another without you having to control it, like the light sensor on your light shade notices that the sun is starting to go down, so it opens your blinds a little bit. Right. And when that happens, your smart cantaloupe slicer knows that you like a slice of cantaloupe before dinner, so it slices up the cantaloupe and they're all talking to one another. So it's not like everything's on a timer and things happen at once. It's happening because one thing is sensing this and it's relaying that information to the other devices in your house as well. That's not happening right now. Yeah. What I need is I need between seven and 09:00 A.m., I need my toilet to flush about every eight minutes. Man alive, that'd be my smart house. Or as soon as the coffee starts brewing, seven minutes later, the toilet flushes. That happens to you. Coffee is good for that. It's great for that. But that's another thing that's coming very soon, too. Smart toilets, I can tell you. Like, oh, sure, you got a lot of Billy Rubins in here. Yeah, what's up with that? What's up with that? So basically what you're talking about is systems that aren't integrated because there's a bunch of different companies with all their own devices, but there are companies trying to come together to join up with open source platforms. And one of them is created by Qualcomm called the All Seen Alliance, which is like, it sounds something like from a future horror movie. Yeah, it sounds really creepy. The All Scene Alliance. Right. Or new Speak. Like, you might as well just say, like, we want a camera in every room of your home so we can all just talk to each other and make your life simpler. Just relax, lay back. Apple's Home Kit. They always make it sound cute and not creepy when it's probably creepier than the All Seen Alliance. Yeah, a bunch of people have on Google has them. Samsung. There's one called everything that's missing a couple of vowels. Wink is a big one. It's a big one right now. Yeah. It controls some stuff, like, I think Phillips lights, and it works with Nest maybe, or something like that. It does, like, two things, so it's like cutting edge right now. But as the author of this article, Bernadette Johnson puts out, none are all encompassing, which I saw that and I was like, Mitch, hebberg would have liked that sentence. None are all encompassing. Yeah, he said he was, like, trying new words and rather than like, totally he said he was eating totally too much. They'd be like, Mitch, do you like s'mores? And be like, all encompassingly. So another hurdle that we are already getting around was back in the 90s, we started to realize we were running out of IP addresses. The standard IP address was the well, it still is in some ways. The IPV Four. Yes, IPV Four. And in the 90s, they got smart. It wasn't like the Y two K Bug. We're like, oh, my gosh, things are going to be different in a month. Right? They got on this a while ago and created the IP and started basically created potentially what's the number? An undecided number of 340 undecided addresses. That's so many. That is one with 36 zeroes behind it and enough to give IP addresses to everyone on the planet times ten to the 28th power. Right. So basically they said, we don't want to run out ever again. Well, the funny thing is, Chuck, is in 1981, when they came up with the IPV Four, that came up with 4.25 billion possible addresses, they were like, no way. They're like, that's we're doing yeah, within like 30 years, 35 years, they started to really run out. And apparently there was a prediction that in 2015, we were going to straight up run out of IPV Four Internet addresses or IP addresses. And apparently that was a cliff we avoided, obviously, because we're still making things that have their own IP addresses. I thought they did run out. No, they use different things to mitigate it, including this network address. Translation really kind of open things up. And that's where a server identifies a network as a single IP address and then leaves it to the local network to decide where the information that's supposed to be going to one computer on the network goes. Right. See what I'm saying? But to the server, to the rest of the Internet, that whole network, which can be a ton of computers, is just one IP address. So you just reduced it by that many computers that are on that local network. Got you. That was a big one. But then also building new things on the IPV Six platform has helped mitigate it a little bit, too. So I think it's a cliff that we came very close to but avoided going over. Well, it doesn't matter now because IPV Six is the new way forward. It is, but there's a lot of stuff still in use that's plenty good for the next couple of years. Yeah. They have IPV Four addresses that still need to they're like me, too. Well, that doesn't matter. They're compatible now. Well, they're working to make them compatible. I think they're already a long way down that road. Oh, yeah. They're using both seamlessly, pretty much. Okay, cool. Well, then there's a great wired well, I think so. There's a Great Wired article about it, and they basically said at first they weren't entirely compatible. You had to have some sort of layer in between to make them basically be friends. Okay. And they're still working on it. It's not like, finished, but it said so far the transition has been pretty seamless. Like, you're interacting with IPV Six right now. You don't even know it. Yeah. I would assume if you have something that was made in the last couple of years, it's probably IPV Six. Yeah, that's what I would guess, sure. So that's pretty neat. Undecided. Didn't even know that was a thing. I didn't either. I had to look it up. It's like what the heck? Is that a typo on? So I don't think we can put it off any longer. Chuck. There's a lot of security and privacy concerns that crop up from just the presence of the Internet of things. Right. If you have a bunch of sensors in your house collecting data and everything, from how many times you toss and turn in your sleep right. To how many minutes the toilet needs to be flushed in intervals, to whether you're moving around your house or not, whether you're home. There's a lot of sensors, even now, the standard home in the United States that are collecting data, and there's not a lot of regulation on what happens to that data, who has access to that data, how safe that data has to be. It's just wide open for government surveillance, hackers, targeted ads. Yeah. If you're paranoid about government stuff, then this probably worries you. Hacking is a whole different can of worms. Like, everyone should worry about that. Yeah, I feel like everyone should worry about government surveillance as well. Big time. Some people think that's bunk government surveillance? Well, some people, yeah, sure, they're fools. Maybe people are utter fools and the world is full of fools. That's crazy to me. There's testimony from the head of the NSA. There was snowden releasing the prism files. How could anyone just say, no, that's not the case anymore? Well, what you're saying is everyone should be as up on this as I am. And that's the foolish statement. If you went to people on the street today, I see what you mean. I bet 50 of them would say, that's just conspiracy stuff. I see. I thought you were saying, like, people knew and they were saying, like, no, this isn't a real thing. No. I think I got you. Most people probably have their head in the sand of stuff. Totally agree. I see what you mean. Yeah. I still think they're foolish. Well, sure. And instead because the one thing that would press security into the Internet of things, there isn't any right now. There's virtually none. Well, I mean, it's all got to be self installed not by the person, but by the company. Right. Like, hey, we know you're probably worried, so we've done this and this. Right. And the way that that will happen is if people say, oh, that brand is not very secure, I'm going to go to their competitor, which is super secure, or if they get sued, sure. And that will cause brands which are self regulating right now as far as security goes, to become more secure. But if people are unaware of it or just don't think that kind of stuff is going on, then there's not going to be any call for that. And they'll be able to continue to put sensors in our home, devices in our home that can eavesdrop on us, that can detect all sorts of different things about us without any thought for security whatsoever. Yeah, well, they have a great example in here, and it's not just the Internet of things. It's already happening with Target. His dad in 2012 got mad because his teenage daughter was getting baby ads targeted toward her, and he was like, why are you trying to get my teenage daughter to have a baby? Why do you keep sending her this stuff? Right. And he found out she was pregnant and was like he actually apologized to them. But I still think, like, he had a beef because what I thought is they were just using her search information to Target ads, which is what goes on all the time. Right. But she wasn't. What Target does is they have every customer every time you shop at Target with a credit card, you have a guest ID number that says, oh, here's that credit card from Josh Clarke again. Sure. He's back in my store. Here's all the things that he's bought. So let's Target ads at him simply by shopping there without using cash, which I didn't know that happened? Well, yeah, and it used to be you had to sign up for like a rewards program, like a Kroger card or something like that. I understand this is the same thing without you opting into it, right? Yeah, it's just tracking your credit card. And I think it's New York Times, the red one article where eventually they quit talking to the New York Times, but he got a little information at first and he said he talked to a Target employee. That said, here's the hypothetical example. Let's say there's a girl in Atlanta shopping here. She buys cocoa butter lotion. She buys a big purse that could be a diaper bag. She buys magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. They might just surmise, hey, I bet this lady's pregnant. I bet she's going to have a boy because she's going to buy that bright blue rug. It's going to smell like cocoa butter. Yeah. And so you know what? I bet you she's due in August, too determined to buy what she's purchasing, right. So let's start bombarding her with ads. And that just seems a little creepy if you're not opting in with I mean, it's a little creepy anyway if you get the shoppers card. Yeah, but you're saying, like, sure, I'll take a little bit of a discount in exchange for you keeping track of my spending habits or you willingly check the box terms and Conditions without reading it. Well, I think Terms and Conditions should be a whole other episode, man. Yeah, there's a documentary about that. I think it's called terms and Conditions apply. Nice. Maybe, but boy, it is creepy. Yeah, because nobody ever reads that stuff. No way. And they make it that long so that no one would. But actually, we've read this Guardian article. Did you check that out that I sent you? Yeah. So in the Guardian article, there's a mention of Samsung, which had, they had terms and conditions for their TV, I think it was in 2014 or 15 that it came out. And it says in the terms and conditions for the TV that you bring into your home. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information. That information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition. Which means your TV is listening to you and transmitting your conversations. Or at the very least keywords from your conversations in your voice to somebody else who can figure out how to Target ads. Who can put you on a government watch list. You can do anything, which means that you're talking normally in your own home and your TV eavesdropping on you. Yeah. You say that's. Okay, not you, but one says that's fine, because I don't want to touch my remote. I just want to say turn up volume. Right. I can't be bothered to use my finger. Fine. Nicholas Cage movies comma bad ones. He doesn't make bad movies, dude. Kidding. I used to love Andy. Samberg's. Nick Cage on SNL. I don't think I ever saw that one. So funny. I like Nick Cage's. Tiny Elvis. Oh, yeah, that was good. He was so bizarre. I love Nicholas Cage because he's unabashed. He will do some really great smaller movies where you're like, man, this dude is an amazing actor. And then he'll do the worst garbage you can imagine for money. Yes. And just like, yeah, I want to buy eight new motorcycles. But I think he's a great example of what a good director can do with an actor if they know what they're doing with them. Sure. Because he does virtually the same thing in all movies. It's just how much more he's doing it and how much he's reigned in or how good the script is. Yeah. He comes in, he's like, you want 20% Cage or 80% Cage? I mean, you're right. He has made some great movies, but, man, he has made some bad ones. Wow. Oh, wait, hold on. Let's get back on track. There's one other thing, too. There's a big debate going on right now, Chuck, about whether your phone is eavesdropping on you for, at the very least, targeted ads. Again, if you think that your phone is not eavesdropping on you, you're deluding yourself. Your phone, your TV, your laptop, everything around you that is connected to the Internet and has a microphone and or video camera is eavesdropping on you. And you don't care. Right? I do care, but I also have a feeling like, but you have a smartphone. What can I do? I know. Well, you could not have a smartphone. That's part of it. And that's a big thing. There's a trade off. It's like, okay, I want to be able to read Twitter every 30 seconds and just be like, wow, that was boring, and then do it again 30 seconds later. And I'm willing to trade that ability for the idea that, yeah, I'm being listened to. And the gamble that, well, I guess I'm not saying anything that important, but, I mean, that's wrong. That's wrong. Well, or the people say, like, if you don't have nothing to hide, then who cares? That's a fallacy. That's a logical fallacy. A lot of the people collecting that databank on yeah. It still has a chilling effect on society at large. And if they ever do want something on you, brother, they got it. Yes, ancestor man, I'm sorry. I'm worked up. I was at Twitter. I'm going to be cool. Then that light didn't change green. It all went south. It's a dumb traffic light. All right, so we talked a little bit about hackers, and we're not just talking about stealing your information or tapping into your bank. What about if your grandmother, who is a shut in, has this great new smart health system that is hooked up to her body and alerts her doctor if something's wrong. She's low on meds. These are all great things, but what if someone can hack into that and hack into Grandma's systems where it doesn't alert? Then her life is literally at stake. Yeah. Or what if you have and this has happened too? What if you go into your baby's room and your baby monitor, you hear some guy's voice on the other end yelling and screaming curse words? Yeah, in Russian. I think that's happened to your baby is just like, what's this guy's problem? Yeah, he usually tells me nice stories. Where's Sergey? I want Sergey back. It's all really creepy, man. You know, one of my heroes, Charles C. Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493 I never heard of it. He wrote an article in Vanity Fair called look out, he's Got a phone. And it was all about the ways that the Internet of things could be hacked to basically really threaten somebody. If you got a smart pacemaker or smart insulin pump, those things could be hacked. Yeah. And that's something that we're going to have to deal with or we're dealing with now as it stands. Well, one of the things that could help and what should be going on is these devices, at the very least, should be giving you options on how much data they get their hands on, how it's stored, and what the expiration date on that is. Like, if you quit using this device, they still have your information. Right. You might still be collecting it, too. Yeah, absolutely. Or when I didn't think about when these systems are no longer supported, like the company shuts down or something, it needs to have a suicide measure program to where it kills itself after it's not supported anymore, and it should do it gruesomely. What about economics? Well, as you can imagine, if there's hundreds of billions of devices on the horizon being connected, it's going to have a pretty big economic impact. And they're talking about something on the order of what was it? $4.3 trillion in value by 2024, up from 900 billion. It seems low to me. Yeah. You know, like, think about just in cashew milk alone. Sure. It's trillion dollars. Yeah. Well, it's also costing some companies. How so? Well, if you've heard of Square, you probably pay for a lot of things with Square these days. It's a great thing because it allows a small business. Previously, there was only one way to make credit card transactions. You had to get a fairly expensive system or a cash register that made it all possible, and they kind of had to over barrel a little bit. Then Square came along and said, no, you know what? You don't need that stuff. Let's democratize it. Yeah. We have the Internet now. Here's some competition. All you need is a little thing to plug in to your tablet, and you can swipe it right there in the cab or in the place of business and avoid the middlemen or use PayPal and basically skirt these companies that have kind of been ripping you off, right, as a business, and then that business passes the cost on to you as a customer. Or they're like, we don't take their credit card, their fees are too high, or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But you're right. It's the Democratization, which is good. I mean, it's great. It's opened up a lot of it's taken Etsy into the real world. That's right. Isn't that awesome? Oh, yeah. There's also worried that it could cost jobs. Like you said, what if the lipstick stalker gets fired because he threw away all those orange tubes of lipstick and he deserves it. He didn't do his job good enough. Well, I think this article just kind of glosses over that issue, and it's a big issue in and of itself. I don't know, but I don't think it glossed over it so much as there's a school of thought, a very prominent school of thought that says, no, that's not what happens. People get different jobs and learn new things. And the one example they used in here, which I think makes sense, is ATMs. ATMs popped up everywhere and people are like, oh, well, there's not going to be any more bank tellers. No one needs to go to a bank. Yeah, but they actually increased in number, right? Yeah, they did. And they think part of that reason is because banks could open more branches because they didn't need to staff it with 14 bankers, they just needed a couple. But more branches meant ultimately more sellers. Yes. Just not in one place. The thing is, I would be very curious to know whether that was an anomaly. Typically in an industry that gets replaced by a machine, a good one, like an ATM works pretty well, right, if jobs actually go up, or if that was just like one of the very rare examples of it. Well, I think it depends on your industry. If you're one of the people that did that thing, you're like, well, I lost my job to a robot. If you build the robots, you're like, I got a job because I'm now building robots. Right. And again, I think we talked about this. I don't remember in one episode. But if you are getting rid of an industry and putting a lot of people out of their employment, their careers I'm not against automating stuff like that. Right. But I think part and parcel with that is to figure out a way to take those out of work people and train them to go into new fields or just to build the stuff that took over their jobs or whatever. You can't just be like, Best of luck. We figured out a way for a robot to do what you're doing. Right? Go get hooked on OxyContin and go die. Wait, what was that? Because we got a great listener mail about that. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. A certain amount of people from this industry it was a Kentucky coal industry, something like that were then cross trained to do computer work. Right. It wasn't even that long ago, but I can't remember exactly what it was. But that's exactly what I mean. Like that's number one, it's a role of government, in my opinion. It's one of the clear things that you can look at and be like, oh, yeah, that's what government is for. They're supposed to invest in infrastructure and education to keep people employed so that everyone can earn a decent wage. It's my soapbox. This has basically been one long soapbox, hasn't it? I don't think so. Well, that's the Internet of things. There's literally nothing more to speak about. It okay. No more. I'm just kidding. And if you want to know more about that kind of stuff, you should go check out our Compadre Johnstrickland's podcast, tech Stuff. I guarantee it talks about the Internet of Things every other week. Yeah, I would imagine, if you want to know more about it. In the meantime, you can look up this article on how stuff works.com by typing Internet of Things on the search bar. And since I said things, it's time for listener mail. No, sir. Oh, yeah, we already did listener mail. Well, that's right, but we have a bonus, because now we're going to finish up with part two of Administrative. Okay. All right. Again, if you're new to the show, this is when we thank people for the nice things they send us. And it goes a little something like this. Peter, the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, they sent us a cat care package after our cat podcast. Oh, yeah. And I think probably partially because of my soapbox on declaring A and outdoor cats, they're like, this guy. Yes. Sending some cat stuff. Get him some cat stuff, stat. Thanks for that. Put a cat in a box and mail it to him. That's Peter's way. We got a postcard from China from Mary Kate Mueller. Thanks a lot for that. Mary Kate We appreciate it. Beautiful Lisa of Black Bow Suites. Send us some candied. Pecans. Dude, those are dangerous. Yeah, they not last long in the Clark House. No. Almost didn't make it on the ride home. I just feel like I stopped. Man, they are good. Aaron Supple sent us the bottle of Sonoma County to selling companies west of Kentucky. Bourbon number one. I haven't tried it yet. Is it good? I have not tried it yet, either, but I'm very much looking forward to it. So. Thanks a lot, Aaron. And speaking of whiskey, 33 books. Dave from 33 Books sent us a whiskey tasting set, which is a little, I think, imported from Ireland. Even a little whiskey tasting glass. Yes. A book for note and a pen even. Yeah, it's everything you need. Everything you need to taste whisky. So thanks, Dave, for that. We got a postcard from Caitlin and her fiance from the Mayo Clinic. Remember the Helen branch mentioned and I think, like, I think some Unsolved Mysteries. We heard the episode on Unsolved Mysteries a long time ago. Yeah. But we got a Mayo Clinic postcard. Yeah, why not? Robin and Erin send us some coasters, some Detroit coasters, because they know even though we poke fun at Detroit, we secretly love Detroit. Yeah. Thanks a lot. So. Thanks, Robin and Aaron for that. Mark Singleton over at Rudolph Food sent us a ton of pork rinds and a bunch of great gear to go with it. So we can wear camouflage hat while we eat our pork rinds. Right. As it should be. Sam Meckling of Jepson's Malort of Chicago. Oh, yeah. Sent us bottles of Malort. And if you've never heard of Malort, it is Chicago's own special liqueur. It's something. It is. It's known for its harsh aftertaste because it's a good way to put it. Yeah. The great thing about Malort, though, is they know the deal. They're not like, this is so delicious, you're just never going to have anything better in your mouth. You seem to be having a good day. Let's change that. Yeah, but, Mauriti, actually, this is the best thing you can say. I've gotten used to it. And it's an interesting taste. You should try it out. Well, thanks to the dudes who sent us that. We appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Sam. Speaking of booze, I think we mentioned it the other day, but also, again, thank you to the people at Spring 44, which is a Colorado distillery for the old Tom Gin that they sent us. Yeah. That was just beautiful. Yeah. And actually just ran out. Yeah, just sat out there. Badger Body Products, a competitor of my own wife, even. That was Dave who sent us those. Dave from Badger Body Products out of New Hampshire sent us shaving stuff and sunscreen and beard oils and such. Yeah. That was Dave Morel. He was the beer guy. Yeah. He worked at Sweetwater. Yeah. And he used to bring a Sweetwater. He's a great guy. And like all beer guys, he ended up in New Hampshire. Yeah. But Emily, actually my own wife, who has her natural body product company, went and she usually poopoos because people say they're natural in art. Right. She's like, Badger is good, actually. Yeah. She's like they make good stuff. Yeah. So I use their beard oil now. Well, thanks a lot, David. I've been using they have a bug repellent sunblock that works. Smells awesome. It smells like citronella. It works like a charm. Thank you for that. Pie lady and son. Oh, yeah. Out of New York, they sent us Pie Dude, and they were just getting started with their shipping program. And Pie Lady and Son, I have to tell you, it worked great. They showed up. Fresh and delicious. And by delicious, I mean really delicious. Yeah. Thanks a lot for that guy. Yes, you can support them as well. Pi lady and son out of New York City, zach debtMore sent us some beautiful cherry, walnut and maplewood boxes. Those are great, Zach. Yeah. Got mine on my desk. Yes, same here. Matt Dent sent us his comic strip guy who's created the Willie Who comics. Been around for 25 years. I know. I saw that book. It's amazing. Yes. And it's a big collection. Collectors edition. Congratulations, Matt and Chuck. Somebody made us a longboard that I've got stuff you should know. Longboard. It's amazing. I don't know. We lost the correspondence. I don't know who made it. Yes. So if you made it, send it in and we'll read your name. Yeah, we'll read. Thank you. But thank you very much for the longboard. Our butter buddy, Tyler Murphy. He's our butter. He is our butter. Our bread and butter from South Dakota sent us Instant Empire shirts and records. Yeah. Which is really cool. Thanks, Tyler. And I just realized that Tyler's email has been going to my spam folder. So I emailed them today because I never looked in there. And I happened to for something else. I saw a bunch of emails from Tyler. I'm like, dude, so sorry. Yeah. Hillary, Lozar and Mike. Dude, I don't know if Mike's a lozar or not. Who knows? But Hillary and Mike have been with us for years. They are also from the Dakotas and travel to see our shows in Seattle. And they're wonderful people. Hillary's a teacher, and they, as always, send us delicious, delicious Flathead Lake cheese. Dude, that is the best cheese on the planet. I think you got better cheese than Flathead Lake. Send it in. Let us be the judge. Exactly. Rachel Stone, who is an artist from Australia's East Coast, she has a site called Landofwonderful.com. She sent us a lovely handmade card and letters. So thanks a lot, Rachel. Yeah. And then finally you got any more? No, last one. Emily and the crew at Kickoffoo Joy drinks. Oh, yeah. They had their Kickoff Joy juice in their Atlanta base, and they make all natural drinks, juices and sodas and things. Kikapu juice. And they sent us a box, and that was super nice. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks to everybody who sent us stuff. We appreciate it every time, so thank you. If you want to hang out with us on social media, you can go to Syskpodcast on Instagram and Twitter. You can go to Facebook.com, STUFFYou know, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon music that's so good it's Criminal morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and Harry Stylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
How Volcanoes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-volcanoes-work | Volcanic eruptions are destructive and often newsworthy events, but why do they occur? What are volcanoes? In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a look (but not too close) at the forces at work behind Earth's geological "hotheads." | Volcanic eruptions are destructive and often newsworthy events, but why do they occur? What are volcanoes? In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a look (but not too close) at the forces at work behind Earth's geological "hotheads." | Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:54:17 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=19, tm_min=54, tm_sec=17, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=364, tm_isdst=0) | 29774228 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuckle Bryant. Looking spry. Are you spry, grandma? Here comes the sun. What? Here comes the sun. This reminds me of the sun podcast. Oh, yeah. I don't think it's going to be nearly as bad. There's not nearly as much physics to it, especially not particle physics or Spooky physics. It's pretty straightforward, really. It was very richly detailed, dense and structure and content. But really, if you break it down, volcanoes, well, that's what we're paid to do, Chuck, and that's what we are going to do. Let me do my intro first. Do you ever see Joe versus the Volcano? One of my favorite all time movies. All time? Probably top five. I've seen it at least twelve times. It's so great. The preserious tom Hanks best role. Yeah, I think so. Beats the tired of Bosom buddies. I'm a big bachelor party guy. Are you really? But in this movie, he is sent to Waponi Woo. Right. Which means little island with big volcano. The Big Woo. Right. To jump into the Big Woo to basically appease the Waponies, who need somebody to sacrifice himself into the volcano, calling the volcano god. So everything can keep going on. Right. And they can keep drinking their orange soda, which they're famous for loving. Yes. Was it Fanta? I think it was Nd. Brand for the movie. So you remember then when he jumps in, what happens? I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but you remember what happens, right? Yeah. Okay. Chuck, do you realize that as of this week, we've reached a weird point in our life where we can explain what happened in that movie because it's not explained by the great John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed that? No, because it's a movie. Yeah, but isn't that weird that were we sitting next to our other significant others watching this movie, we could turn to them and say, here's actually what happened, and this is the type of thing that just happened? Yeah, of course. It really wouldn't happen that way. We'll figure it out. I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it, because we've been chastised for spoiling, like 30 year old movies before, in series that ended, like, ten years ago. Yeah. Good series, though. Et. Phoned home. Let's talk about volcanoes and how they work. Josh? A volcano, a lot of people might say, is a big mountain with a square top that bits fire everywhere and kills people. I don't know about square top. That is not true. Because any place on the planet Earth where the inner Earth leaks out into the outer Earth is a volcano. Wherever Earth gets a boo boo. Yes. Volcano. Right? That's exactly right. Yeah. So the Earth is composed of three we should really just do the broad stroke basics real quick, right? Sure. The Earth is composed of three general mega layers, right? Yes. You've got the thinnest layer, which is the outer crust, which is what we walk around on, which is the bottom of the ocean, that kind of thing. 20 to 44 miles deep on land. And that sounds yes, you're right. That sounds super big, but that's actually really thin. So from its thinnest part at the bottom of the ocean, it's 3 miles down, thick up to, like you said yes, 44 miles. Right. And then under that, you've got the mantle, right? Yes. And then you have the inner core, which is where the inner Earth people live, right? Yeah. The mantle is the biggest part. Really hot, but not melty because of one word that is the key to all things volcano. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Everything about volcanoes is pressure related, it seems like. Yes. Somehow it's hot enough, this mantle. It is solid, but it's hot enough to melt. But the pressure is so great, it can't melt. It can't be liquid. It's forced to stay in the solid form. Right? Yeah. The other key thing that we need to touch on before we get into volcanoes is the continental drift theory, plate tectonics. Right. That there are at least seven large plates and some minor plates as well, that are the outer crust that are moving over the mantle via the Athenosphere. And it's like this kind of liquid layer, this lubricating layer between the crust and the mantle. Right. And then so anytime these boundaries where these boundaries are, there's a potential for volcanic activity. Right. But that's not the all encompassing explanation for volcanoes, right? That's right. There are several ways that volcanic activity can occur as far as plate tectonics goes. Let's cover those first. Chuckles I'll take the first one. Okay. These plates can move away from each other sometimes, not necessarily toward each other. They can move away when they move away from each other. If it's underwater under the water, right? Yeah. Subsurface, then that's an ocean ridge. If it's under the land, it's a continental ridge. Right. And these plates drift apart, and then the mantle all of a sudden doesn't have as much pressure, so it can actually melt finally because it's so hot. Right. And then it bubbles up through the little cracks there. Then once it gets there, it gets cool, hardens again, forms an all new crust, and kind of just fills up that gap. Exactly. And that's called spreading center volcanism. That's where two plates are moving apart. Moving apart. Now, if you want to talk about subduction zone volcanism, which I do feel allow me. That's where two plates are moving together. And if you remember from the earthquake podcast, we covered a lot of this and that, too. The abduction zone is where plates are pressing up against one another, and one is pushed under the other, right? Yeah. This forms a trench, a hole in the Earth. Big time. Okay. So with the spreading center of volcanism, magma flowed out. Because of this lower pressure, it was allowed to go to its liquid form with subjects we haven't said what magma is. That's liquid rock. Nice, Chuck. Very important. It is. This is what makes up the mantle, for the most part as well. Yeah. Right. So this is the stuff that is very hot but is under so much pressure it stays solid. Well, I think it becomes magma once it turns fluid. Okay. And then once and here's the distinction between magma and lava. Once it exits the Earth becomes lava. It's lava. Yeah. So go ahead. Okay. Nice one, Chuck. Good catch. Thanks. So with subduction zone volcanism, the magma actually the melting point is lowered with the introduction of water. So either water enters the trench created by the subduction zone or ambient water from the rock around it enters it or it's like squeezed out of it. Exactly. So either way, this introduction of water lowers the melting point and allows the mantle to become magma as its destiny. Right. So that's colliding and then shifting under one another subduction. You can also collide and you just collide. You meet each other head on, two plates collide. Right. And boom, you've got mountains, not volcano. You do. Right. But this is usually just a subduction zone that hasn't happened yet. Eventually one of them is probably going to slip under the other bing. But for the time, they're just like full of rams. Yeah. And then you've got a place moving up against each other. I think that was a slip strike fault, wasn't it, in the earthquake podcast? I don't remember. I think it was where they're just like, one is going south and one is going north. Right. That forms a transform plate boundary. And there's almost never volcanic activity. Right. There's another way they can form, and this is kind of a cool one. Inner plate or hotspot volcanic activity. Right. We should say that everything we just talked about, all of those were found along plate boundaries. Yeah. This is like, within a solid plate, right? Yeah. Within a plate, you can get a hot spot in the middle of it because the mantle basically forms a hot plume. It comes up from the bottom and gets hotter and hotter and then eventually reaches right underneath the lithosphere, I guess the lithosphere, and creates a hot spot. And it's really an unusual heat. It forms magma right under the Earth's crust. Right. And that stays there, but then the plates move over it. And as each plate moves over it, it forms a whole string of little volcanoes, which is how the Hawaii volcanoes were created. 70 million years old, by the way. Very old. This is a very slow process, but it is a process. If you sped it up really fast, you'd be like, okay. Yeah. This place moving over. And that's that hot spot volcano, right? Yes. Inner plate volcanic activity is what it's called. Yeah. And I think they point out that most of the land volcanoes are the subduction zone that you mentioned, and then the hot spot ones. Right. And then in the ocean, it's mostly the spreading center. Volcanism, I believe. Yes. Right. Yes. All right, so, Chuck, we've got magma, right? Yeah. Let's say we don't have magma. We have a mantle, and then something happens. So this mantle shifts a little bit and starts to move upward. Right. Something is giving way to the downward pressure of the rock surrounding it. And so this magma, which is hot, it's just under a lot of pressure. Right. And it wants to be liquid. It's less dense, and it's able to move up. Yeah. The further it moves up, the less pressure there is. So it's just going to keep going upward and upward and upward. That's how magma starts to move toward the Earth's surface, right? Yes. And one thing I used to build ponds for a living, and one thing that you'll find when you ever try to build a pond, water is very lazy and it wants to go to the path of lease resistance liquids are right. So it will always find something you overlooked and caused a leak. Yeah, same thing, I imagine, with lava or magma, it's liquid, so it's going through any crack or crevice it can find. And as long as the upward pressure created by the lower density of the magma is greater than the downward pressure of the surrounding rock, it will keep going up. Yeah. But once there is enough pressure, like, let's say it just kept going up and eventually would spew out, and you've got a volcano. But if there just happens to be enough pressure and it's like, no, stop, then it kind of has a little waiting zone in a magma chamber. Right. And it just fills up, and it's like, I can wait 70 million years. Yeah, but it's waiting. Right? Don't be mistaken, brother. It's there. We just sounded like ZZ Top. Jerry like that one. So, Chuck, that explains how lava enters the Earth's crust, holes in the Earth's crust, and creates what we'll talk about in a second hawaiian type volcanoes, hawaiian type eruptions, I should say. We're basically the law is just coming out, bubbling up over the surface and flowing really slowly. Right. Creating little lava ponds and craters and stuff like this. Just it's cool looking. Sure. Not very dangerous if you can walk at all. It's slow. Right. Or even drag yourself slowly. You could probably beat the lava. But the one that everybody wants to know about our eruptions, like the spectacular, like the Iceland volcano. Right. I'm not even going to attempt a pronunciation of this, which, by the way, cost at least $1.7 billion to the airlines alone and lost revenue. Really? Yeah. That was a strategy volcano, by the way. We'll talk about that in a minute, okay? Yes. But with a huge explosion, it's not just this lower density of the magma. No. It has to do with the gases inside. And magma is what magma eats. Right, yeah. This is sort of like it reminds me of the Lake NIOS exploding lakes. It's a build up of gas pressure internally within the magma. It's a lot of dissolved gas, and they're stuck that way, dissolved, which is all fine, and they're kept, thanks to pressure, confined in there. But when the vapor pressure gets greater than the pressure surrounding it, it forms little vesicles, which are little gas bubbles, and then it's go time. And that's when you know you've got some trouble, because those bubbles, they got to get out. It's like a soda can. It's exactly like it's the exact same principle of a soda. Right. So if you open a soda, all the bubbles rush to the top, and that's if it's just a regular old non shaking touched it or anything. Yeah. If you shake it up, you're actually mixing those bubbles in with the liquid. So when those bubbles rush to the top, they're going to bring a lot of the liquid with them. This is the same exact principle that's behind a volcanic eruption. Okay. But in this case, magma is the soda. Exactly. And the bubbles are the gasses from the dissolved rock. Okay, right. Yeah, I'm with you. So then there are two factors. You said that pressure had everything to do with volcanic activity. Sure. With eruptions, there's two factors, two general factors that really have an effect on what kind of volcanic eruption takes place, and that is viscosity, which is I can never keep it straight, but now I've got it. Viscosity is the ability to resist flow, right? Yes. Optic flow fluid. Right. If it's high viscosity, which means it has a high ability to resist flow, which means it's thick stuff, it's molasses. If it has a low ability to resist flow, meaning you're pouring something out of a cup and creating flow. If it has a low ability, it's going to flow very easily and quickly out of it. So it's low viscosity. So viscosity and the amount of gas bubbles present are going to determine what kind of volcanic eruption you have. Right. If it's high viscosity, which means it's very thick, then it will be a big eruption. Right, because it tried very hard to get out. Exactly. And then the opposite is true. If it's a low viscosity, and the more gas is present, the more imagine just these little bubbles. The more little bubbles they are trying to get out, the higher the viscosity, the harder they are going to try to get out. And then when they do get out kaboom right. Which is determined by how much silicon is in the magma, which I thought that was a little weird or not weird, but I had no idea. So, Chuck, when it does go kaboom, that's called the eruption column. Right. It's composed of hot gas, ash, pyroclastic rocks, which is lava in solid form. Right. And that one flow I was talking about in Hawaii, the real slow kind of lumbering flow where it's just bubbling over it's effusive. Yeah. I mean, that's not super dangerous because it's so slow, but it's still destructive eventually. Yeah, slowly destructive. If you're a plant that's stationary, you're in trouble because plants can't walk at all. Let's talk about the different types of eruptions, man. Yeah, there's a bunch of these. My favorite is the strombolian. It's definitely the most delicious, really? For one reason and one reason alone. It's pretty impressive. Not too dangerous. About 50 to 100ft in the air. It's going to be spewing, little short bursts, very highly viscous. So gas really has to build up in order for this to happen. But they're pretty small eruptions. Not much lava going on. They make a big boom. Yeah. A little ashy tephra, which is always nice in your volcanic eruption. Right. And tefras that fall in volcanic material. Yeah. A lot of things, like undergo a change in name after they've been a verb at some point. So it goes from magma to lava to TEFRA. Yeah. Right. And that's all rock? It depends. It could be ash TEFRA is just any of the material that comes out of the volcano and is landed. Oh, I thought you said originally it was all magma. Yes, you're right. Good, Chuck. All right. And then we also have the plenty of eruption. Right. Which the big daddy. Yeah. This is the type of eruption that covered that came out of Mount Vesuvius and I think 79 Ad. And covered herculaneum and pompeii. These are the big daddies that you think of when you think of volcano. The big upward thrust, the 30 miles column of junk that is shooting out. That is the plenty of eruption right. Sustained. That's the one you think of. Yeah. I mean, it's bad news for anyone around there, don't you think? I would think so, yeah. And not even right around there. I mean, it can shoot pyroclastic material 30 miles into the air, hundreds of feet per second. That's a big explosion. I imagine I couldn't find I looked all over the place to find out what type of eruption the Iceland volcano underwent in April. Couldn't find it. But this sounds a lot like a plenty of interruption. I mean, if they were shutting down air service in Southern Europe because of the ash that had entered the atmosphere from this, it sounds like it was probably plenty. Mount Saints. I guess was too. Right? Yeah. Basically all the ones you can rattle off off the top of your head. There's probably plenty of volcanoes. No. What about the Hawaiian? Those are the really slow, effusive ones, right? Yeah. But they have, like, fire fountains. They're cool to look at, for sure. And it's cool sounding. Yeah. And they can produce lava lakes, which are ponds of lava craters. Pretty cool. Yes. I've never been to Hawaii, though. Have you? No. Strickland has. Yes, he has. He loves talking about the Hawaiian eruptions. He loves butchering the Hawaiian names of things, too. Are those other ones smaller and less frequent? The volcano hydro, volcanic and fissure. Yeah. The most common eruption types are the Plaintiff, Hawaiian and Strombolian. Okay. And then less common, like the real, like, if you're in a fish and AO of volcanoes, right. Then you're going to want to know about the volcano hydro, Volcanic, and fisher. Like you said, the fisher has the curtain of fire. It occurs along like a trench. It's not like a mountain. Basically, there's a tear in the Earth. Right. And the magma is becoming lava and like this big curtain of fire. I can't really call it anything else, and it be as dead on. Sure. The volcano is cool because of the pyroclastic bombs that it will shoot into the air like football sized bombs of hot rock. This is the Earth being angry. The gods are awakening. Well, this is the other sand I'm moving around, dude. And then Hydro Volcanic compares a little explaining. This is a volcano that takes place not underwater, but near water, near a very high humidity area. And basically the interaction of the water creates this chain reaction that turns the volcanic material into this fine ash. Right. It can also melt a lot of surrounding snow, which can cause landslides and a lot of trouble for people. Indeed. Yes. So those are the types of eruptions. Are you still awake, and are you still with us? So far, people are like, oh, yeah, the sun. Should we talk about the shapes or just the frequency of eruption? Well, let's talk about the shapes, because basically there's three components to a volcano, every volcano, right? Yeah. You've got the magma chamber, which we talked about. It's where it builds up. You've got the central vent, which is this little connecting area. This is where it starts to this is the fissure that it comes out of. Yeah. And then the chamber to the crater. Right. You've got the summit crater, which is where it explodes out of. Right? Yes. And then you've got different types of volcanoes, three main shapes, and the strategallcano. A stratovolcano with a plenty of interruption is what everyone thinks of as a volcano. Right. What you would build for your science school project with the baking soda. That's a strategy. That's right. Unless you're a really forward thinking kid and you're like, I'm going to build a scoria cone volcano for extra points. Which actually, if you did do that, you'd be pretty smart, because while the strategy volcano is the most familiar, the Scoria cone volcano is the most common. Yeah, I guess that would be a very smart kid. Yes. And if there's any 7th graders out there looking for a cooler volcano, you want to add a little zing to your volcano, make a score your cone and say Josh and Chuck sent you, and get prepared to be beaten by your classmates. Scoria cones, by the way, if you need a little help. They're smaller, they're steep on both sides, and they're very wide, right? Yes. And they're usually composed of ashi TEFRA shield volcanoes. That's the last kind. They're wide, short, low viscosity dispersal of lava. So it's just a big Oozing blob, basically. And it builds up into, like, a shield like dome. And these erupt every few years, very frequent. So we'll talk about eruption in a second. A good example of a shield volcano is Mount Aloe, and a good example of Ascorre cone is Sunset Crater in Arizona. All right. Chuck. Josh. Have you ever heard of Crater Lake in Oregon? Yeah, gorgeous. Yeah. Isn't there like a down World War II plane or something in there? I don't know. Is that just like a Clive Cussler novel I'm thinking of? I have no idea. Well, Crater Lake is actually extinct. We imagine an extinct volcano, basically, the magma chamber blew it all at once, collapsed in on itself. The crater collapses in on itself and then eventually filled in with water. And it's called a caldera. Yes. Until it's full of water, then it's called a lake. That's right. Once again, add something, change the name. How many volcanoes are there active right now? Working in the world today? I'm going to guess 400. You'd be off by about 100. 300, 500. What do you mean you're going to guess? You have the same information I do. I was trying to mix it up. They are active volcanoes, 500 around the world, and the classification is a little inexact. Even the revised classification is a little inexactive. I didn't see that, actually. Here's why, though. This is why. It's inexact and subjective, because we don't have anything that won't melt if we try to really get a good look inside of a volcano. So it's all just kind of like, oh, yeah, it's smoking. So we're going to call that an active volcano. There was at least one when we were in Guatemala, remember? And one went off right after Jerry was there. Oh, really? I think so, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, we'll find out after we stop recording and ask her. Okay, so the classifications, even though it's inexact, we will quote them here. If it's erupting, obviously, or demonstrating some kind of activity within recorded history right. Then it's active. And why we say it's inaccurate is because recorded history varies big time. If it is not showing any signs but it has erupted within the last 10,000 years, then it could potentially erupt again. So it's dormant, but it could go off. If it has not erupted in 10,000 years, then it's extinct, they say. Right. But I say I'll bet you're off, man. You never know. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I think if you're dealing with plate tectonics and there's clearly not any kind of magma chamber around that we can detect, it probably is extinct. But as we said, they have revised the rating of volcanoes. Right? Yeah. So now if it's showing anything, is that what you just did with the revised version? Because they really are similar to the original version. Basically, the only change is now if it's showing anything, then it's active, right? Yeah. Weird. And here's the cool fact of the day. Right. And any given day, ten volcanoes are erupting. Yeah. That aren't a big deal, probably. Well, they are if you're standing next to them. Yeah, but it's not newsmakers. I would say yes. And then one volcano is thought to have wiped out an entire civilization. Sanderini in Greece. Really? Yeah. The manoan civilization suddenly disappeared, and they're starting to think that it was because they melted. Pretty much. Well, that's it for volcanoes. If you want to see some really boss volcano pictures, I know where you can just type volcanoes into the search bar athoustofforks.com. You made it through this one. Pat yourself on the back. But, hey, we've all got to understand volcanoes, right? Since I said search bar, that means it's time for listing or mail. So that is not only the end of volcanoes, Josh, that's the end of 2010. That is something else. Can you believe this? Can you believe I know you? We're in the future. 2010. I thought it would be in spaceships and have pill meals that I could eat. I have pill meals in my pocket right now. Really? Sure. What you got? I have pot roast. Nice. And turkey and stuff. If you add water and it becomes a big meal. Or you just eat it and just eat it and it tastes like all that and get filled up nice. So at the end of every year, we like to say thanks. Obviously, we're still on the air, and we wouldn't be if you guys weren't listening. No, we would be just doing our regular thing, writing the articles, crying ourselves as well. Crying herself to sleep. Yeah. Thank you for listening to all of you. Absolutely new people. All of you vets, all of you. Returning friends, everybody. Happy New Year to all of you very much. Yeah. Yeah. That's all I've got. I don't want to make a big deal out of it because I just want to keep on going through 2011. Yeah, we're not going anywhere. Here's to the next year and eleven months and eleven days left of Earth. Right? You want me to sing Old Anxiene? Please. Can we get Jerry to put it over? Or at least there's no rights on all Fogelberg's. Same old Angling. The saddest song in history. Oh, that is a good one. Let's hear it, John. No, never. But I do have listener mail. Well, do you know an album that appeared on The Innocent Age? Okay. Was it a good album? Yeah, I mean, I actually owned that. I was a little kid. I was like twelve listening to that song, thinking it was sad when I was twelve. That's Dame Fogelberg. Yes. And what's the name? Tamil Thingson. And what's the album? The Ancient Age. Okay, so this is listener mail, Josh, from Kyle. And this is about our Hanukkah podcast, which we got some pretty good marks from from our Jewish friends. Yeah, we did. Here or there. Although I wish we could try. I had a few people that are converted jews say, hey, Chuck, when he said, it's not the same thing, that really hurt my feelings. Yeah, I wasn't saying for you, it's not the same for me. I would still feel like a Goie. So it's not the same for you, but in Chuck's opinion of you, it's the same? Yeah. That doesn't make you any less Jewish if you've converted. I wasn't saying that at all. I was kidding. Don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Hey, guys, great job on the Hanukkah podcast. I'm a 17 year old from the Plane, Illinois. It's the home of the McDonald's Museum. Right? Home of the first McDonald's. Yeah. Nice. I was raised atheist my whole life until the fourth grade when I learned about religion. And as much as research a fourth grader can do, I decided I wanted to be Jewish. I love this guy in the fourth grade. He's like, I want to be Jewish. That's pretty cool. And he did it. I realized that in college and I didn't do it right. I ended up converting, being bar mitzvood, learned Hebrew, and now plan on joining the Israeli army. Wow. I heard about this, the real deal. I find it to be an amazing religion, and I loved your podcast on it. I just want to show you something you might find interesting. None gimbal hay shin, which appear on the dryer in almost every country in the world. Nescadel Hayesham means a great miracle happened there. While in Israel the Dreidel says none gamal hey pay. Which means a great miracle happened here. Cool. So in Israel, they have a different dreadful because it's like it happened here, not there. I've always found that interesting. I just want to let you in. Thanks for the podcast. And that is from Kyle, the new Jew. I really think Kyle was on NPR. I heard an interview with somebody who had converted in the US. And was now like, going to Israel to join the Israeli army. Was it a young guy like that? Yes, he was youngish dude. It might be him. I wonder if it was, we'll have to check it out. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah. He should have come to us first, though. I agree. Wholehearted son. He's making the rounds of the media circuit. Right. Hey, by the way, I mean that's. What he's saying to everybody, right? Yeah. I was on Stuff You Should Know and NPR. Right. Well, Chuck, again, happy 2011 to you. Happy New Year. Congratulations, sir, on another year making it to another year with me having to deal with me. Hey, every year it gets easier. 2011 is going to be a breeze. Nice. If you have a New Year's resolution that you think is worth writing down and sending to us, you can also bring it up on Facebook. I'm sure there'll be plenty of stuff there. You can tweet it to US s YSK podcast. And if you want to, just put it in the email. If you're a confidential type, address it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house upworks. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the reinvented thousand and twelve camry. It's ready. Are you? Yeah." | ||
Are we all Martians? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-we-all-martians | There's a very good question that no one has yet satisfactorily answered: Where did life on Earth come from? Some look to the Red Planet as the source of life here, which, if correct, would make us all Martians. Is there anything to this out there claim? | There's a very good question that no one has yet satisfactorily answered: Where did life on Earth come from? Some look to the Red Planet as the source of life here, which, if correct, would make us all Martians. Is there anything to this out there claim? | Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:43:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=19, tm_min=43, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=262, tm_isdst=0) | 27134400 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and I'm with Charles Bryan. It and we're doing stuff you should know today. Oh, yeah. Not the other one. Stuff you should not know. Nothing You Should Know. Yeah. We're out there inspiring podcasts. Yeah, we heard about that today. Right. Someone started a podcast in the Illinois Valley. Nice. I don't know where that is. I don't think it's Illinois, though. But they wrote about it in the paper, right? Yeah, they got it right up in the paper. Pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, before we get started, buddy okay. We need to announce our upcoming New York trip. Yeah. And Trivia Night. Yeah. We talked to Mayor Bloomberg, and he said that Friday, October 12, 2012 is Stuff You Should Know day in the five boroughs of New York City. That's right. Then we will be presented not a key to the city, but a key card to our hotel. At least it's a set of lock picks to the city. That's right. So we're coming for Comic Con. If you have a Comic Con pass, you can come see us podcast live. And we're going to have details on what room and what time and everything. Yeah. Plus, it's cheap. Even if you don't have a pass, like date passes are not expensive. Okay. Yeah. Even in this economy, it's valued. It's so good. So we're going to be podcasting live during the day on Friday, and you can check out Facebook and Twitter for info on exactly where and when. And then that night, another Stuff You Should Know, trivia Night, which was a huge success. Huge success in New York last year. So two years ago, right? Yeah, two years ago. Yeah. About this time, too. I think it was October, wasn't it? Yeah. So that's a whole day of your life in New York City packed with stuff you should know featuring Chuck and myself. So this is going to be great. And I know it's just me, but I like seeing myself. And we're going to have details for sure on that. We're locking down the venue, hopefully, as we speak. And locking down our All Star celebrity trivia team as we speak. Yes. If you're out there and you're an all star celebrity, play with us. I think it's a great call out. Set us up. We're still assembling our team. Yeah. A couple of the stalwarts are going to be out of town, which is disappointing. So we're looking for comers, as it were. Yes. And we're also looking for Comers to challenge us and duke it out on the trivia floor. It's going to be fun for free. That's right. And there will be adult libations involved, if you're into that. Root beer, probably, if you're into that. Sure. And that's about it. Anything else? I think it's high time we started the episode. Okay. Thank you for bearing with us, I guess. Everyone. Let's see. Chuck, I'm a little under the weather today. I know I'm fighting. I just learned that I'm not going to get sick. It's like, man, that one day where it's like right before you're about to get better, the worst day, but you're just not going to get sick. You know what I'm saying? So I don't have like five days of sickness ahead of me. I've got bagel days of sickness ahead of me. You're saying this like positive thoughts? Is that the deal? Okay. Yeah. I found that my mind body connection is really strong, especially in that horrible way where I'm like, I'm not going to get sick. I wonder if I'm getting sick though. Am I getting sick? And then all of a sudden I'm sick. Right. It's like I just talk myself into getting sick. But it sounds like you just talk yourself into getting well, I'm trying it out. It's mental gymnastics. Sometimes it works, but I guess let me just go ahead and start and get this one over with. Okay. I like this one. Yeah, not bad. You realize this is half of an article I sent you before that you're like, no, let's not do this one. Really? Yeah. The origin of life on Earth. But didn't we do that? No, we never did that. No. Well, there was a reason. Well, maybe we have it now, but maybe we can do the other half. We'll do this as like part of a two part suite about where life on Earth came from Mars. Maybe there's another way. And this is my intro, there's another possible way. And it's something called abiogenesis. All right. And Abiogenesis basically says that all the proteins needed to form RNA somehow were present in the early Earth in the primordial soup. And somehow they came together in a structure that was RNA. And RNA is a pretty specific, weird little thing in that it can not only replicate itself, it can make new stuff too. Wow. So it can build DNA, but it can also replicate itself. It sounds like something out of a Ridley Scott movie. Very much so. And they think that RNA somehow came together and over the course of millions of years and all these different trials and errors finally started to form DNA, which kickstarted life. The origin of life was just a bunch of proteins that came together. There are a lot of reasons people poopoo this. Sure. A lot of people, a lot of creationists say, hey, you know Occam's razor which you scientists love so much. Yeah. Do you think that's it or that somebody created us? Right. So the Abiogenesis hypothesis maybe theory by now it has some holes in it, but it's really interesting. And we'll talk in depth about that in another one. Okay. This one is about the big rival to Abiogenesis and it's called Panspermia, which is a pretty neat name. What does that mean? Seeds everywhere. Yeah, seeds everywhere. It's all over the place. Pennsylvania. And it's from a guy in six suede whose name is pretty awesome, Svente arhenius, who wrote a book called worlds in the making, and he coined the term panspermia. But it was about 50 or so years, maybe 30 or so years before him that the idea of pantspermia was first put forth by lord kelvin. Yes, the famous lord kelvin. British physicist. Mega famous. I mean, not many people get a temperature scale named after him. No, there's not just the brian kelvin, tommy celsius and Billy fahrenheit. Yeah, man. And lord kelvin. What triumphant that is. So his idea was that seed bearing meteorites, which is kind of where we are here with this. Did we come from mars? Potentially. That these meteorites that had life buried within them, or at the very least, sitting on the surface, it had life there, found its way to earth. And that's where it all started. Right. And it's pretty cool to think that way back then. They were thinking of this stuff back in the 1870s. Yeah, man. Well, they're not super far off. The space elevator came from a russian guy in at that people were thinking back then they had a lot of time to subjugate. Other cultures may have been thinking even more because they didn't know as much. Right. All they did was sit around and think. Well, if the olympics taught me anything, the opening ceremonies, it's that they had a lot more time to toil and think. And everything just got better. After the sod was removed, when the industrial revolution came about. I think that got better. I think it got worse. It seemed to me that the saving grace of civilization was when the industrial revolution hit. Oh, okay. I thought you meant the opening ceremonies, because it got much worse after the industrial revolution, all of a sudden, people were texting each other on screen. It was weird. It was like these little romance stories playing out on the field. It got so odd. Yeah, it did. Yeah. But fortunately, the olympics had John hodgman to defend it. He was the sole person to defend it on twitter. Oh, was he? Boy, good thing twitter went around during the Atlanta olympics. Yes. I don't remember that one, but yummy was like, you remember the atlantic? It was so embarrassing. She was like it was like little Richard driving around in a truck or something. No, we had stainless steel pickup trucks driving around. We had, like, line dancing and georgia peaches. It was just like oh, man. But the point was, it was big. It may have been gaudy, but it was big. Right. No one could outdo beijing, but they were saying they weren't even trying to do outdo beijing. They were trying to do something different. But still it missed down. Yeah, it's back to the victorian era, and their science thought, wow, we got so far off, it's ridiculous. Right. But the point was, the concept of panspermia is that the Earth, prior to the arrival of life was like a virgin petri dish. Yeah. And then there was some cosmic cough and, like, a little bit of cosmic spittle infected this petri dish and all of a sudden, life took off. That's gross pants. Permea used to have a more narrow definition back then, but now it's been broadened out to the point where pretty much most scientists believe that you can exchange life among bodies in our solar system. It can happen. Yeah, well, it's proven to happen. It was broader, right. Back in the day, it was broader. Now it's broader. Back then it was more specific. It was broad, narrow. And then it went back to the original broad version. Now science has started to kind of back up what was originally considered a flight of fancy. So what Lord Kelvin thought was that asteroids brought life to Earth and probably from Mars, maybe elsewhere in the galaxy or elsewhere in the universe. Sure. But the point was they arrived via rock. Well, after a few years of consideration, most people were like, that's not possible. Like, an asteroid would basically pulverize everything on it. There's heat involved. There's no way. Sure. And so the Swede comes along, savante are hideous, and he says, no, these are just basically like little microbes traveling between the planets. Right. Yeah. It's like you don't even need the meteorite as the vessel. Right. This stuff is just going by, what? Starlight? Yeah. That's kind of a simple way to put it. Electromagnetic energy. Yeah. In the other article, it said starlight, which sounds a little more fanciful, or ether, I think they used to call it, too. Oh, really? Yeah. So this is all great. And then we find out in 1975 when we launch the Viking probes which to Mars, which I think we goofed on this before. Right. The Viking name or something. Yeah, it seems like it sounds familiar. Viking One touched down at Chrysa. Viking Two on Utopia planitia. And interestingly, they took some atmospheric readings and they found that the same stuff in the atmosphere of Mars was also contained inside these meteorites from the 1980s. Pretty cool, right? Well, they figured out the signature of the atmosphere of Mars and then they compared it and it was the same. Right. And then they went back and said, well, wait a minute. Let's find out what other rocks have this specific, unique signature that we can locate on Mars and say these are Mars meteorites. I think they had like, 50,000 of them. 53,000? Yeah. The ones they already had. They looked back into them and 104 of them came from Mars. It was kind of low, I thought. Yeah, I was a little disappointed. But the point is, these things show that rocks can travel from Mars to Earth and survive intact. That was the big part of it. That's right. So you have a little bit of Lord Kelvin's original idea starting to come back into reality. Yeah, just good for him. He has a scale and everything, but they dug them up and shook his hand. They did put him back. Shall we move on to Alh 840 zero one? This is one of my favorite meteorites. This one you remember. This one caused a huge stir. Clinton came out and was like, there's life on Mars. They found evidence they found three different traces of what they considered, I guess, microbial fossils from Mars. And two of them were discounted, but another one was like a chain of magnetite that was arranged in such a way that it couldn't possibly have been created by anything but an organism. Right. I think the results are still out on that one. The other two are like, no, it's definitely inorganic. But this one, the jury's still out on whether it's possible it was created by some sort of organic life that basically excreted magnetite chains. So the cool thing about this is they studied years later, they've come up with all these different issues of why this might not be able to happen. One of them is the intense heat that would be generated. Could the meteorite survive it? Could life on the meteorite or buried within it survive it? Yeah. And they studied at Cal Tech. Yes, Caltech. They studied Alh 840 zero one. I wonder what they call it. Probably the Allen Hales. The Allen Hills meteorite. Yeah, probably so, because that's where it was found, and that's what the Alh stands for. So they studied this and they figured out that inside this thing, it actually never got hotter than 104 deg. And they did this through magic called magnetic signature. They cut off a slice of it and found its magnetic signature. Couldn't heat beyond that. So that means it never disappeared. Yeah, it never got hotter than 104 degrees. So that kind of put that one to bed. Yeah. So there's plenty of microbes that can survive temperatures of 103 or 140 degrees. In fact, a lot of them love that kind of temperature. Love it. Yeah. They're called retirees. So that backs up Kelvin a little bit. The fact that there are rocks that we can say definitely came from Mars. Back him up. And then also getting back to the rocks coming from Mars, the possibility the probability of one infecting the planet, I guess you could say the early planet also came to be supported through further research. Some guys from NASA. Was it NASA? Yeah. They calculated that as many as 50 billion Martian rocks pummeled Earth in the first 500 years of the Earth's life. 50 billion? 50 billion at Earth. 20,000. A decade? No, within a decade. Right. Yeah. But over the first 500 million years, while the Earth is cooling and just prior to the existence of life, on Earth, 50 billion Mars rocks hit Earth. Right. Okay. So they're saying the rocks can survive. There are plenty of them. And we know that at least one traveled and did not heat up over 104 degree. And the NASA dudes also said that basically our inner solar system all has sort of a similar suitable environment. So exchange of life in the inner solar system only is very much likely. Yeah, it takes care of if you look at Mars, the chance that Mars can send a rock to Earth is way higher than it's pretty high, right? Yeah. But if you go outside of our solar system, the chances start to plummet exponentially downward. To where? If you go outside of our solar system, elsewhere in our galaxy, even in the Milky Way, the odds are like one in a billion that even a single rock could have hit Earth in its 1st 500 million years. It just doesn't happen. But apparently the interplanetary exchange between Mars and Earth is a lot more frequent than you'd think. We're also talking about how that 104 degree internal temperature bacteria can survive that maybe even thrive. Yeah, there are some bacteria too, that have been studied, that have been able to survive, basically trips on satellites exposed to solar radiation, much as they would be like on a meteorite. And they've been found to survive pretty well as well. That is very true. A lady named no, I'm sorry. Well, yeah. A microbiologist named Lynn Roth Child and her partner Rocco mansionelle. I believe that's how you pronounce that. Mencineli, they put some halo files which are salt loving, which you'd find in the Dead Sea. Yeah. And they can like these buggers are survivors. Yeah. They basically just scab over their cells and survive like that. And they found that after two weeks on a satellite, ten to 75% of these bacteria had survived. Not bad. That's not bad. So we know that bacteria can survive in space. We know that it could possibly hit you right on a rock. And we know that plenty of rocks come from Mars. True. Jumping back a little, one of the initial things they thought would be that if these asteroids, if these things are colliding in space, it would just disintegrate into dust. Basically, they found out that is not necessarily true either. They found trace gases within meteorites that originated on Mars in the 1980s and basically figured out that if one of these impacts happened, maybe it's disintegrated in the middle, but on the outer edges there could be like larger chunks that just get shot away. Right. So that's basically where these things are coming from. Okay, but some other people said, all right, well, those ones that get shot away, they get to escape Earth's gravity or Mars'gravity, they would have to suddenly, in a less than a second, be accelerated from zero to 11,500 mph. If you did that to human, the human would become liquefied. Of course. Okay. But that doesn't necessarily hold true with bacteria. And we know this because certain microbiologists have packed bacteria into bullets and fired them and then studied the bacteria and found that they were alive. Still, they survived that trajectory. Yeah. Which wouldn't be that fast, so it wouldn't be 11,500 miles an hour. I guess it's the fastest they could get it, though, right? I guess. Okay, well, at least it was a good effort. The girta Horneck microbiologist in Germany. She also sent organisms into orbit for six years. Not too bad. In the 1980s, bacillus subtilis. And this is pretty wacky, because not only did it survive, but when this thing started depriving itself or getting deprived of nutrients, it formed like a shell, like a spore shell on top to basically protect everything underneath it. That's the one I thought with nothing. That's the one I thought was scabbing over. That one. Yeah. So in the cold, dark, no water, no nothing, about 30% of these things survived. Right. That's survival. Okay, so then we have one last factor, Chuck. Time. Yes. So it's not like this is a ten hour or two week trip. This can take a really long time for a rock to escape Mars's gravity and then basically make its way to Earth, like millions of years, that kind of time. Can a bacteria survive that length of time? Sure, why not? Well, in 1995, some really smart people at Cal Poly isolated a living spore from the gut of a bee preserved in amber, kind of like right out of Jurassic Park. How long ago had that bee been preserved in amber? 25 to 40 million years. And the bacteria is still alive? Yes. And that is not even the most amazing one. The most amazing one? No. Russell Ring of West Chester University in Pennsylvania extracted bacteria from a 250,000,000 year old salt crystal. Living bacteria trapped inside liquid in the salt crystal. So I think all the questions have been answered is like it's not probable, but it's feasible, at least, that these things could have taken place. So it is possible that we are in our origin Martians. That's right. It still raises a question, Chuck. What's that? Where did that life begin? That's it. Dial it back even further. That's all I got. Do you got anything else? Right now? That's all I got. So I would recommend going to houseworks.com and typing in Are we all Martians? And we'll bring up this article on the site. You can also type in origin, life, Earth in the search bar. And it'll bring up my article on panspermia and abiogenesis. That's right. Actually, there is one more thing we should have pointed out. We said that it can take 40 50 million years for these meteorites to reach Earth, but we didn't point out that that's not always the case. Sometimes these things find their way to Earth in just a few years or a day. It doesn't always take 50 million years. Nice. Okay, Chuck, Josh, before we go any further, we need to tell everybody to go do some reading toot. Sweet. Agreed. Our horror fiction contest. That's right. Yeah. As everyone knows, every Halloween for the past couple of years, we read a horror story. And Jerry Jazz is it all up with sound design. She does good work. And this year, Josh had a pretty awesome idea that sort of bit us on the behind by calling for fan submissions. And we got a lot of them. We got 104 of them and they had to be between 3004 thousand words. So we read between 300 and 400,000 words of these submissions and we went through and we picked out our favorite 16 and it was tough. There's some really good stuff in there, but we came up with the Sweet 16 and now it's up to you guys out there to pick which one we read for the Halloween episode. Yes. We've entered the 16 into this fancy little bracket game, a widget on the House of Works website. It has this grossly inappropriate country music that we can't disable. There were extensive emails about whether or not we can disable. We can't. We couldn't even put horror sound or anything. No, I wanted to so bad. So it's like this really scary bracket game with like it's crazy. That's weird. Anyway, there's brackets up there. First you need to go to type this into your favorite search engine blogs, how Stuff Works, suite 16 here. And it will bring up this blog post that has a link to all 16 articles or entries. Yeah. We're also linking to this on our Facebook and Twitter. So you can do that too. Yeah. And then you read the 16 and then there's a link on that same blog post that has the bracket game. You can jump off to that and vote for your favorites. And the round one ends this Friday. Round two starts, I think, that day. And then it keeps going and going until we come up with a winner. Four weeks. Okay. And we will read that on the air. It will be awesome. I think we already have next year's picked out as well. We do, because what we thought was the best one that was disqualified for certain reasons. And so we're just going to clean it up and read it next year. Yeah. It's not a winter. No. In no way is it a winner. In fact, it lost. It lost. Disqualified right out of the gate. But we still liked it. Yeah. And the other 16 are really great. So it's like any of them are going to be really good. Yeah. I'm not disappointed in the leads. Me neither. I'm very excited, as a matter of fact. Okay, so go to Blogs How Stuff Works and then Sweet 16, horror fiction, something like that. It will bring up that post that says read the suite. 16 horror fiction entries here. I think there's an exclamation. Really? Yeah. All right. That was lengthy. Call this another trucker emails us. Nice. We've heard from a few truckers, long haul truckers, and I imagine podcasts are pretty great if you're sitting there with hemorrhoids. Seriously driving across Kansas. All right. Just listen to the white collar crime podcast, guys. Couldn't help but think of my own experience. My last job was working the counter at a general auto repair shop. There were two of us at the counter. Both handled the phones, inventory parts, and cash drawer. Just about everything except turning wrenches. As we didn't have charge accounts with all of our part suppliers, we paid cash for some of the parts right out of the till. The parts had to be entered into the inventory as a cash transaction, and the system would spit out a piece of paper showing the transaction and it would get filed away. A couple of weeks after the other guy quit, I was now handling all the transactions and started noticing some things. Every quarter, we would audit the invoices, and some of the invoice numbers were repeated, as well as very unusual things like a distinct Ford part number on an invoice from the local Dodge dealer. Something smells fine here. Some of them were photocopied invoices, and we didn't have the original. So we uncovered basically that this guy was taking legitimate parts invoices making color photocopies using a razor blade. He would cut out things like the invoice numbers, parts, and prices and alter another legitimate invoice by taping those numbers over the originals in photo copying. So this dude is just like, basically manipulating these documents? Sounds like it. Very easily. Since I left the company a year ago, they have continued looking through the files I'm covering more and more forged invoices. I don't know the exact figure, but this guy stole a staggering amount of money from the business and he's gotten away with it up until now. Does it just end there? Yeah. Weird. I mean, yeah, this person doesn't work there anymore. So Justin doesn't work there. I don't know if they're pursuing this anymore. I guess it's white collar crime. Sure it is. Not like stocks and bonds and things, but sure, it's white collar crime altering documents. I feel like it's on the blue collar side of white collar cry. Sure. In a part store. An auto parts store. Yeah. Maybe that's what's tripping me up. If you are on the road a lot and we keep you company, we want to hear your thoughts. You can tweet to us. Wait until you're parked. S-Y-S kpodcast. You can also join us on Facebook.com stuffysnow and you can email us at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
10 Scientists Who Were Their Own Guinea Pigs | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-scientists-who-were-their-own-guinea-pigs | Over the centuries, some scientists have concluded that the best test subject is looking at them in the mirror. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore 10 researchers, unsung or otherwise, who put their own health second to the advancement of science. | Over the centuries, some scientists have concluded that the best test subject is looking at them in the mirror. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore 10 researchers, unsung or otherwise, who put their own health second to the advancement of science. | Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:39:22 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=16, tm_min=39, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=249, tm_isdst=0) | 39108119 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, chuck here. Right now, there are millions of people around the world hosting on Airbnb. I mean, there's no doubt it's a great way to earn extra income, but I've always wondered about their stuff, like what happens if somebody drops a wine glass? Well, now I know. Thanks to Air Cover for Hosts, people can welcome guests into their home with confidence. Air Cover for Hosts gives you damage protection for free every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts, what if you were an apparel company facing an avalanche of demand so you call IBM to automate your It infrastructure? And now your ecommerce platform can handle spikes and orders. Let's create It systems that rule us their own. Fleece IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Sometimes science goes too far. Dark Matters. Twisted but true. Wednesdays at 100 on Science. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, at long last is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is special, like, eight Ways from Sunday. This episode is, isn't it? I've changed my name over the weekend. Yeah, I changed. Jan michael Vincent. Finally. I know, right? You've been talking about that forever, Chuck. I'm glad you finally did it. And you showed me your driver's license and it's official. Pretty neat. And what's cool is you did your hair for the photo. It looks kind of like the Airwolf era. Jamie Vincent, is there any other era? The mechanic. That's true. Yeah, those are his two eras. Super. Was he in that? Yes, he was the young buck stuntman to Bert Reynolds aged veteran. Oh, really? He played that role a couple of times then, I guess. I guess so. Okay, well, that's enough for the jam. Michael Vincent shout out. Is he around still? I mean, I haven't seen him in a decade and he was in pretty bad shape a decade ago. Was he really? Yeah, from what? I think drugs. I might be wrong, though. Or maybe he was helping. Or not. Right. Maybe he was injured or something. Because you just told everybody Jimmy Vincent likes drugs. He self experimented. Great one. Thank you very much for that. This is a special episode because we are good, good friends of the Science Channel and they have a very cool show that an ad played for at the beginning of this episode. That's right, Dark Matters. It premiered last Wednesday. It comes on tomorrow, Wednesday's at 10:00 p.m.. Have you looked at the episode? Have you seen the end of the video? It's pretty awesome. It is. And I was going through the episode guide of the stuff they have coming up. It's like really like a dark version of Unsolved Mysteries. You remember that? Yeah. So a couple of the episodes have stuff that we've covered, like Einstein's brain, C-I-A-L SD. Yeah. And then they have a bunch of stuff we have. Are they ripping us off? I didn't get that impression, but it's possible. They can do anything they want, but imitation is the greatest form of flattering. Right. We get asked to do stuff sometimes, and, you'll know, if we really want to do it because we do it. And we did this one. This is literally being recorded today. Yeah. That's crazy. That is definitely different. Yeah. Jerry's turning this one around, like, hours later or earlier, we recorded this. It is as fresh as it gets. It still has the peach fuzz on it. Depesch Mode, by the way, Depesh Mode is in no way related to a Racer. He was a founding member of the Pesch Mode and later went on to found erasure. Really? Vincent Clark. Really? Yes. Wow. I knew there was some tie. I had no idea we're talking about this because we were having rarely do we let you in on our pre recorded conversation, but Josh went and saw a Racer this weekend, and I knew that was awesome, and it was great. And there was some tie to another band, and I couldn't remember it. And it was depatch mode. Well, it was either Depech Mode or the Pet Boys. Probably Pet Mode. Geez, did I just say that? He said the Pet Boys, which is auto parts store. They're really good on the keyboards, and they have these gigantic heads and tiny bodies. All right, so, Chuck, you ready? Ready. We're talking about scientists who self experiment, and we've talked about crazy experiments before. So this episode actually forms a trifecta with two other previously released episodes that, if you haven't heard, you should go listen to. What's the third? There is the human experimentation episode and then five crazy government experiments. Yeah, all those are pretty well mixed together. So if you listen to that, if you listen to those two self experimentation, you're going to have a very robust understanding of just how nuts some scientists are. You know what they call that around here? What? A bucket. Yeah, they do bucket of content. Heck, that's almost a channel. That's right. This is good, man. You threw this together, like, lickety split last week and found some really cool things, I think. Yeah, you could do way more than ten. Oh, yeah, sure. Like the guy who cracked his own knuckles for 30 years. Oh, yeah. Just in his left hand, I believe. You found nothing, right? It does not cause arthritis. That's right. We talked before about Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss chemist who took the world's first acid trip. It's on purpose on a bike. Can you imagine, like, never having known anything about it? I think generally when people do that kind of thing these days, you've heard of it and you know what's coming. Sure. But for it to be this brand new thing, he was probably like, I bet that was a long bike, correct. Yeah. Kids grew up on the great space coaster, so they know it's coming, but yeah, he said that he laid down at home and these bizarre but not altogether unpleasant visions started coming to him. He was whacked out for many hours. But we've talked about him before. A guy who we haven't talked about, who I find just fascinating. His name is Santorio. Santorio. The researchers are so nice. They named him twice Centorio. Centorio? Yes. Take a check. Well, he was a selfexperimenter in one of the earlier self experimenters. We're talking 16th century style. And what he did is he wanted to find out about and I guess they didn't call it metabolism at the time, did they? No, he later study. Okay. Yeah. Back then they had no idea. But basically that's what he was doing was kind of learning about the human metabolism. And he did so by being very meticulous about recording what he did, what he ate and what he drank, and weighing his stools and his urine. And I guess he formed some equation, what comes in, what goes out. Well, he found that it doesn't equal. Well, sure. And you can't take into account the weight you put on. There's still some difference. And he wanted to figure out where that went. And he came up with the idea of insensible perspiration, which I thought was going to be all about sweat. So I was a little disappointed. Well, it is. Yeah. But really, it's just like constant little sweat. I guess you lose weight like that. But the cool thing about Santorio squared is that he lived for 30 years, chuck essentially. On weight for 30 years? Yeah, every day. Every single day for 30 years. And he basically lived on this machine. It was a huge beam scale and he constructed like a little chair and like a work table and all that, and he weighed all the food and drink that came on and he weighed all the poop and urine that went off. But he lived on this thing. Well, and what's sad is that he did all this and it really wasn't super useful. No, but it opened the doors, though, for things like that. It definitely did. And one of the other things it did was he had the idea of insensible perspiration before he did this. So he was one of the first people to say, you know what? I'm not just going to say something, I'm going to subject this to scientific rigor. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. I'm going to live on poop and weigh my poop. Yeah, he's like a stockbroker in the 80 is looking for brand. So that's number one. Number two, we come to 18. Three is a little bit of a jump there to Frederick Wilhelm, Adam Sertiy, and what he ended up doing was actually pretty useful for everyone, even today. Did he discover more of them he isolated it. Isolated it from OPM. Yeah. And through got a few friends together. Well, first he tested it on animals until they started dying. Sleeping and dying. Right. And then he was like, well, maybe I should try this on people and see what happens. Because he said that animals do not give exact results. That's true. Right. So he and his 17 year old friends give exact results, although dying is a pretty exact result. Yeah. So he owed a bunch of animals, then he got three, you pointed out 17 year olds plus himself. I think he was like 20 at the time. He was. So it's, like, right in the wheelhouse still today. I think he's middle aged back then, though. Yeah. And so he dose himself and his friends on a low dose at first, about a half a grain of morphine, which is 30 MGS. It's a comparatively low dose to what he took. Right. And that produced a little flushing. He was like, hey, this is kind of neat, but I'm looking for more than flushing, so let me take a little more. After about 15 minutes, took a similar dose, started feeling a little queasy and faint and sleepy, of course, and to the point where I guess he thought it might be getting a little dangerous. So he threw up, made all his friends throw up to get it out of their system. Well, yeah, he started to get a little worried that they were all going to die because they take in 90 milligrams of morphine in less than an hour, which today we realize is ten times the recommended dose. So, yeah, he gave everybody, like, 8oz of vinegar to drink and made him throw up and save their lives. I imagine they probably would owe deed, huh? Yeah. And then he did another experiment later because he had a toothache, and he found that if he just took opium for it, the toothache wasn't cured, but if he took some morphine, it was cured. I thought he discovered that by accident. Like, he was like, wait a minute, my toothaches go. No, he kept going. This is not the only experiment. He had many brushes with death. As far as self experimenting scientists go, he was probably one of the toughest ones, or at least able to take a lot of trust. The one most addicted to morphine. That's right. Yeah. But that was a pretty big contribution to humanity. Morphine. I mean, that's still like the go to painkiller today, I imagine. Or not I imagine. I know this to be true. Up next, Josh, we have Sir Henry Head, and he got together with his buddy Whrrivas. This one's a little crazy to me. They knew at the time that nerve damage can repair itself, but what they didn't have was documentation. Right. Because people couldn't describe it good enough. They'd be like, yeah, I guess it kind of hurts. Yeah. So what they needed at the time, there was no documentation, so they were like, well, let me cut out a sliver of my nerve on my arm and sew it back together. And since I can talk about this stuff intelligently, I'll do it myself. Yeah. And not just any nerve. This is a radial the radial nerve in his left arm. Right. He was right handed, which is why he did this to his left arm, because he's head. No, he's no dumb. Right. And he had it surgically removed. And the radial nerve, dude, goes to the spinal column and then all the way down branches, all the way down to the hand, so it's like a major nerve. And had a section cut out and then tied back together with silk and then said, okay, I'm going to spend the next five years paying attention to how the sensation somataception comes back. That's right. And not only that, Chuck. So, dude, I got a root canal the other day, as you know. Yeah, you said it wasn't too bad. No, it wasn't. But I was thinking about Henry Head, because while it was going on, I kind of went off to my happy place. I just left my body as much as possible in case any pain did come along. It would be kind of muted. What Henry head did that work? Was it did you're not looking for the pain, you're trying to avoid it mentally. Yeah. And it definitely makes it worse if you're thinking about it. But what Henry Head did was create this kind of trancelike state called negative attitude of attention, where he focused his attention inward on pain, looking for it so he could, I guess, experience it more fully and pay attention to the type of pain it was. This guy went on this journey of pain, excruciating pain at times. He told his wife that what was this quote to his wife? He said, I shall know a great deal about pain by the time this experiment is over. Yeah, he was right. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, but he was a bad dude. She was like, what's this bringing in? Are they paying you for this eternal thing? But that documentation was important because they'd never been able to describe fully. They probably didn't follow patients up like they do now, like, five years later. Right. Well, and this was over the course of five years. So they basically documented how sensation returns after major nerve damage. And he also contributed a lot to experimental psychology with the negative attitude of attention. Basically, there's this whole thing of reverie where you're just basically zoned out, like Ralphie in A Christmas Story that was never documented before. And basically what Henry Head did was say, oh, here's a way to explore that. I don't get the Ralphie remember where they're like, Ralphie and he, like, comes to remember his little daydream about getting the A plus plus plus. That's reverie. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Family comedy. Yes, it is. Number four on our list, Josh. I like to call the dude who loved drugs, alexandra Shulkin. We talked about him before, and he was a chemist for Dow in the 60s. We talked about in the psychedelic treatmental illness. That's the one he showed up in. Right. He was basically toying with mescaline and compounds that later became ecstasy. MDMA. MDMA, yeah. Have a hard time saying that. And he and his wife took a lot of these psychoactive drugs, had parties in the martini as the usual method of the 60s, put little drugs in there. And that's basically his story. He likes the drugs and I guess he documented all this stuff, right? Yeah. He went just partying. Lucy. I don't know if partying is the right word, but I don't know that he was always documenting. I don't know if it was always scientifically rigorous. How many did he take here? So there's like an estimated 300 psychoactive compounds in the world, and he estimated that he sampled between 200 and 250 of them. Wow. So he liked the psychedelics a lot. He was a big time into the dead Timothy Leary to shame, didn't he? They were probably buddies. Was he American? Yeah. Okay, so let's go back a little bit from the drug. Addled sixty S to the drug adult. 19th century. Yeah, 1819. Right. There's a Czechoslovakian monk who at age 32 became a doctor because he didn't think that the whole recommended dosage thing that was being doled out at the time was he called it nothing but mysticism. He thought it was way too low and basically homeopathy. Right. I think he had a problem with homeopathy. His name is Jan Perkiny, and he basically said, okay, I'm going to become a doctor so I can learn more about this, and then I'm going to take as many drugs as I can get my hands on and overdose and then pay attention to what happens to me. That's right. Because I want to figure out what the recommended dosage should be. Yeah. The coolest part about this guy's story, I think, is that after he started doing this, like taking things like Foxglove to blur his vision and then writing about that night shade, the word got out. And people I got the sense that other doctors were like, hey, there's this dude that he'll let you do anything to it. Right. He'll take anything. So they started doing that. Yeah. One of his teachers at med school said, hey, I've got these three different extracts of hippocamp and I need to find out which one is best. So what do you think? Is there anything that does besides make you vomit? No. Okay. That's sole purpose. Yeah. As far as I know, that's it. Have you ever heard of it used for anything else? No. I haven't either. No, I don't ever want to have it. I want to try it. So Jan Perkini conducted a three week trial of these three extracts of ipicac. And by the end of the trial, he conditioned, like, a vomiting response where he saw, like, a brown powder that looks like ipicacy. His wife was like, you want some cinnamon toast? You know what's interesting? His wife died and he became in charge of raising his three boys. And he said, okay, I'm not self experimenting anymore. I have to stick around to take care of these jokers. That's good to know. Yeah, it was pretty cool. He said he was leaving it to the younger generation, but he's been doing it for 20 years already. Right. And not just ippicak and Fox glove, but also nightshade. We now use Atropine, which is the active ingredient night Shade, to dilate pupils, thanks to him, because he overdosed on Night Shade to find out what would happen. And he would also make himself very dizzy to study vertigo on carousels. Yeah, there's a type of vertigo named after him. Oh, really? Yeah, because he studied it and figured it out. So he would just, like, get on the carousel and then stand up. Yeah, but rather than this is a common thread in self experimentation, like with my root canal. Or if you're busy on a carousel, you go inward, you shy away from it. You don't want to pay attention to any details. You just want everything to end right. With selfexperimenting. Researchers do is throw themselves into the experience and pay attention and gain all that knowledge from it. That any one of us could do if we were good at describing things scientifically. True, but we don't, because we want to avoid pain and discomfort. These guys did it for us. They did. Thankfully. Yeah. Well, that's why we're doing this one, too. It's like, hats off to him if you haven't gotten that impression yet. Thank you. Hats off. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun is shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, My Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's Right hosts Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales, and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great, and it's a fun show, and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today it's 2022 and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus infection. Or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teledoc is ranked number one by JD. Power and telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teletoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. What if I just did that and I had like, a reverse mohawk or something and you couldn't say anything about it? All right, george Stratton is next. And he did something a little crazy. He wore reversing lenses in the 1890s, so he learned that our visual information comes in in an inverted manner. We all know this. Right. Well, he knew that, but there were theories that said that's how it has to be, and he wanted to find out if that was true. Does visual information has to be inverted for us to see upright because it flips over in the brain? Exactly right. So can you imagine what he did to his brain by doing this? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. He wore these reversing lenses, which basically presented visual information right side up and wore them for eight days right straight. So it provided it right side up to the brain. But if we wore that, everything would look upside down. Yeah. And he did, like you said, eight days straight. Unbelievable. He said the thing that got him the most was, like, he would put his hand out moving. Right. Well, he had to just sit there. For the first four days, he couldn't move at all. Oh, really? Yeah, but he would stretch his hand out and it would come in from the top rather than the bottom. And he said everything was just like a dream. I have to try that out for like a second. I just like to put some on and be like, oh, right, that's weird. Let me take them right back off. Exactly. Not leave them on for eight days. Now. Apparently by the fifth day, everything started to show up as upright again. Oh, really? Yeah, and then if you really concentrated on it, it would go back to being upside down. So did he rewire his brain? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, he proved that the visual information doesn't have to be inverted to be seen upright and that the brain is really capable of adapting in a fairly short time to basically the most radical changes in the sensations that's presented. So I guess that sort of helped. It's not like that led to any huge breakthrough, though. Yeah, I would think that it probably formed the basis of neuroplasticity, surely. All right. Yeah. Plus also, anybody who does that, that's mind bending. He gets a pat on the back for that no matter what. Well, and he also found too, that after taking them off, that it took a little while to get back to normal, which the price has something too about your brain unlearns. His brain was ticked off. Yes. He said that he had like glasses at first, and he said it was just too much, he couldn't do it. So he blindfolded one eye for eight days and had basically a monocle, like a little single lens, and that's the one he wore for eight days. He said it was just too much to have two lenses. So you want to do Carl Lon Steiner? Yeah, he actually did do a lot of good work. He was Vienese and he was a physician, and he basically came up with the blood typing system, the Abo blood typing system, because he noticed that red blood cells and some people clump in the presence of the fluid component, which is serum, but not everybody. So we thought it's almost as if their blood is a different type from one another. Well, at the time they knew that that would happen because you give people blood transfusions and then they die and the blood is yeah, but at the time everybody thought it was because those people had some unknown disease. And Lon Steiner was like, I think that people just have different types of blood. So he used his own blood and some of his colleagues. We should do one of blood type. I think we should. Is that true? Like your body literally cannot accept another blood type? It depends. I think O is the universal type. Yeah. So you can accept but if you have like A, you can't have B at all. No, because the red blood cells clump and your blood doesn't flow and you die. So it's like putting diesel in a very much regular engine. Very much so, yeah. So like you said, what Lon Steiner did was a huge contribution because he showed there's different antigens in different types of blood and that creates this different blood type, abo or AB. Yeah. And if you test people first and say, oh, they're atyped right. And we've got some eightype blood over here, a blood transfusion will work and so will organ donation and all this other stuff. Yeah, it was enormous. I bet doctors were like, oh, well, that's good to know. Right, people? So yeah, he won the Nobel Prize in 1000 930 for that. No kidding. Rightly. He should win it every year. But what's crazy is he experimented on himself. It's kind of cool. But what's nuts is that he also uses colleagues blood. And it just so happened that out of like five people, they all had different blood types. Like all blood types were present. It could have gone the exact opposite way. Just everybody had a type. And then he said, no, they're the same. Yeah, exactly. So I thought that was pretty cool. It was almost Providence. Well, that led to Dr. Jack Goldstein in the he was a biochemist who did more experimenting, and this one confused not confused me, but he found out that an enzyme and coffee, when injected into B blood, removes antigen and basically makes it the universal blood type. How did he figure that out? I don't know. The coffee thing comes out. I don't know. But he figured it out. I just injected coffee one day to see what that would do in my blood. Right. So he had otite blood. So this enzyme changes B type blood to Otype blood, and he had Otype blood. So to prove that this worked, he got a blood transfusion of this treated B blood that was ostensibly now O blood. So he got a blood transfusion, a small one, but he did it himself to see if his arm would fall off or something like that, or if his blood would clump. And it worked, and it's still being worked out, but apparently that opens up like the donation pool. If you can just take all this B type blood and you need O, which is the universal type, just injected with this enzyme. And I wonder how much blood you have to have transfused before it. Like, how much diesel can you put in there? I don't know. If they just did, like, a vial, what would that do to your body? I don't know, because Goldstein did eleven and a half billion red blood cells. Right. And I don't know if it's just a few drops or if it's, like, half a pine or a pine or what. We'll have to find that out in the blood typing episode. Okay. Well, I've been wanting to do the blood one for a while, but it's just like, let's do it right now. It's tough. I need a little while on that one. Okay. Do we have a blood typing article? Well, we have an article on blood that's, like, really dense. Oh, yes, we started to do that. We're like, yeah, we're not doing this right now, I thought. I think it was written by an MD. Wasn't it? It read like it. Yeah. So look for the revised version coming in the future. All right. I like number nine. Ebinghouse. Erman. Is it Herman or erman? Ebinghouse. I don't think he's Portuguese. He was German. Portuguese, yeah. Erman. I don't know. He's Herman, then. Let's just call him Herman. Okay. He was German. And he was the first guy to really study memory in a really maybe at all, but in a really scientific way, which was unusual at the time to apply scientific research principles to psychological matters. Right. It was like, basically taking the way the hard sciences do and applying it to the soft science and psychology. That's. Right. But he formed the methodology that's still in use today and prove that it can work. Like yes. You can study cognitive faculties, like memory, in a science way. So what he did was pretty cool. First thing he did was he created these nonsense syllables, 2300 of them, with two consonants with a vowel in the middle, like nog is one example you used. Yeah. And he had to make them nonsense because there had to be no association with previous words that he had learned. They had to be brand new things in his brain. Right. Because if you have a previous association with a syllable right. Like skay, and you have a great memory of ice skating as a child, and skay brings that to mind, of course you're going to remember skay. I'm surprised he came up with 2300 of them. I know. That would be tough for me. So what he did was he basically, over the course of a year, learned these words and then to the point where he could recall them perfectly and then recorded how long it took for him basically to forget them and then relearn them again. Right. And that taught us all sorts of cool things about memory. Yeah, he figured out that and a lot of this stuff is so commonplace, we take it very much for granted. But this guy is the one who figured out that meaningless stuff is harder to learn than meaningful stuff. He gave us the idea of the learning curve. The more stuff you have to learn, the longer it's going to take to learn it. Yes. I think he was the first person to actually name it, too. The learning curve. I think so. It's possible. I believe so. Okay. And forgetting happens most rapidly right after learning and then kind of evens off and slows down. And he taught us that cramming doesn't work, that learning is best when it's done over a longer time than a single true ramping session, because, boy, I used to cram pretty well. Did you? Nice. I was good at it. I was not. I would just be too stressed out. Well, and I short changed myself, though, because I would do well on the test and then forget it, which was I mean, I wasn't doing myself any favors as far as gaining knowledge. I took Italian in college, and it was the only language that's ever clicked for me. I got Italian on a fundamental level. Oh, really? Yeah, and just ace the class until the final. And I studied for the final. I don't think I crammed it. I didn't take it for granted that I was going to ace the final, but for some reason, I got there and forgot everything when I sat down. Well, then I panicked. Yeah. But it wasn't panic until I realized that I'd forgotten everything, and I still, to this day, don't understand what happened, and I don't remember it's not like it came back after the test. It just went away right before the final. You know what happened? What? Centaurio. Centorio. That's what happened. I started weighing my faith and it chased away all my understanding of Italian. And I stopped after one trial. Did you quit? I'm just saying I've weighed my feces once. I know you got to do it more than once. He also created the Ebbinghouse illusion. Have you ever heard of that? That thing right there? Is that the same size? Yeah. That is not the same size. It is. It is not the same size. It's a very famous illusion where there are two same sized circles. They're not the same size. And then one on the left has these very large circles around it, and the one on the right has very small circles around it. And it gives the appearance that they're different sizes, but they are not. So Evanhouse is a pioneer in experimental psychology, which is pretty cool. Absolutely. And in experimental psychology still, today self experimentation is fairly commonly used because it's not nearly as dangerous as it is in, say, medicine. For that reason, science today is basically like you can't self experiment. That's so 19th century. Well beyond the dangers of it. There's something called double blinds and placebos that if you're self experimenting, then that's going to affect the outcome of the experiment. Right. Almost 100%. The double blind is like a hallmark of scientific inquiry and it's impossible when you're experimenting on yourself. It's true. So if you're looking for grant funding and you're saying, well, I'm just going to try this drug on myself and see what happens, you're not going to get that funding, but probably won't get published either, right? Well, it depends. There's this guy named Seth Roberts who published a paper about his twelve years of self experimentation, and he's a psychologist, but the paper that he published was about the self experimenting he did in his spare time. So if you're not an experimental psychologist, probably if you're into self experimentation, you're either some sort of pro scientist doing it in your spare time or you're an amateur. There's been a movement called N equals one, which is scientific notation for the study sample size or population size. Isn't it called quantified self, though? That's the movement. Well, that's the website. There's like a group where it's kind of like this hub of like, hey, I wanted to figure out why I had migraines, so I started tracking like, my food. And they were Wired editors, I think, who started quantified self? Yeah. I did not know that. So there's a quantified self.com is basically this awesome place where you can go see how other people are carrying out their own self experiments and gets a little wacky. Yeah. There's this one lady that drinks her first urine of the day, each day, but it's like she records all that. Are you sure you saw that? I read it. I didn't see her do that. Well, you didn't click on the YouTube link? No, there's all sorts. There was a big Forbes yeah, Forbes had a big article on this movement, which is some people call it naval gazing at its'finest other people think it's valid. Well, that's the point that Seth Roberts made. He was saying, like, I don't need funding for this because I'm just doing it my spare time. It costs, like, basically no money. Get off my bat. Just pay attention. But he also said that he had the motivation of a person looking to solve a problem. Like he wanted to control his weight or mood or make himself a happier person, get better sleep. So he just carried out all these self experiments and he could conduct more than one at a time. So, yeah, he was like, Get off my back. I think it's kind of cool, though. Like, I have lactose issues, and I could see myself getting into tracking that and isolating exactly which foods. I mean, that's basically all it is. That's it. It's kind of cool. And drinking your own urine. I will draw the line there. So we should probably say thanks to some of the sources that helped us with this podcast. Josh Clark oscillatory Thoughts blog. Let's see. Tiffany Wattsmith wrote Henry Head in the theater of Reverie. Scientific American had a cool article, self Experiment set up for Science. Alan Neuronger had a paper from 1981 called Self Experimentation a Call for Change. Lawrence K. Altman literally wrote the book on this. Who Goes First? The story of self experimentation and medicine. Who goes first? Yeah, exactly. Pretty funny. A. Cohen wrote an article in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology about Sara Turner experiments. He and his good time buddies. Salvator Kuri. Did he write about Centaurio? Centauri. He wrote about George Stratton. The University of Indiana has a cool human intelligence department. Quantified Self.com. If you want to get into self experimentation and don't feel like suing us for mentioning it, it's interesting to look at, at the very least. Yeah, agreed. And then Seth Roberts. The unreasonable effectiveness of my self experimentation is the name of the paper. So those are all the ones. And then pretty soon there'll be a list of top ten list on the site. It's not published yet. It's practically done, I would assume. And Chuck, if you forgot the name of the show that we are promoting on Science Channel, why don't we do a little ad for it? A summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah, from the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, hosts Selena Erkart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today, it's 2022. When things look different, like doctors visits, for example, sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for none emergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teledoc is ranked number one by JD Power and Telehealth Satisfaction with Direct to consumer providers. Teledok is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teldoc. comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. That's true. Yeah, Chuck, a couple more shout outs are good. Good friend Wyatt Sinak. Yes. His stand up special, Wyatt Sinak Comedy Person is out on DVD. Very funny stuff. And if you've only seen Wyatt on The Daily Show He's great on The Daily Show, but his stand up is hysterical and different than you would think it would be. He's much more like lively and animated. He's awesome. He's a good guy, too. And we have a Happiness Audio book out. That's right. The Grammy nominated nominated happiness Audiobook the Super Stuff Guide to Happiness. That's right. It's up on itunes for 399. You're going to end up shelling out more if you're in Australia. We're sorry. Let's see, what else? Oh, it's got all sorts of great sound design interviews. Yeah, it's just cool. Got some experts on the horn. My niece, yes, she let it off. And yeah, it's up on itunes to search for Super Stuff Guide to Happiness. And that will also bring up the Super Stuff Guide to the Economy, which is still evergreen and good. Are we going to do any more of those? I think we should. It would feel like we should. Okay. We should. It would feel like a quitter if we just had two. Yeah, we need at least three. I would like four, at least. Okay. And then one more administrative detail. We have a cool little thing. If you text SYSK to 80565, it takes to you back a link to listen to the podcast on your iPhone without going through itunes if you're not in the mood. Is that what it did? Yeah, it's cool. It brings up our RSS feed and you can just listen to it. I think it's a quick time. So it'll work on your iPhone or your Droid or whatever. That's our latest marketing invention. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So just text SYSK 28056. Five if you ever are having a stuff you should know, Jones. That's right, Friedrich. Sir, Turner is not around. Yeah, by the way, we're working on there's been some issues with the apps, I think refreshing the podcast list lately. And we are working our tech department is working on that. So keep your pants on, as they say. Yeah. So this will be up eventually. You can look for ten scientists who wear their own guinea pigs. Love it. In the search bar@housedeforks.com. You can also type in human experimentation and five crazy government experiments. And they'll bring up those articles, and I said, Handy search bar. Finally, somewhere in there. Which means it's time for the listener. Josh, I'm going to call this. Well, first of all, quickly, if you're from Berkeley, California, and you went to UC Berkeley yeah, we had a slight slip of the tongue. Seriously. We said UCLA Berkeley. We know it's UC Berkeley. We know UCLA is in Los Angeles. Yes, it was just a little slip of the dumb. That's it. We're not dummies. No, we're not dummies. And also, if you live in or have been to Netherland, Colorado, and are a fan of the Frozen dead guy Days and are mad we didn't bring it up in our Cryonics episode, go listen to ten odd town festivals. It's in there. It's in there. All right, so back to the listener mail. This is from Stephen H, and this was just cool information. I'm a huge fan of the show, guys. Love the depth and breadth of the presentations. I'm not sure how far I am from this week. He's pretty far. But I just listened to the Black Death episode. I thought you might be interested to know why the plague was a horrible affair with millions of deaths and an interesting effect on our language today. Many scholars of the history of the English language, myself included, hold that the plague in England is a major reason why we write in English today. You see, after the Normans, which were French Vikings, took England at the Battle of Hastings in Anglonormann French and Latin became the two major languages of administration and literature because all the important rich folks were French, spoke French. Okay. However, for reasons unknown, the plague seems to have hit the mid range nobility harder than other groups, resulting in a desperate need for administrators. The only people left to fill the jobs were regular Joes who only spoke English. So the theory goes that because of the plague, the nobility was forced to learn English to communicate with their administrators, resulting in the re emergence of English as the language of law, administration and literature from Stephen H. Pretty neato. Yeah. I love supplemental information. Those are my favorite ones. I do, too. So thanks a lot, Steven H. And since Chuck is such a big fan of supplemental information, if you have any supplemental information about experimentation, specifically self experimentation, we want to hear. Yeah, if you've done this yourself, I'd like to hear about it. Yeah, but don't do it yourself just to tell us about it. No, because we don't want anyone to get hurt. That seems like in the gray area that I'm not comfortable with. But if you've done, like, your own Lactose study on yourself? Something like that, sure. Something harmless. Yeah, like you didn't inject Lactose. No. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can go on to facebook. Comstuffystnow. That's our page. Or you can send us a plain old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House of Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-04-20-sysk-swearing-final.mp3 | How Swearing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-swearing-works | Swearing is something that's been done across all cultures, virtually since humans began speaking. What is it about these taboo words that offend some, and are beloved by others? Does it help to relieve stress to swear? Are there general rules of thumb ab | Swearing is something that's been done across all cultures, virtually since humans began speaking. What is it about these taboo words that offend some, and are beloved by others? Does it help to relieve stress to swear? Are there general rules of thumb ab | Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=110, tm_isdst=0) | 46516001 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. So this is stuff you should know. Beep Edition. Are we going to beep? No. I didn't think so. We're above that. I tell you what, it was a joy to read this Tracy v. Wilson article. Yeah, tracy of stuff you missed in history class. Used to do a lot of writing, and her articles are always she leaves no Stone Unturned. Yeah. The V stands for very good article. It really was good. Yeah, it was very good article. Very good. So very good. Did you notice her images in the article on the site? No. Oh. They were all like Star Trek. Firefly. Harry Potter. I did notice from Potty mouse, though. What, later in the article? Or was that from that other thing you sent me? Oh, that was from another thing. Okay. I kind of just put it all in together. Tracy really went for it. Yeah. A lot of f bombs. No, that was not Tracy. Well, there are a couple of other articles I sent you. One was James Harbock wrote a good one on the BBC. And another was from Rebecca Roach on a Was that the swearing in other countries? Yeah, that was really good. Yeah. I'm excited about this one because I love to curse and swear, and you folks don't know that because we've always kept our show G rated. I know. Which is I'm glad we do that, because it's going to stand out these days among podcasts. Yeah, it's true. Plus, it's kind of like you have to get a little more creative when you have limitations like that. I found that working within a structure makes you think more rather than just letting it all hang out, being loosey goosey lazy. Yeah. I'm very lazy then, in my regular life. Well, my wife and I both have sailor mouth hot. So do I. Should we be telling people this? I don't think it's fine. Okay. Because this is a good lesson to kids, that there are appropriate times to say certain things. Inappropriate times. And when you're podcasting, apparently it's inappropriate. Exactly. At least with us. But, Chuck, one thing you might be happy to hear is that a longstanding myth called the poverty of vocabulary hypothesis is not held to be correct any longer. Well, what's the myth? The hypothesis was that people swore because they couldn't think of other words and that you were basically lower class. Not true. Poorly educated with a small vocabulary, which is why you cursed. And up until fairly recently, I think it was a 2016, maybe 15 journal article that really put the nail in the coffin and said, no. We tested people. The people who came up with the most swear words were also the ones who had the most extensive vocabulary elsewhere, too. So the idea that you're just dumb if you swear a lot, normally gone. Yeah, but I mean, it depends on how you do it. Sometimes you can tell someone can't think of a better word, you know what I mean? Yeah. And sometimes I know some people that are just some of the best swearers, most creative, intelligent swears. And it's like a music, almost. Right. I love it. It is. And it is a music. It's definitely not just words. As we'll see. Swearing is its own thing. Yeah. It's kind of phenomenal, actually. There's a hypothesis that language came out of Squares originally. Oh, really? That the first tuktuk. Yeah, tuktuk was basically hit his thumb with a club against a rock, shouted something, and that became the S word as we know it today. Well, Tracy, one of the first things she points out was, I thought, super interesting, and that it's a very paradoxical thing in that they are a taboo, but it's not a taboo that people avoid. It's one of the few taboos everybody not everybody, but many, many people embrace. Right. Think like, 78% of men, and we're talking for the most of this show about sort of western countries, except at the end. But as far as we know, and we being like humanity, swearing is universal. Here we go. 72% of men and 58% of women swear in public. This not even in a private life. Yeah. And apparently that's a longstanding understanding of swearing is that men do it more than women. And back in the 70s, there was a Berkeley linguistics researcher named Rebecca Lakoff, and she noticed that women tended more to use what are called minced oaths, which is saying like fiddlesticks instead of the F word, basically talking like Ned Flanders in places where men would have cursed otherwise. And she surmised that it was because women are taught from a young age to be polite and preferential. Sure, whereas men are allowed to curse and kind of let it all hang out. But that just put women in an awkward situation, or damned if they do, damned if they don't situation, and that if they are polite and deferential, they're treated like a fractional person. Right. But if they transgress and curse, they've broken taboos in western society, it's way worse for a woman to curse than a man, at least in public, or maybe even private, which is a double standard that we need to do away with. Agreed. Because it's much like the First Amendment episode where I got all riled up against obscenity. The idea that some words can't be said because it's taboo just irks me to no end as well. I don't think it's a big deal, but I do respect that others do. And I really do try to curb how loud I curse in public. No, it's public now. I really do. And this isn't just since I've had kids. I've always just sort of tried to be aware. Maybe it was my Baptist upbringing, but as bad of a mouth as I have, I've always tried to just sort of be aware of my surroundings, because I never wanted to be that guy that was making someone else feel bad or whose parents had to shuffle their kids away from me because of the language I was using. Yeah. I've had a hard time with Emily. She doesn't mince her oath. No. She's louder and she's in the moment, she's very free spirited. Sure. And I'm always like, there's kids right out there, can you keep it down? She's like, F it fat kid. Not affect kid, just effort. Got you. But Tracy just has a lot of little tidbits here at the beginning I think we should mention, because they're just interesting. One is that people and I found this to be true when I worked at a Mexican restaurant, we all learned the curse words first. And when you learn a new language, it's one of the first things you learn if you learn through immersion rather than in a classroom, are colloquialisms and curse words. Although she says curse words and swear words are different. Yeah. So you want to say what the difference is. Most people use them interchangeably. But a curse word is where you're basically hexing something. You're calling for someone to be well damned. Yeah. Or anything. Good idea. Like, if this window that I can't get open sure. That's a curse on that window. Exactly. You're right. Whereas swearing is kind of different. It's like by Odin's Raiden, where you're invoking the name of a deity or something religious or whatever, and you're doing that to give weight to your words. Or I swear to God as a swear. Technically, if you're a pious type, swearing to God is going to be as bad as saying if that window, if not worse. Actually, the worst is if you say GD. I remember growing up as a church kid, that was the worst of all swear words. Yeah, right. Taking the Lord's name in vain. Yes. And that can be basically all words. We'll use swear and curse interchangeably, like any normal human being. But most square words or all square words, I believe, can be broken down into two categories, and one of them is deistic, where it involves a higher authority. God, religion, something about that. Right. And the other is visceral. And that is basically everything else that involves body parts, body function. It's funny, they really do break down into those. Yeah, basically everything does. Related to the body or related to God. Pretty interesting. Yeah, it is. Again, that seems to be universal. But what one culture emphasizes, another culture might not. And even within the same culture over a period of time, words can change. Emphasis on words can change. Like, for example, in the 19th century, you did not say bowl, as in, look at that bowl over there. B-U-L-L? Yes. Because it was associated with sexual virility. So you would say, look at that brute cow over there, or look at that Cdox. Anything but bull, because it was a bad word at the time. And then now it's like someone would look at you like, what the hell is a Cdox? Is that why BS has bull in front of it? I wonder if it's like a particularly virulent type of fallacy or lie, because I don't see why else it would. That's what I thought, too. Tracy also says that no one really knows because kirsten came before writing what the first square words were. Right. But researchers agree, and this, I thought was super interesting, is that they called it word magic, early forms of word magic, or where they came from, which basically means, especially in cultures that didn't have writing, they believe that words had a lot of power and you could curse something like we said, like, words could be really good, or words could be really bad. And that swearing kind of evolved out of that, right. Which is just awesome. I love it. It is. There is a good example of this. Apparently our word for bear here in English is rooted from the Germanic word for brown. And it was based on the pagan Germanic taboo against saying the name of a wild animal because it might make that wild animal appear. Right. Because of word magic. So that's why we say bear today. So interesting, because something like ursa would have made the bear appear and killed everybody, and it would have been your fault because you didn't say brown, he said ursa. Did you ever hear the for unlawful Carnal Knowledge acronym? That's completely not true. Right. The F word is very old, recorded in English since the 15th century, and they found some roots of it back in Middle Dutch, F-O-K-K-E-N was to, thrust or copulate. Norwegian. F-U-K-K-A was populate. And in Swedish, F-O-U-K mt. Penis. And apparently, even though it was around, it wasn't really used in common speech that much. It was like a word in English. Yeah. But it wasn't really used as a curse word until much later on. Yes. I think the 16th century is when it first appears in writing, and even then it seemed kind of casual. Just a casual right. I've got another one. You're ready? Sure. Zhounds. You know that word, zhouns? Yeah. I think, like, Shaggy used to say it a lot. He said Zoinks. Somebody said Zoe. Encyclopedia Brown. I don't know. So, sounds like that. Yeah. It's related to God's wounds. So you say God's wounds. Oh, really? Yeah, invoking a deity. So that would be a Deisteric curse. Wow. And I can't wait until the end when we go around the world. Some of those are really funny. Yeah. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break and talk a little bit about why people swear. All right, so this makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of thought that says that swearing eventually comes to take the place of crying. Yeah, I thought this was there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that makes perfect sense. Makes total, complete sense. Yeah, because when you're a kid, you cry about things, and then when you grow up here in the west, you're for some reason, taught not to cry anymore, especially little boys, which is total BS. Says Rosie Greer. Yeah, I cry all the time. And so that swearing becomes what they call an instinctive response for if you're upset or if you're afraid or if something bad happens if you're frustrated. And that just kind of takes the place of crying. Yeah. Which, again, both makes a tremendous do you swear while you're crying? Because no, I don't do the ugly cry. We should probably get a judgment call from our legendary producer Jerry about is it okay for us to say effort in place of actual bad words here? Jerry says, yes. We need a ding ding ding. So that makes total sense to me that you learned to swear. And one of the reasons why it makes total sense to me is that swearing is a way of letting off a pressure valve suddenly and quickly, almost involuntarily. Yeah. Right. You can do it out of anger. You can do it out of frustration. You can do it out of shock, surprise, pain. At least in the context of our society. It would be weird if you cried in all those situations as an adult when you can get it over with just by shouting the S word or the F word or something like that. And actually, there's a linguist named Joffrey Nunberg. I probably screwed up his name, but he had this great description of swear words. He said, Swear words don't describe your feelings. They manifest them. Which is absolutely true. I've seen it put as, like, a quick verbal hand grenade home. It encapsulates a feeling in a really potent condensed form. Yeah, it's true. So, bam. Another really cool thing that Tracy wrote about was that they do a lot to they can establish a group identity. They can make you feel like a part of a group. They can express intimacy or trust with someone. They aren't just regular words. Beyond shock value and humor, which are all valid, but beyond camouflaging your fears, which is valid. I remember in one of our first editorial meetings at How Stuff Works years ago, when our former boss, who gave us the charge to do stuff you should know dropped Fbombs in the meeting. And this was the first kind of like my stupid chicken killer software job that I had. I was like a frat house, so that didn't count, right? Like, the language in there was terrible. But this was my first real job where I thought, like, all right, I'm in my first meeting, and he starts dropping F bombs. And I immediately felt a kinship, and I was like, all right, this guy is doing something. He's laying this out to the room, and that means something. It wasn't a casual thing. If you drop an F bomb in a meeting like that, you're telling people something. Yeah. Like, it's okay to use that language here, or, this is what kind of person I am. Right. It really gives off a lot of social cues. Yeah, it sure does. I've always loved them for it. It really does. It also kind of presents the person of higher authority on your level. Or you can turn people off, though I did think about that. Like, man, I wonder if there's people in here that are offended by this. Well, it is foul language can be offensive. And this really great article by Rebecca Roach on a basically posits that it's offensive because when you are using foul language in front of somebody, you know that there's a chance that it's going to offend them and you're doing it anyway. So basically, purposely creating an atmosphere where someone probably will be offended or could be, is the whole reason why bad language is offensive. Yeah. It's like it's agreed upon between the two parties. Right. Like, there are certain words that if I use in this conversation, you might get offended or you might feel more included. Right. And because I know that you might get offended and I'm doing it anyway, I'm saying to heck with your offense, which, again, creates the offensiveness in the first place. It's a bigger thing. It's an urban oh, wow, look at you. It's a dirty word. Well, I guess we should talk about social response a little bit because it's kind of where we're headed. But like, obscenities and dirty words weren't even really looked at that way until after the 1800s. No, there were taboo words, for sure. Yeah. But they weren't considered dirty. It was just taboo. Like don't invoke Odin's. Raven Right. But, like, the word profanity didn't come around until the 19th century, which is really interesting. Yeah. And originally, profanity and Blasphemy meant the same thing. Right. They both had to do with basically insulting the sacred, and then over time, they started to diverge. Blasphemy still means the same thing, whereas profanity now is a general catch all for what we would call swear words or curse words or dirty words. Right. Even though there's in all cultures, there's a definite hierarchy. Yeah. If your kid says D-A-M-N not the biggest deal. No, just maybe to bed without dinner for a few nights in a ride. If your kid is dropping F bombs, it ranks or worse. Some people think the F bomb is the worst thing you can do. Wrong. Yes. That's just plain wrong. I'm sorry. At least in this day and age. Yes, that's true. That hierarchy you talk about seems to fall into a couple of categories. Even though having a hierarchy is universal, what is at the top of the hierarchy is not. Right. One of the things that frequently is found at the top of the hierarchy around the world is moms. Your mother? Yeah. There are plenty of very different cultures around the world where insulting your mother, particularly either a sexual act with your mother or bringing up a person's mother's genitalia the worst. It's the worst of the worst. Oh, yeah. I remember like I said in college when I worked at that Mexican place, we learned all the curse words first, and the guys in the kitchen, I was like, man, you guys talk about each other's mom more than anything I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, it was remarkable. Right? And that must be, I guess, Spain listed or Spanish languages. Well, it's Latin languages, latin based languages. The Spanish would definitely fall under that category. Yeah, but also I believe Mandarin. Some Arabic languages, just languages around, really disparate cultures have said, leave the moms out of this. Well, it was also funny, too, because she followed up with sometimes in Bosnia, it's your father can be a really big insult. Or grandfather in Albanian, your family, turkish, your extended family, and finally, Mandarin, which is your ancestors to the 18th generation. There it is. Man, that is the best swear on the planet. F your ancestors to the 18th generation. I wish I knew how to pronounce this. That's as good as it gets. Kao ni suzong shibadai. Oh, you know this is available in China. No. Good. I'm going to learn how to say that, like, for real little kids in China. Listen to this. That whole class just went, I need to learn how to say very sorry. Then gasping is universal, too. But speaking of swearing at work, supposedly swearing at work makes up 3% of the conversation. Is that it? That's what it said. That sounds low to me. I saw a 2016 study that found that women curse more than men at work. More women admit to cursing at work than men. Well, that's different, but frequency wise, men curse more. So if the average man who curses at work is placed beside the average woman who curses at work, the man is going to curse more frequently. But if you fill the room with the women who curse at work and the men who curse at work, there'll be more women. Is that for explaining? I'm literally confused. Well, and then apparently among millennials, 66% of millennials say they curse at work, and then 54% of baby boomers curse at work. 54%? Yeah, which, if you put that together, comes out to be 120%. So that makes, like, zero sense. You fooled me. They did. If you're talking about the law, depending on where you are, there may be some arcane laws on the books that prevent you from cursing in public. Yeah, but it's definitely we did one on free speech recently. It definitely does not qualify as protected speech. Just depends what can. Yeah, alright, so like, if you're just walking down the street and you say, if you pig to a cop, you're going to get arrested, but there's a pretty good chance that your case is going to get ultimately thrown out. Okay. If you were in Pennsylvania, you are going to well, depending on the town and you curse in public. You say f to Steelers? Oh man, you should count your lucky stars if you make it safely to jail. Unless you're in Philadelphia. Well, there you go. Yeah. Apparently in Pennsylvania, they were arresting people left and right, giving them citations for cursing in public. And it finally got to the point where the ACLU got involved and said, what are you doing? You can't do this. This is protected speech. This is cursed in public. Right. And it's a gray area, actually, like states, there are states, like you said, that have some laws on the books and apparently one of them is Pennsylvania and they were enforcing it and I don't know if they still are or not, but pretty recently they were giving people citations for it. And in Michigan, they had a law overturned as recently as 2002 where it was illegal to cuss in front of women and children. And some guy was canoeing down the Rifle River. His canoe was overturned, he was in the water cursing up the storm. And there were women, children, elderly there. He was arrested and taken to jail. And the Michigan Court of Appeals said, no, this is 100 year old law. Well, and the guy overturned his canoe. Like give him a break. Right, exactly. Give the guy a break. And he got off, his case was thrown out and they said, this law is null and void, by the way. So there is speech protection and it is taken to extend to the state level. But again, it's a gray area because if you did that on TV, you could certainly be fine and that would be upheld because we've long agreed that there are certain situations where you shouldn't curse because kids might hear it. But what's the difference of doing it on TV and doing it in front of a kid? Only the courts can say, well, yeah, and that's an FCC thing. And there are certain words like George Carlin's famous words you can't say on television. Bit. But those are rules more than laws, aren't they? Yeah, I guess they are rules. You're right. Rules and regulations. Yeah, but they are upheld. Yeah, but like private organizations and if you're in a store or a movie theater or at work, they can prevent you from doing that stuff. You can be asked to leave. Yeah, you can be asked off a plane, stuff like that, hopefully while it's on the ground. Yeah. If you're a company, it's like in the mall episode I think we talked about where First Amendment protection doesn't extend a private area. Yeah. You can have a policy, and it can be like some people can consider that a hostile work environment if you have a real potty mouth boss that makes everybody feel uncomfortable. Right. Because cursing can go it's one thing to say BS or F this, but if you, like, get really creative with your curse words. Well, plus, there's a difference between F this and fu, especially coming from a boss. Sure. So, yeah, you can switch it really is. It's the best. All right, should we take a break and talk about the brain? Yes. So we're back, ready to talk about the brain. Got the top of my skull removed, and Chuck has his finger in the ventral dorsal interior postulate, if I'm not mistaken. I thought this is where it got really interesting. Yeah. Because it supports all that anecdotal evidence. All of it. Yeah. All right. So the parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex I guess we should go through all this. I was going to break it down to the big line at the end, but we'll go through it all. Yeah. You got to build it up. We're showman, if anything, the cerebral cortex has pre motor and motor areas. They control the speech in writing. It's kind of like the higher function. And then we talked before about wernicke's area jeez. We talked about that a bunch, I feel like. Well, it's pretty interesting. It is. And they recognize and process words, spoken words, and then you have your prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate what's, your social behaviors and stuff. It's a higher function. So all these things about to say are working together, but they're kind of not when it comes to cursing. Right. When it comes to language, they're all working together. But like we said before, squares are something different. They're separate. Yes. Scientifically, in fact, they are. Yeah. So they involve different parts of the brain than language processing. The limbic system, which is part of your reward system, or the basis of your reward system, but also has to do with housing memory. It has to do with regulating emotion, basic behaviors. And apparently they think that in primates and some animals, vocalization is based in the limbic system, just like that thing that Tim Allen does. That would be limbic system based. I don't know what that is. That weird. Like oinking bark. He does. I've literally never seen anything tom Allen I'm not about to do it. So you're going to have to go look it up on YouTube. All right. And then the basal ganglia, which is motor function. Yeah. Impulse control. Those two things which have basically nothing to do with language processing. Higher processing in humans are what governs swear words. Yeah. Like, Tracy says that these scientists think that it all takes place in those lower regions. It's all emotion and instinct, and that the brain doesn't even process a swear word. Like a word, like what are they called? Phonemes. Phonemes, yeah. Phonemes. Like the parts that make up the word. The curse word is just the word as a whole. Right. As far as the brain is concerned. Like when you hear the word articulation. There's a part of your brain in the left hemisphere. A region is going to work taking articulation. The emphasis you put on it. Putting it together. Running it against your memory banks or context or whatever. And saying. Oh. I know what you just said. But if somebody shouts the S word. Those parts of your brain are not springing into action. Right. It's the parts of your brain that are involved in experiencing and recognizing emotions, the very, very ancient parts of your brain that are involved in it, which gives credence to that hypothesis that language evolved out of expletives. Well, and also in that one article you sent, the theory that it's not even a theory, just kind of the thought that a curse word isn't even a word so much as it is like a yell. It could might as well just be, ah. Yeah. It's just you've got four letters, and if you think about it, it makes utter incomplete sense. Like even the worst of the worst, where you're involving somebody's mom in the worst possible way when somebody says that, even when they're especially I should say when they're saying it to insult you specifically, your brain doesn't dial up that image. It doesn't have to. Yeah. You're not thinking about the actual meaning of the word. You're responding to the emotional punch in the gut you just took from that word. Like, you know what that word means. Yeah. And it doesn't even mean the thing they mean on a very emotional level. You have it stored away in that sense. Yeah. Because most times curse words, almost always, they aren't to be taken literally. Right. Who is the guy who wrote that one bit that you sent from the BBC? James Harvey. Yeah. Like talking about the F word, there are ten different ways you can use it. Well, that was Steven Pinker he was referring to. Okay. Yeah. And none of them you should take literally. And no one does take them literally. Right, exactly. You just know what it means if you say f it or f this or f you. You're not literally saying engage in sex with this thing. Right. Yeah. And you think the person was a weirdo who just topped you if they did at your command. Well, which is another reason why we let people that are just learning to speak English off the hook when they say curse words because they don't understand the difference between the literal meaning and the expression. Right. So no offense is intended. Right. That social contract is not there yet. Exactly. It's just hilarious when they do it accidentally. It really is. Yeah. What. Was it stripes beginning with learning to speak English. Yeah. Harold Framis is teaching them. Yeah. Very good stuff. And so they've done fMRI studies, too, that show that fMRI? Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Test to show that higher and lower parts of the brain can struggle with each other when they swear. And apparently, the people who really pride themselves on being super educated and very literate people, they respond to slang and quote illiterate phrases the same as they do swear words. And this one is weird to me. They've done studies where you identify the color or word is written in not the word, but the color, and the swear word distracts them from the color of that word. Right. That's just crazy. Yes. They literally exist in their own space. Yeah. They are their own thing, for sure. Yeah. And you remember them supposedly you remember square words four times better than other words. Yes, it's nuts. But what makes it I think what's super interesting to me is that they're universal and there's distinctions, but you can divide most things in most square words into just a couple of different categories across the board, but they're not given thought, but they're based on things that you learn. So, for example, Chuck, let's start to go around the world, shall we? All right. Are we there yet? Sure. So in French Quebec, it's an extraordinarily Catholic society, and basically all of their swear words have to do with the Catholic Mass, like the chalice, the tabernacle, the host, literally, these words, like, you say tabernacle and that's bad, man. That's a really bad word. Okay. And it has to do with the idea that you're bringing the sacred into you're, basically. Blasphemy, and it's a big time taboo. But the idea that you don't look at a tabernacle in a church as a kid without being the first time you were walking to a church and say that's the holiest thing there is. I understand everything there is to know about it. So much so that I can break a taboo by saying that word. You have to learn that. But the idea that when you do learn it, it's stored as an emotion in your brain as a motor function rather than as a word that your higher cognition refers to or brings forth, it's just astounding to me, it is it's like a parallel process to learning language. Yeah, absolutely. There are languages where, like, it's different in a lot of countries, but it's also the same. Like when you talk about feces. There are many different languages that use the word feces, whatever word for it as a swear word, including English, of course, french, German, they all have Albanian. They all have words for feces that are curse words. But then it's not arbitrary. I guess it just depends on how it came to be in that country. But in Sweden, which is in that neighborhood, you can say skit when you're annoyed. But it doesn't count as a curse word. Right. They said you could say it around a grandmother. I'll skip. Yeah. So it's a curse word. But the importance, the emphasis of a taboo that it breaks depends on the culture. Yeah. Or like in Polish, they'll use cholera. Other countries use types of disease. Yes. Like canker in the Dutch. Yes. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Canker meaning cancer. So you are basically wishing cancer on somebody, which is pretty awful. Yeah. That would be a curse. That's not done here. But if you did do it in normal discussion or even an argument here in the west, there'd be like a record scratch, a needle scratching off a record. Be like, what did you just say? That was the worst thing that's been said to me in months. Yeah, but they just have a word for it, right? Yeah. I never really thought about that. That would be a terrible thing to say. It really would if you said that just in a sentence to someone in English. Yeah. Especially if you were, like, jabbing your finger in their chest while you're saying it. That's right. I know. We have a lot of listeners in Sweden, swedish people, apparently. Same with Finland and Norway and Denmark. They put a lot of emphasis on the devil. Oh, yeah. So, like, some of their worst swear words are based on satan, hell, the devil, that kind of thing. Yeah. So you don't want to bring that up or else you might offend your hosts in Sweden, prostitution, apparently a lot of cultures and this theory makes sense prostitutes, defy wife's exclusivity, and a man's ownership. Which is why a lot of words people will use for prostitute can be a swear word against somebody. Yeah. And apparently cultures that we're bringing someone's mother into it is the top of the hierarchy will also have words for prostitutes. Plenty of words for prostitutes, and those will be extremely bad words as well. Right. So it's like those things kind of go hand in hand, which, from what I've seen, has to do with the patriarchy creating the moral hierarchy. Right. Yeah. Because it's such a male view of things. Like, you're my mom, so you're the most sacred thing around, and you're a prostitute, which means I can't control you. So invoking those things are the two worst things you can talk about. Yeah. And then our last step to me, Chuck, in Japan yes. Bakka. Baca means basically idiot. But you don't call people that. It's a really bad word, which I think is so sweet. I love that country. Idiot. It's bad. Yes. Think about how often we call people idiots here in the US. Yeah, but that's bad, though. I remember my mom saying, like, don't say that word. Well, she was right. Yeah. Still. She's not even Japanese. No, she's in Tennessee. She's got a little Japanese in it, maybe. So japanese streak. So I guess we will finish up here with a little bit on what can happen when your brain is damaged. And we've talked about a little bit of this stuff before, but there's some pretty interesting things in terms of brain injury. Something called aphasia is a condition where you can lose the ability to speak or pronounce words because of disease or brain damage. But physics have an interesting thing. They can return to their ability of automatic speech, which is just like saying things like but the other thing that comes back are swear words, which ties all back into the thing is they exist in their own category, almost like non speech. Exactly. So that's one of the first things that can come back. Or never go away. Yeah, or never go away. And when they their ability to pronounce words can evolve while they're recovering. But the swear words stay the same. Right. Like, apparently you can have a hemispherectomy on the left lobe where a substantial part of the left lobe goes away and you can't talk any longer, but you can say the S word just fine. Right. That must be startling. I'm sure we did a great episode on Tourette syndrome quite a while back, and we talked about Coprolal alia, and that is I think a lot of people have this image of someone with Tourette just constantly screaming swear words, and that's actually a very small number. And that's actually called coprolalia, not tourette. And a very small number of people with GTS exhibit Coprolalia. Right. Very small, yeah. And I think you even grow out of it in most cases, too. Right. Apparently younger males are the ones who are more likely to have that as a tick with Tourette syndrome. But it also makes sense in that swearing can be viewed as a motor function with a motion attached. Right? Yes. And a tick has to do with the motor function, whether it's your head twitching or shouting the S word a few times. Yeah. Still a tick. My last thing here is, I think, pinker. I think it was really interesting. And then he noted that square words were often most often just very just the sound itself being real, just harsh. Right. And that contributes a lot to their function, like when you get hurt or when you're just trying to exclaim something loudly. Like the F word has a very sharp K at the end. Right. And if you express anger using gentler sounds, like he says whiffy and slush, he compares to what he say. It's like slamming a door fitted with a compressed air hinge. It's just not the same thing. Right. There's something about those sharp, quick words that ends in K's and T's that are staccato that just sort of provide that visceral release, I think. Yeah. That was Rebecca Roche who used that analogy with the hydraulic hinge. Perfect. Just WiFi door. Yeah. But we should finish on pinker's. Seven functions of swearing. All right. What are they? No, I'm sorry. Five functions. I bet we could make up another two swear words. They can be used descriptively. I can't give an example of that one. Idiomatically. It's f up abusively. F you emphatically. This is effing amazing. Yeah. Cathartically, which is f right. Which it makes squares. Pretty interesting things. Yeah. And I mean, Tracy put some tips in there for when you have children on how to regulate that and explain things, but just parent the way you want a parent. Apparently, though, you're not supposed to laugh. That's impossible. Yeah. Literally laugh and clap and pat them on the head. Buy them a toy. Yeah. My kids at the age where she repeats everything and I hurt myself the other day and let out an Fbomb, and she said it right after me and there's nothing funny. Wow. Do you have it on tape? No. But she does say the word fox. The animal fox. She says that as the other word. Really? And we do have that on tape. Wow. It's funny. I'd like to see that. Yeah, I'll show it to you. It's good. And it's just a reality that we curse in my household, and my kids are probably going to be one of those kids that curses earlier than other kids, but I'm hoping to kind of cross that bridge and be like, hey, listen. Can't say these things in school. Can't say them in front of teachers. Remember when a teacher would curse? How like, no shocking that was. I don't think I ever experienced the teacher on a bad day. The class is just pushed and they would just break down and scream a curse word. That never happened. Oh, man. I had it happen a couple of times. And it is talk about, like, the social contract. Nothing will make a bunch of kids, like, straighten up faster than hearing them. They're just like, oh, man, like Mrs. So and So. We pushed her too far. Or when a kid curses at a teacher, there was also that, like, oh, boy. Yeah, that's huge. Like, trouble. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm hoping to teach my daughter just to pick and choose. Yes. Maybe she'll grow up to be like Red Fox, make money off of cursing. Maybe so. Or Sarah Silverman. Yeah. Who's like the modern Red fox. Well, she definitely has made a career out of breaking taboos with language, for sure. Shock value. She's great. So is Red Fox too. R IP red Fox, not Sarah Silverman. That's right. If you want to know more about Red Fox, sarah Silverman, swearing, any of that stuff, you can type those words in the search bar@houseworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this notable Canadian filibuster. You folks may have noticed we had a Saturday episode on Filibusters, and that's a new thing we're doing called SYSK Selects, where we republish a Saturday episode that we think was great or relevant in case you missed it. And thanks for the support on those. Yeah, apparently. And by support, we mean thanks for listening, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah. They're still free, right? So Blake listened to the filibuster one and he wrote in about a Canadian filibuster. Hey, guys. Quite enjoyed the episode about filibusters. Although I've worked for several years at various legislatures throughout Canada, I can tell you that filibustering is not unique to the US. Senate. My favorite example of a filibuster took place in the Canadian Senate. Parliamentary proceedings in Canada are recorded and published verbatim and hansard. Canada being a bilingual country means that the hansard is available in both English and French, meaning that staff not only have to transcribe everything said, but translators also need to translate English speeches into French and vice versa for official publicly available record. Why is this topical? Because during one particularly contentious filibuster believe related to trade agreement, in the late 819, senator stood and read the entirety of his autobiography into the record. As you can expect, this took quite a bit of time, but not only did it delay passage of the bill, the common mythology that the senator also did this in order to get a free professional quality translation of his autobiography, which was subsequently published in French. Wow. That's from Blake Evans. That's a good one, Blake. Thank you for the Canadian history lesson. We don't get enough of that down here. I have one. I have a call out for Canadians. Great. I've always just made fun of it as fake Thanksgiving, but I realized I never have figured out why Thanksgiving is celebrated a month or so early. Well, early compared to the US. And Canada, right? Let us know exactly. That's a different way of looking at it. Okay? So if you want to get in touch with us, let us know. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast or join me at Joshmclark. You can join Chuck on Facebook at charleswchuckbryant or facebook.com. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestephos.com. And as always, join us at home, on the Web stuffyshaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
8d97fab0-ba8a-11e8-a624-0f8c646ec0f2 | Short Stuff: Barbed Wire | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-barbed-wire | Barbed wire changed the Western US as much as the railroad and the six-shooter. Before barbed wire arrived, the West was free and open; after, the West became concentrated in the hands of a few big ranchers. No wonder it was called “devil’s rope.” | Barbed wire changed the Western US as much as the railroad and the six-shooter. Before barbed wire arrived, the West was free and open; after, the West became concentrated in the hands of a few big ranchers. No wonder it was called “devil’s rope.” | Wed, 04 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=247, tm_isdst=0) | 12602345 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony. Is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself. Like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Dave Kustan over there. And this is short stuff. So giddy up. Giddy up, literally, because we're going to go back to the Old West, the rooting toot in Old West. We're jumping in the old wayback machine. And we're going to 1876. Like Back to the Future three. That's right. The movie I only saw once. That's all you need. Some people love those. I didn't like the sequels, but we don't have time for that. I never saw the second one. Okay, good. You did one and three. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I like odd numbers. So it's 1876 and we're in San Antonio, Texas. Yes. There's no basement in the Alamo. There is not. And the Alamo is quite tiny, actually. It really is. It's like the Mona Lisa of buildings. That's right. Or the Josh and Chuck of podcasters. People don't know we're only 2ft tall. Yeah. So we are looking upon a scene. We're at a ranch, and there's a man over there named John Warren gates yes. And they call him beta million Gates. And we have just thrown some money down on a bet of whether or not this little wire pin he has can hold in these bulls and cows and horses and these crazy longhorn steers, and my money is on. No way. Gates. No way that little wire is going to hold these animals in. Yeah. And I mean, we put a significant amount of money down because we just printed it ourselves, because it's 1876 in the Old West, and you can do that. Right. 100 similions. But I bet against them as well, Chuck. And the reason why is because it's just a little couple of things of wire with some barbs on it, and these are some angry steers. And what's more, he has a GoCho assistant swearing in Spanish at these cows and trying to get them riled up. And by goodness, we just lost our bet. I know, but it was quite a party, and we're hammered, and we're going to go back to our canvas tent and sweat. I ate the worm. So here's the deal. That story may or be not true. Mayor be not true. You're mayor? That's right. I'm glad we leave stuff like this in yeah, that's what makes us us. So we don't know if that's all true or not. It's a great story, that's for sure. But what is super true is that Beta Million Gates was trying to drum up some early press for this new fence made by a man named Joseph Glidden that the Native Americans called well, some people call the thorny fences. The Native Americans called it. What? The devil's rope? Yes. Because they didn't like it. But we just call it barbed wire. Yes, barbed wire. Joseph Clinton didn't invent that stuff, although he did have a patent on when you look at barbed wire, what you're looking at is the variety that Joseph Glidden came up with. But there are plenty of people who came up with their own version prior to him. I was looking at this list of them with pictures. Some of those are just vicious looking like that. They're basically like cut up razor blades stuck in wire. I mean, just horrible stuff. But what Glenn did was he took a barb and he twisted it around a wire, and then he added a second wire, just a plain wire, to twist it around the first wire to hold the barb in place, keep it from sliding. But even more important than that, because it's pretty simple, and somebody probably would have come up with that sooner or later, was he patented it and he invented a method of mass producing it. And, brother, did he mass produce it. Yes, before he very brilliantly decided to keep those barbs in place, which was the key, those cows would just go up and hoof them over to the side and slip right on through and sneak out to the skating rink. Because cows are well known as being among the smartest animals. Yes. And their hoofs, they can do very fine, detailed work, like an abacus work. That's right. So I believe before my dumb jokes, you were saying how much he was pumping this wire out. Yeah. Tell him. By 1880, his factory into Cab, Illinois, we're turning out 263,000 miles of wire. Yes. And Chuck, that is enough to circle the Earth ten times over. How many? Big max. That's a trillion. Big Mac and to n. Yes. And this was a big deal. It wasn't just like, oh, he invented some stuff and it helped keep some cows in, and now we all use it, and it's pretty neat. This changed the face of the American West along with other stuff, but it had a big impact on the foundation and settling of the American West. Yeah. I mean, at least as much as the locomotive, the telegraph. It was an enormous invention, especially for something so simple. Barbed wire. It's extremely simple. But up to this point, the Native Americans have been living nomadic existence, hunting buffalo, just basically moving around the Great Plains and the prairie for basically 15,000 years. That's right. European ancestry whites had showed up but the first ones that showed up basically said, hey, I think you guys are on to something. I'm going to embrace this kind of free range stuff, and I'm bringing cattle and sheep and all sorts of other animals, but I'm just going to let them just graze wherever and just move them around as the weather permits. And that worked okay. But when barbed wire came along, all of a sudden, these open, enormous, vast expanses suddenly became closed off. And what used to just be common property that belonged to everyone and no one, suddenly huge slices of it were being fenced off, literally. And that changed tens of thousands of years of tradition in ten years, maybe less. Yeah. And here's the thing. It's not like this was the first fence. In the west, they could build wood fences, but in the Prairie State, they didn't have a ton of lumber. There weren't trees everywhere. Wooden fences are super expensive. Rock and stone walls like, are you kidding me? To do for a whole farm. Super expensive and also scarce. But what barbed wire did is it democratized it and made it super cheap, or relatively cheap, I guess, compared to the other things. Yeah, and easy and fast to say, this is my area and you're not coming in and these cows aren't getting out. Yeah, and we'll talk about how that changed the nuts and bolts of it right after this. So, Chuck, when people started putting up these fences, not everybody was on board with this. The Native Americans didn't like it. Like you said, they called the barbed wire devil rope. The old tiny cowboys, they didn't like it because they embraced free range practices, and all of a sudden, their cattle were getting caught up in this stuff. Because part of the problem with barbed wire is not only did it keep stuff in, it kept stuff out, and so you could get tangled up in it either way. And the cattle that we're used to just kind of roaming around free range will get caught in this stuff and would die of starvation, infections. They just get stuck in the fence and would never move again for the rest of their lives. The rest of their short lives. Well, yeah. And consider the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed this in 1862 that said, hey, are you an honest citizen of the US? Yeah. You can be a freed slave. You can be a woman. You can go claim up to 160 acres of land out there in the west, just build a house, work that land for five years. So all of a sudden, there's a lot of people you talked about the Native Americans ranging around, imagine your tribe riding your horses to where you want to go, and all of a sudden, you're like, well, here's 160 acre fence that I now have to drive around. Right. Drive, yeah, just a cattle drive. Okay. Drive your horse right, all right. That sounded like a city flicker there for a second, but in the same way, you accidentally stumbled into the proper terminology. That's right. But like we said, these European cowboys, the Native Americans, they're used to this free ranging, and all of a sudden, these homesteading farmers, a lot of whom were European, they were staking their claim to property, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally. Right. But the result was the same. And if you put up these fences, whether that was your land or it was actually like common land, you were claiming it as your own. And if you had a gun and a rifle and some hired hands, you could defend that land that was really common property, but you claimed for your own. And so for all intents and purposes, it was your land now. And this had an extensive domino effect where the free range cowboys and Native Americans lost that common grazing area, it got smaller and smaller. And so as the grazing land became more and more concentrated, there are more and more people whose herds were eating off of less and less land. And so it no longer became a viable existence, free range. And then if you were a smaller landowner, you would have your land encroached on by these larger landowners. Probably some guys would show up with a gun and be like, her now. And so the upshot of all this is that the people who had the most land ended up taking over even more land, and just a handful of people got the American West concentrated into their hands. That's right. Which is kind of the history of America in a lot of ways. It's still going on today. I mean, think about when Home Depot or Lowe shows up in town. The hardware store goes out of business, and the people who used to work there now work at Lowe's or Home Depot. So there were plenty of disputes. This was the Old West. Plenty of them involved fist fights and guns. But there were actual gangs. There was gangs called the Blue Devils or the Havolnas, and they were called fence cutting wars. They would go in in the dead of night or maybe in broad daylight, even if they were brazen and well armed. And they would cut these wires, and they would leave messages and threats saying, don't rebuild the stuff. There were shootouts. There were people that were killed in these fence cutting wars. Authorities eventually stepped in, were like, the west needs to be death. It needs to be a little less wild. And those wars ended, but the barbed wire endured. It did. When you think of the barbed wire, you think of the Old West, but you also nowadays think of barbed wire stretching from Switzerland to the English Channel in World War One. Razor wire? Yeah, barbed wire around prisons. And w h outen wrote a poem about it. He said that barbed wire proclaims that you are kept out or kept in. And when you resist, it rips you other barriers. Weather crumble grow moss. Wire merely rusts and keeps it sting. Which reading which doesn't rhyme. Yeah, but it's still pretty good. Yes, the military has been using it since 1888. Teddy Roosevelt used it. Certainly. World War One. It was used as a weapon. And yeah, any prison movie you're ever going to see, you're going to see a formidable coiled strip of razor wire around the top of those fences. It's like an extra silent character in most movies. That's right. Especially You've Got Mail. Oh, that was from the last episode. That's right. If you want to know more about barbed wire, we'll just start walking and fella. You're bound to wander into it sooner or later. Just bring some antibiotics because you're going to get an infection. And since I said that, that's the end of the episode. And since it's a short stuff, that means that short stuff is over. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
451b15ce-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-2353a85d870a | Short Stuff: Labor Day | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-labor-day | Labor Day, the day when most people in America paradoxically take off work, is actually rooted in some deeply radical and anarchistic thinking. Learn all about this most subversive of American holidays in this episode of Short Stuff. | Labor Day, the day when most people in America paradoxically take off work, is actually rooted in some deeply radical and anarchistic thinking. Learn all about this most subversive of American holidays in this episode of Short Stuff. | Wed, 31 Oct 2018 13:26:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=13, tm_min=26, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=304, tm_isdst=0) | 11871862 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your city advantage platinum select card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you advantage miles. Actually, you earned advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city advantage platinum select card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Hey, and welcome to the shorty. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry's over there. So that makes this stuff you should know shorty. Welcome to the shorty. I like that. I'm trying to switch things up because these are a little different, you know? Sure. They're their own thing. Chuck yeah. We decided that we needed a signal to people that this was different, and we decided against a three minute long. I suggested a series of blinks, but after a little while, we figured out that wasn't going to work. Well, I see you're wearing white, and that's because it's not yet labor day. And then it's acceptable still. Is that still a thing? Oh, was it ever? I think so. Yeah. I think that gangs of angry people would beat you senseless if they saw you were in white after labor day. Gangs of angry boaters and country clubbers. Yeah. Maybe clutching their pearls. We're talking labor day. Yeah, we are talking labor day. And a lot of people kind of look at labor day and say, that's a weird name for a day off to go have a picnic before we have to go back to school or something. Sure. And that is a pretty appropriate thought if you think about it, because it really doesn't have anything to do with labor. It's a day off, which is something, but it's not a day off for everybody. It just seems insensible until you start to know the origins of labor day, and then you say, oh, it came out of the labor union, hence the name labor day. Let's get back to that. Yeah, exactly. As far as national holidays in the US. And Canada, it's been around since exactly 1894. And it was, like you said, labor unions. They don't know exactly who started this tradition, but I think scholars generally say one of two people both involved in labor unions probably did. So yeah, one was Peter McGuire, and the other one was Matthew McGuire's. Two different spellings. But I saw somewhere that Matthew Maguire was much more radical and that Peter Maguire was much more centrist. He was the chill one, so he was the one that he got the official credit over time, but it may have actually really been Matthew Maguire. He was just overlooked because he was like, the Jersey. Let's have some Labor Party rallies and maybe we'll throw some bombs or something. Possibly. So Peter Mick Guire with a C. He was the general secretary of the and I love this. The brotherhood of carpenters and joiners. And I guess they mean joiner is a woodworking joiner? No, I think they mean like, people who like to join clubs. Oh, really? No. Okay, sure. It's got to be right, because it's all the carpenters. But I mean yeah, I guess that's what that means. Nothing like a dovetail joint, right? That's what it is. That really gets my blood flowing. But shouldn't it be jointers? I don't know. I bet you someone will have some good information on this. Like a Jointer was a former name for carpenter or something. Right. So Peter McGuire's claim to fame other claim to fame was that he co founded the AFL. What? Yeah. The American Federation of labor. Oh, I thought you meant the American Football League. No. Who was that? Well, I don't know. Okay, so whoever came up with the idea, it's Murky, but we actually do know the first Labor Day, that was September 5, 182. And it took place in New York, and it was like a real deal Labor Day thing. Yeah. They had a parade. Yeah. And the whole reason behind the first Labor Day parade was like, at the time, if you worked, you worked in a factory, most likely, and you worked anywhere between twelve to 14 hours days, seven days a week. And so these labor unions were starting to organize, but they were pretty good at organizing people in their trade, but they weren't coming together to really join their strengths. And so whoever's idea of this was to have this first Labor Day parade, the basis of it was get all these different people from different unions together so they can see that they have all the stuff in common, and then maybe we can really become like a strong political force and we can agitate for like a five day work week and eight hour work days. And they were successful, but it came out of this first parade that they had. Yeah. They were like, hey, we get off Thanksgiving, Christmas and the 4 July. How about one extra day off? Yeah. In a year. And for this first Labor Day, and for other ones, too, they were like, well, no, you can't have the day off. So it was a general strike, is how they took the day off. Yeah. So enterpresident Cleveland. Mr. Grover Cleveland. And he has an interesting background because he was not a union supporter, but everyone thinks when he signed the law saying, the first Monday in September shall be Labor Day, the great Cleveland nationwide. While I grew up mustache or shaved the beard, especially for that, as you can tell, pretty good, Chuck. But most people think that even though he wasn't a union supporter, he was trying to sort of put himself in a better light because of some political damage. Earlier that year, he sent federal troops in to put down a strike. And this was I know we covered some of this in the long unions episode, but a lot of times these strikes became bloody battles and riots. And a strike by the American Railway Union at the Pullman Company in Chicago did just that, and 34 workers died. So they think Cleveland was like, all right, you can have a day off. I saw both things. I saw that Cleveland saw this as politically healing. It was like a bone he was tossing to the unions and to labor in general. I also saw that Congress had a bill going in circulation years before this happened and that Cleveland just happened to be the president who was sitting at the time, and so he was the one who signed it. And really, it wasn't any political tool at all. So I saw both. But either way, it did come on the heels of that for sure. And that was a big deal, that strike. I was looking into it, Chuck, and there's like the whole thing started because some workers from the Pullman Company, pullman made railroad cars at the time, the popular ones, like the good ones, the Pullman yard here in Atlanta. Right. So they went to the head of the company, I think, either George or Charles Pullman, and said, hey, we want to work fewer hours. We think we're working too much for too little pay. And he said, oh, that's great. I'll take that into consideration. And in true Montgomery Burns fashion, he fired the people for even asking. And so that started this whole this whole strike that ended up, like you said, it was bloody. There were riots. They were overturning railroad cars. Overturning railroad cars. Do you know how hard that would be? I imagine there was rope involved. I would hope so. And horses. Yeah. In The Incredible Hulk. Should we take a little quick break? Yeah, I'm a little worked up. All right, we're going to take a quickie, everybody, and we will come back and finish up about Labor Day right after this. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in its host baritonee, Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, Doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast force multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolatecovered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. All right, so what's Labor Day like around the world, Josh? It has other names in different parts of the world. Is that right? Yeah, and it takes place at different times. Like Mayday. May 1 is known internationally, is like the day of Workers. Basically what Labor Day was originally to America, may Day is to the rest of the world, especially Europe and China and some other places. And it's been definitely co opted as a kind of a Communist day, too. Interesting. Yes. Which is another reason why we don't really tend to celebrate May Day. We celebrate Labor Day in a totally different part of the year. Nothing to do with communism. Yeah. And I actually looked up the origins of this whole white after Labor Day, and our old buddies at Mental Floss and new buddies here at work, Will and Manga, I don't know if they wrote this one, but apparently that came in the 1880s or so, post Civil War when new money started happening. And apparently the old money people were like, jeez, there are more rich people now than ever, and we can't distinguish between the rich folks. So I'm an old Blue blood, and this guy just made his money. And I don't know whatever they were making back then that could make you rich. Chewing gum. Radio knobs. Radio knobs. He's got new money. So they felt the need, the old Bluebloods, to design a bunch of silly fashion rules and society rules that I don't know, if only they would know about it. Yeah, just doing trap people, maybe, but as a way to distinguish old money and true rich people from these vulgar new rich people. And apparently not wearing white outside of summer was just one of those rules. Those were the very people who would beat you senseless if they caught you wearing white. That was the other part of it, too. Not just feeling foolish, but feeling vulnerable. Tremendous pain as well. But they do confirm that these days. It's not a big deal. I think it's just going to become more of a joke now when someone says, you don't wear white after Labor Day, I see you just laugh and laugh at the joke. But as far as unions go, the US now obviously is way down as far as union membership in the 1950s, and this is pretty remarkable, if you ask me. About 40% of the workforce in America belong to a union. Yes. It's amazing. Yeah. They got things done back then, too. What are you saying? I think, you know, and now I believe I'm not sure when this was written, but it's probably roughly the same, but about 14%. That's 11% in 2013. Even lower. Which, I mean, would definitely go on to explain why Labor Day has really lost its meaning. Too. Well, now I think people know it as just that sort of last blast. Even though kids start school way early now, it used to be sort of around that time when you would head back to school and stuff. Yeah, I was thinking about that. It made me nostalgic for when I was in school, like, seeing, like, oh, yeah, Labor Day. Right after that, you would go back to school. And now it's like I've been in school for a full month now. Yeah. I mean, I remember having, like, all of June, July and August off, for sure. I know. And now these kids are back in school in August. It's weird chumps, but they do get a very quick break with Labor Day, at least. Now I know they definitely have some pretty killer breaks that we didn't have. For sure. Yeah, they get all the breaks. Well, that's it. That's one in the can. If you happen to be listening to this on Labor Day, pat yourself on the back because you just created an S YSK trifecta. Have a genetic on me. Oh, that's nice, Chuck. And put on something white just to stick it in the eye of those blue bloods. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website, stuffyoushenknow.com. It's got all of our social media links. You can also send us an email. Pay attention. You should address it directly to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health. Find us at chewie amazonandhalopets.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-21-sysk-crayons-final.mp3 | A Nostalgic Look at Crayons | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/a-nostalgic-look-at-crayons | Mixing wax with pigment is something artists have been doing since DaVinci. These little implements would later go on to be called crayons and gained popularity among the elementary school set. Learn all about crayons in today's episode. | Mixing wax with pigment is something artists have been doing since DaVinci. These little implements would later go on to be called crayons and gained popularity among the elementary school set. Learn all about crayons in today's episode. | Thu, 21 Sep 2017 20:45:24 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=20, tm_min=45, tm_sec=24, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=264, tm_isdst=0) | 49986743 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Matt. Yeah. And Jerry's not here, but because Jerry is a storm sufferer. Yeah. How did you fare? Pretty good. I mean, power was out for a little while. Cable is out for a little bit. Nothing bad. Yeah. We're talking about Irma. This is obviously in the future. There may be another hurricane by then, for all we know. Yeah. Well, Jose is starting to circle background, I think. Yeah, that's what I see. Yeah. Irma came through Atlanta, which is weird for a hurricane, and then eventually tropical storm to reach that far inland. Right. And I was kind of like, we get bad thunderstorms in Atlanta, we'll be fine. Right. Didn't make about some extra milk for the kid, but I didn't, like, go nuts with prepper style stuff. Right. But it was surprisingly scary, I'm here to tell you. Were you scared? Yeah. Our part of Atlanta got hit the hardest. Sort of the East Lake Decatur Kirkwood Decab County area. Right. And there was one moment where the trees and we have all these old Atlanta, for those of you who don't know, is a city built in the middle of a forest. So there are these old oak and pine trees that apparently have shallow roots from past droughts and things. Right. Because the roots kind of come toward the surface to get as much water. It's just not good. Yes. I was kind of wondering, us, like, we like to just sort of study things in general. And I was looking at these trees swaying and I was wondering about the physics of an uprooted tree. And then it's probably, like, in the roots give. Right. And every time it swings, it probably just gets a little more unstable. And then the big gust. So we had, like, five huge trees down within 1000ft of our house. Oh, man, you lucked out. So we were just sort of waiting. I was just literally like, all right, which one is coming to hit us? And there was one huge gust that came through at one point where it was so scary sounding that we grabbed the animals and our daughter and ran into the hallway. Wow. And Emily stayed there with her and the animals. I couldn't I was pacing from window to window through the entire time. What's going on? If I can see it coming down, I might give us half a second to get out of the way. But I did see one come down behind my house in real time, which was scary. I'll bet that must have been kind of amazing to see those too. Yeah. And the sound like, obviously we got nothing like Florida, so I'm not trying to compare. But it was a little scary. Right. And we didn't have power for three days, which is not fun. So I've never seen a tree fall down in real time, so settle a bit. Okay. Does it make a Wilhelm scream? It did. It started to fall and went, maybe we can get Jerry to dove in a Wilhelm screen. Yeah, the wrong one. We're never going to lay that one down anyway. It was fun at first, not having power, and then also wanted to announce because people care so much about our pets because they're part of the show on Monday or Tuesday. It was Tuesday. We took the wizard in because he had been, like, hiding and whenever animals start doing weird things like that, it's not good. Yeah. And like the rest of the other three over the past nine months, tumors all over his body, man. So we put him down yesterday with no power, but had one really great night the night before with like we were forced to just be quiet. And there were candles lit because it ended up being this peaceful candlelight vigil because the power outage kind of forced that upon us. How life works out like that sometimes. Yeah. I was going, you know, if that happened, we might have been watching TV with him. Right. And, you know, still petting them and caring for him, but he's just like Game of Thrones. I quit Game of Thrones. Well, I'm sorry, Chuckers. Did I quit Game of Thrones? No, not just for me. Like from everybody. I'm sorry. I appreciate that, man. It was Emily. I mean, I was wrecked, but Emily is destroyed because this cat was attached to her body for 15 years. Is that how old it was? Yeah. And we got great lifestyle around Buckley and wizard, so they were good, long, full lives. But when you get together with a human and you get four animals in the space of a year or so, it's all good times. You don't think about the end of that. Like the secession of deaths in quick order. That can happen. Yeah, I see what you mean. Now they're all here. Now they're all gone. Yeah. Like, I thought maybe we'd lose one a year or every couple of years, but I was like, no, november, February, September. Yeah. That is quick succession. Yeah, sure. It's not fun. So anyway, just want to get that out of the way. Well, hang in there, man. Thanks, dude. And hats off to you for coming in. Yeah. Rather than just being like, no. Well, we don't pad the queue like we used to. No. Which is good. It keeps it fresh, but there's also less room to just be like, no. Yeah. We can bring breaking news on crayons. Right, exactly. I was going to say, during Irma, did you guys, with your power out, scribble anything with crayons? Yeah, I mean, eventually we sent my daughter over to my grandparents just because they have my grandparents. Her grandparents, right. Yeah. And she was getting a little cagey and quite honestly, I think we were getting a little cagey, but at first, yeah, it was Crayon play. Yeah, crayon play. The big fat kind. Yeah. She has the big daddy right now because, I mean, she's got little hands, so that's what she uses. That's the only kind she can grip. Yeah. Better to scribble with. Right. Her fine motor neurons are not quite refined enough to hold the normal traditional size crank. Well, I mean, she would hold it, but she would hold it like she holds a long sword. Right. Yeah, I know. I know what you mean by the long story. The deathly purpose. Right. So it turns out, Chuck, I don't know how much of this you know, having a young one with Crayons. I don't know if you read the back of the box or like, okay, that's the history of Crayons, huh? Is that on the back of the box? Maybe. I don't even know. I haven't seen a Crayon in years. But I have a question for you. Yes. Is it normal to weep quietly while you're researching Crayon? Did you have a nostalgia burst? Yes. I mean, just like the idea of that box with the logo and the smell of them. We're talking about Crayola. Crayons. Obviously. You might as well just go ahead and get that out of the way. And it's really funny because this House Stuff Works article went to great links to just be about how Crayons work. Yeah. A nice effort. Yes. But still, I mean, it's Crayola that you're talking about in the United States when you're talking about Crayons. For the most part. Yeah. And so much so that the author didn't even really talk about Crayola as a company much. Right. And I thought that was wrong. I thought so, too. So we're going to correct that in the podcast, but I found out from this research that there is hydrox Oreo situation going on in the Crayon world. Oh, no. Prang, which is at best and also ran in the Crayon competition. It was actually around before Crayola or making crayons. Remember praying? No, I think they're still around. Prank. Were they the square ones? No, I think they were just an off brand. Okay, but it's like hydrox. Everybody thinks hydrox is the knock off. No, Oreo is the knock off. But the superior cook. Exactly. Same with Crayola. Crayons and Pranks. Like, what did we do? Why did you pick us? I'm sorry, Prank. This is just the reality of the situation that I'm pulling out here. Yeah, I think so. I learned a lot about this, but more than anything, I was just taken back to my childhood, because childhood and crayola go hand in hand. Yeah. Plato Crayola, crayons. And we need to do an Elmer's Blue at some point. Sure. Just knock off the big three. Or paste. Elmer's Paste. I had the purple kind with a pirate on it. Do you remember that one? Yeah, it was highly edible? No, it wasn't toxic, as far as I know. Right. But it made you want to eat it. Like, you wake up and be like, I think I'm going to eat a little that pace today at school. Yeah, why not? It's funny you mentioned nostalgia, though, because you probably did, too. Went to the Crayola Facts and Figures page, and there was a Yale study that found yale University, that is, they found that the smell of the crayon the crayola crayon, yes. Specifically is ranked number 18 on the most recognizable sense for adults, just ahead of coffee and peanut butter. And I bet you playdoh's up there, too. Isn't that crazy, though, that somebody's like, oh, I would have never guessed that was coffee. But they got the crayola crayons and yeah, weirdos. Yes. Peanut butter. What is that? It's like weird concoction. Yeah. Is that a turd? That word is just borderline acceptable to me. I think it's one of the great gross words because of the way it's spelled. Yeah. More than anything, the way you spit out the words. Yeah. T-U-R-D. It just looks gross. But you almost make the sound that you make when you encounter the smell of poop in the bathroom or something. Like I think that's one of the reasons why I don't like it. It's just too visceral. Oh, man. All right, so let's get into this. Okay, so crayons have not been around very long. Chuck, the crayon as we know it is in the little round childhood writing implement, has only been around since the latter half of the 19th century, but this article goes through great pains to talk about a bunch of things that are not crayons but waxy forms of art. Right. So we might as well talk about a little bit of that. Did you find out how to pronounce this? Batik or batik? Well, I said batik because I did this, believe it or not. Oh, you've done batik before. Nice. It was weirdly. Well, not weirdly, I guess. My elementary school, of which my father was principal, as we know, had a lot of interesting programs. I can't remember the name of the class, but it was like, let's get out. It was sort of like an elective, but for elementary school. Okay. It was 80, so it was probably called that, but it was just different, kind of. We did photography and all sorts of cool stuff that usually don't get to do in grade school. But we did a batik course, and my dad got really into it for a while. Is it really? We were batiquing in our family for a short time. Was this like, right before you got into bedazzling? He never got into that. Okay. He was into photography and batiku, so we would batik like the only thing that I remember was doing you're going to think this is good. We did herschel Walker, georgia Bulldog, batik canvases. Nice. That we framed. Right? Yeah. So let me figure this out. Unpack that one. There was like an image of Herschel Walker on a canvas. Yes. Or you drew Herschel Walker. It would look nothing like herschel. Walker So how is it a Herschel Walker canvas? I think if I remember correctly, we would get an artist to do it. Okay. And then we would like a cloth canvas and then we would batik that. So you would take wax and trace it over it or something like that? Yeah. I don't think it may not have been true in the batik style. We're dancing around this a lot and people are like, what the heck is batik? Oh, yeah. We should say it is a method of dying cloth where you create these patterns. You spread this hot wax over a cloth. Right. The cloth likes it and then he tie it and then the pigment doesn't get where the wax is and then later you remove the wax. Right. But we may have done some weird Southern version of that because I remember like, waxing already inked things and then you would crumble them up and wrinkle them. Okay. And then it would give this cool, like, you know, like when you would wrinkle a waxy fabric what that might look like shabby chicing, maybe. I don't know, man. Batik strikes me as kind of like tiedye. The end effect could look sort of like tiedye. Right. It didn't have to that, but it didn't have to. Right. But the point was, and the whole reason is making an appearance here is that it's not like wax and a pigment. Right. So at least 2000, possibly even as far back as 4000 years ago, there were people who had put together that you could do cool things with wax and pigment. Yes. Right. But boutique is really not crayon in any way. No, it's not. It's a process. Right. But it's the seed, the kernel of the beginning of idea of a crayon. Yeah. I think the caustic art is much closer. Okay. Well, a caustic artist in caustaustic and caustic, it's basically where you take a deconstructed crayon and rub it on something that's in caustic art. Basically it's taking pigment and then some sort of waxy substance and melting it together and then just using it to decorate. Maybe it's like a finger paint or something like that. And then I guess the wax hardens and you've got art. Yeah, I mean, some of the stuff looks really cool. Did you look at any on caustic art? Really beautiful stuff. Really? So what kind of art would you make with this? Well, I mean any kind. If you just looked at it on a picture on your phone you would just think it looks like a regular painting. Oh, really? Is there like a three dimensional quality to it though? Because it's wide? Maybe? That's what I would guess. It's one of those things where you get up close to it, and you go, oh, I see, because I'm always doing it at museums, right? I know. I've been to a museum. All those docents that have just you, man, if I had a nickel for everyone. And then, of course, very famous artists like DaVinci and Edward Munch, and basically it sounds like kind of all of them were making their own crayons in the truest sense of the word crayon, which is French for pencil from cray, which means chalk. Right. C-R-A-I-E. Right. Yes. And that's from the Latin crater, which meant chalk. Right. So this is not chalk. No, it wasn't, but chalk is kind of similar. And in fact, the earliest manufactured crayon, the conte crayon, basically grew out of chalk. Chalk is pigment and chalk. Yeah, I guess that's it. Yeah. And artists would use chalk like you can use still today. Some people create art using chalks. Right, yeah. Pastels right. Past sales. That's what I was looking for. So you've got past sales. It's not a really difficult hop, skip, and jump to say, well, how about instead of chalk, we use wax and see what happens? And that's where the concray came from. But the problem is, I believe it was made from beeswax, as most crayons were up to the early 19th century. Yeah. And you, I think, had to warm it before you used it, so you probably take a flame to it for a little while, melted a little bit, at least get it a little malleable before you could use it. And the earliest contecrans were black, brown, and red. Get a load of the beauty of those three together. If you looked up is it context or conte? I'm saying conte. I'm splitting the difference between the two. By the way, have you seen the response from the psychopathy who says it like that? Nut jobs say it like that. Apparently psychopathy is just wrong. Wrong. Yeah, it's apparently a real pet peeve of some people who really need to calm down. And it's psychopathy. I don't say like that. I never will. Yeah, psychopathy. Psychopathy. That guy is a real psychopath. People would just edge away from you. Psychopathy. And spoiler alert, I'm going to read an email from a legit psychopath. Yeah, we got a few emails from psychopaths. Yeah, sorry, Pikapa, but if you look up the conte crayon and a photo of it, you would see that and go, oh, I've seen those in art stores. As soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, I know what those are. Yeah, it's kind of like for adult artists who want to do crayon art. But that's where crayons came from. Yeah, they legit art. Right. And like you said, a lot of the earlier artists, premade 19th century artists, made their own, and then the first manufacturers of crans were making them for artists. Correct. So we'll get back into the history of crayons after we take a break. How about that? Let's do it. Okay, so when we left off, the manufacturer of crayons was about to begin, and it was all for artists. I'm in the corner. Batiquing, Herschel Walker. I don't even know what you were doing. I don't think it was Betiquing, though. It was definitely Betiquing. I bet you my dad still has some of this stuff in his basement. Well, can you bring one to work for show and tell? Maybe I will. Okay, I'm going to hold you to that. I'm going to bring it up every episode. So where do we leave off? The modern crayon is in its infancy, so the Kanta crayon is invented, and I think that was the late 18th century. And then by the 18th, apparently, it's lost to history. Who actually created the first crayon that we would recognize as a crayon today. Yeah, it surprises me, but this article points out a manufacturer named Joseph Le Mercier, who by the 1820s was producing wax crayons. Right. Again, though, these things are beeswax. Is it not easy to work with? It was way easier to go to the store and buy them, but once you bought them, it was still kind of a pain to use. Yeah. And I thought this was funny, too. There was another company in Germany about 15 years later, Jstatla, that had the same crayons, but they were all encased in wood, which seemed like a very German thing to do. I don't know why, but I don't know, it just struck me as very German. Yeah, I could see that. They wanted to be clean, and they don't want to get their hands dirty or anything. So, like you said, beeswax no good was doing the job, I guess. But this is before kids were using this stuff at all, I think. Yeah. Again, they're making them for artists. But even artists are like, this is not easy to use. Right. If there's one thing that can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, that depends on the Industrial Revolution, is the crayon. I mean, tons of other stuff forward economic progress, all that wealth, capital, all of that depended on the Industrial Revolution. But so too did the crayon, like, to a surprising degree. And it starts with coal mining, right? What? Yeah. In Eastern Europe, they were mining coal, and they found from the coal mining and the process of mining coal, there was a byproduct called Sarason. I'm a big fan of byproduct use. Me, too. Pretty neat. Yeah. Sarason was softer than beeswax, which was a big plus. Cheaper than beeswax, which is always good if you're in the money making business. And so there was a tech company offenheim and Zip, who started making crayons out of that stuff. And as our article puts it, it was soon praised for its durability of the marks that it made. Right. So it was the good stuff. Right. It was easy to use, and it left a good mark behind, which are two things you want in a crayon, especially if you're an artist. Right. You don't want disappearing ink. No. So somebody said, oh, what else can we get from Cole? And a few years down the line, right around the Civil War, a little after the Civil War, a guy named Charles A. Bowley, let's say bowley. Yeah. He was a manufacturer from Massachusetts who started using something called Paraffin Breakthrough. Everybody's heard of Paraffin wax, right? Have you ever seen a package of paraffin wax that you get at the grocery store? Sure I have. Have you ever noticed that most of the paraffin wax is Golf brand? The same Golf that owns the Gulf 76 gas stations have not. Because it's a byproduct. Yes. And I never knew that until today. I'm like, why would golf be into gas stations and wax that you buy at the grocery store? It never made any sense to me. Now I understand because it's a byproduct of fossil fuel mining. Yeah. Like, why does Yamaha make keyboards and motorcycles? That's a great question. I don't know that there's an answer to that one. Like diversification, maybe. I'd like to be in on that meeting. We're really good at motorcycles, so I'm thinking keyboards, thinking guitars. I need to look at paraffin in the store. Is it usually, like, in the baked goods? Yeah, like wherever you'll find, like, Mason jars, that kind of thing. Oh, so like an old country store? No, they have it at the grocery store. You just always walk past it unless you're looking for it. Got you. All right, we'll check it out. And it's golf, usually. Yeah. In my experience, it's always golf. I bet I've walked past it a million times. I'll bet you have, too. All right, well, I'm going to keep a lookout next time I'm in the grocery store. No, the bell jar aisle. I think that's probably the baking good aisle. Okay. Yeah. Bell jar. Is that right? Okay. I'm not on my game today, so I appreciate it. It's all right, man. So that was also derived from coal, but I guess now petroleum. Is that I don't know. As far as I know, it's a fossil fuel by product. I'm really hedging here. Got you. You don't want to get into the ins and outs of the Gulf Corporation. So that was when Bowie struck gold and everyone gold. Yeah. Everyone was like, this is the stuff. This is even better than Saracen. And he said, all right, take these and make them into pencils. Right. He was the first one to make round crayons that we would recognize now as crayons. He was the guy. And this was around the Civil War in the United States. Yeah. So couple this with post Civil War industrialization, like you were talking about, and then coupled this with this thing that was happening in the country, which is well, hey, maybe we should start instead of sending kids out in the fields when they're six, maybe we should start educating them a little earlier in life. And kindergarten was born. Yeah. Again, though, from industrialization. Yeah. Because not only out the fields as much, I guess they didn't and they needed to be prepared for a life outside of the fields. Which school would prepare them for prefactory work. Right. I actually saw a really interesting article once that basically said schooling is, at the very least, initially was meant to prepare you for long periods of monotonous work, basically busy work. That you were being prepared for life in the factory by having that inculcated in you, like that that level of patience, getting up every day and going to a place right. And then just like, doing the same thing. Just kind of a drone kind of thing, that schooling was preparing you for factory work and interesting. But they made school too fun. They did, eventually, because I was one of those kids who kind of like school for the most. Well, if your dad was leading batik classes exactly. I can see how you would. Right. Dude, we were repelling off of mountains in my elementary school. Yeah. That's not how they initially viewed it. No. You probably don't do that today either. No. I think you hit it at just the point where school had gotten more fun than originally planned. Right. But much more dangerous than is allowed today. Oh, yeah, for sure. All those, like that parental slip or the permission slip, I don't think that holds water legally anymore. I think that's one step of, like, 15 to be able to go on a field trip. Yeah. And it was like, literally, your child will be going down a mountain via rope, as taught by your principal. And it was on a piece of paper that was, like, cut into third. Right. It wasn't even an eight x ten piece of paper. Yeah. Right and a half by eleven. And there's an asterisk that said, principal does not know what he's doing. But what I was saying, ultimately was that so that was industrialization. So coal mining industrialization led to the parafin wax. Right. Industrialization. Getting kids prepared for factory work led to school, and in school they wanted crayons. So that led to the creation of crayons and then industrialization itself. Mass producing crayons led to the rise of crayons, and specifically crayola crayons. Yeah. And why did they love them in school? Because they didn't make a big mess. Right. It's not like paint. That if you ever been a kid's class of paint, you know what happens there, man. Remember wearing, like, your dad's shirt backwards? It's like a smock. Yeah. It's just no must, no fuss. It's a very tight, handy, little clean product for a kid. It is. To use. Yeah. The problem was, like you said, a lot of these things were toxic at the time. So there was a company called Binny and Smith. And Binny and Smith. You would love them, Chuck, if you like reusing stuff. Yeah. They were cousins, right? I believe. I think so. Were they? Yes. But they were big time into finding byproducts and stuff and finding new uses for it. Right. Hey, Benny, what are you going to do with that? You're going to eat that sandwich? You're going to eat the rest of that? Sure. Smith so they had a patent on an iron oxide red that most farmers used in their barn. That's how they really started to make their money. They came up with a true black, a carbon black that was used again as a byproduct of something or other. But they already had Crayons in use. They used them to mark their own shipments in their factories, in their warehouses. But Mr. Benny's wife, Alice was a teacher, and she said, hey, you guys should start manufacturing these. They're already in the pigment business. So it made sense. Right. So they took the paraffin wax that Bowley had come up with for using. They took their pigments that they already had, and then they said, we need to figure out how to make this non toxic tinkered around with it a little bit. And the Crayola crayon was born, I think, in the 1880s. Yeah. And I believe are still mostly made in the US. And I think even they were bought out in the mid 80s by Hallmark. During the big Hallmark takeover of the mid 80s, they just started buying everything. Sure. You're like Dupont? We own you now. All right. ABC, Forks Township, Pennsylvania, if I'm not mistaken, is where Crayola still is after all these years. I saw Easton. Oh, really? Maybe that's where they started out. I think it's Forks Township now. Okay, well, we will hear from the good people of Pennsylvania. You know? We will, I'm sure. But they eventually Benny and Smith company became crayola. Right. Yeah. They finally just said, Enough of the screwing around. It's not Binny and Smith presents. Crayola. Crayola is the whole thing. Yeah. Which obviously came from the word crayon and then oleaginic olig genic. Really? Yeah. What does that mean? Oily. Oh, I thought you were pulling the leg. No. And it was Mrs. Benny that came up with the name, too. But the fact that she was a teacher helped a lot because Benny, at least, was predisposed to listening to teachers. And at the time, teachers were starting to get a little more clout. Their role in society was developing and strengthening, and that by the 1920s, every state in the union had a requirement that a kid between the ages of eight and 14 had to go to school. Yes. So there was like, a ready made relationship no. What's the demand yes. In schooling. And apparently one of the first customers of Crayola was the US government, who bought them for the Native American. Schools that they forced kids into. They said, hey, we took you from your family and we're destroying your culture while you're here. But have you seen Crayons before? Wow, these are awesome, huh? Shall we take another break? Yes. All right, well, let's do so when we'll come back and talk a little bit how Crayola crayons are made. And believe it or not, a little bit about controversy with Crayons. Okay, so industrialization gives us Crayola. Crayola takes the stick and runs with it. Right. And who is the other company? Prang. Prang doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? In a corner, praying. Did you ever notice? Do you ever see a box of Crayons that weren't Crayola? Like there's something wrong with them. You know what I mean? Yeah, it doesn't look right. It's definitely one of those brands that was so iconic and synonymous with its own product that you felt like you felt bad for the kids who didn't have the crew of the Crayons. Sure, yeah. I hope I'm not coming off as Elitist fancy six dollar box. I had knock off Crayons myself, but I was also quite familiar with Crayola and I always just loved the Crayola one. The knock off of Crayons never evoked any emotional response to me. Somehow Crayola did. Well, I'm looking at praying now and I definitely have never even seen these. Maybe I was the only kid with the praying Crayon well, and I know the good people at praying right now are screaming, we're not knock offs. We pointed that out earlier. Yeah, we already said that earlier. You should listen the whole episode. Remember the giant box that had the sharpener in the back? So let me give you a little bit about that. Are you just bringing it up or were you going to say? Oh, no, it just sort of occurred to me that how many Crayons were the 60? Something started off as 64. Okay. Introduced in 1958. Alright. It was the first box, I believe, with the flip top box, what they call the stadium seating and the built in sharpener. Yeah. In the back. And it debuted on Captain Kangaroo on his show. Okay. As a commercial, I'm sure he blurred the lines better. Got you. Look at this new thing. You're going to love this. Yeah. And he had blades of cash coming out of his pocket. Out of his green jeans. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, that was a different dude. That was Mr. Green Jeans. Yeah. I think he wore his pants once in a while. Sure. Just to show him who's boss. Yeah, I used to love those because one of my big peeves still as an adult is a dull Crayon. Yeah. So that sharpener, that would waste a lot of wax trying to get the thing sharp. It was a huge innovation, for sure. Yeah. And then, of course, the saddest Crayon is the broken in half one that is worn down so it's not even a round amount at this point. It's worn down to the paper, and you got to start peeling the paper away. And then I don't know, I was just like, I don't want to play with this anymore. What about the communist who would use it sideways rather than at its point? They would just rub it lengthwise so that it would flatten out on one side. There were probably artists trying to create shading patterns or something. Well, it was lost on me at the time. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize that. I yelled at a lot of kids. Unnecessarily, apparently. Yeah. I used Crayons for my very now famous Village People portrait. Right. What else are you going to use for that? I don't know. Maybe color pencils. But that's if you're just trying to impress somebody. Yeah, I never got into this. They just didn't show up quite as well. Crayons says, I'm here. Yeah. And you press down hard, and when you pull it off the page, sometimes it'll stick a little bit and it would make that little sound when you pulled it off. Forgot about that sound, man john Hodgman is having a very hard time if he's listening to this nostalgia laden episode. He moved on a while back, not just from this episode either. You don't think he listens anymore? Probably not. I know a bunch of podcasters now, and none of them will they stop listening once they get to know somebody. For the most part, I don't do that. I enjoy hearing my friends podcasts. I think that makes me an outlier, though. Yeah. Because I've heard several remarks like, I can't listen anymore now that we're friends. Well, I wonder if it's kind of like if you like somebody in real life, you very frequently can't be friends with them on Facebook because it's just like a different what haitable side of them. I thought that's how Facebook works. No. In ideal situations. But you've never had somebody where you just like, I can't listen to you rant about this for another minute. Not friends on Facebook anymore. Yeah, I got you because I like you in real life, and I want to keep liking you in real life, but I'm going to hate your guts if we remain Facebook friends or if I keep following you on Twitter because I can't stand you on social media and in real life. I really like it. I know what you mean. Totally. It's probably the same thing. I got a dude like that. And it's not even, like political stuff. It's just, I don't know, sort of jerky complaining where I'm like, that's who you are. Yeah. I thought you were a real nice guy. Right. That's what I'm saying. It brings out the worst. Social media brings out the worst in people. The worst. Worst. All right, so where were we? Oh, we were talking about Crayon. Right. So we hadn't really started yet. Talking about the colors. I feel like we should. Yeah. Because there's one thing, this is what Crayola did better than anybody else. So early on, they identified another company, a rival company called Munsel. Munsel made really high end crayons for artists, and Crayola said, you're making better crayons than we are. We're going to buy you. We're going to buy your crayon division. So they adopted the techniques and the pigments that Muncil made. But Munsel, since they were gearing themselves toward artists, their packages would say, like, five intermediate hued, medium chrome, medium value artist cran. Right. And so instead of keeping the Muncil words, which would be like, medium reddish blue or something like that, they would change the name to Plum. Right. And then they would use other great names like Periwinkle, dandelion. Nowadays it's things like macaroni and cheese or rasmataz. Raspberry. Not a fan of that. Okay. But they use names that kids can get into and that not only can get into, like, those words swirling around in your consciousness help shape your world view. Like, the world was kind of beautiful, and there was beautiful words and things involved in it. Bernie Sanna yeah, that was not one of them. And as a matter of fact, some of their early crayons were called things like Venetian red or cobalt blue, stuff you would find right. In an artist paint box. And they figured out very early on that the name of the color means as much as the color itself. Yeah. And I think the first editions in, they used some of the copper and gold and one other one silver. Yeah, silver, of course. And they didn't use any other metallics till the 1980s. Right. I guess they had it covered there. But I think you're right. That's also gotten them into a little bit of trouble. We talked about a little controversy. Yeah. And you didn't think about this when you were a little kid in the well, not as a little white kid, no. We're more forward thinking society now. So when you see a crayon that's called flesh, and it's clearly a white person peachy sort of complexion of a crayon, that's not cool because they're all different colors of people. And Crayola got it right. I don't know if it was from intense pressure or internally or what, but in the 1962, they said, yeah, we probably shouldn't call this color flesh. Apparently this was teachers again, this is listening to teachers and teachers saying, like, no, I don't think this is okay. There's apparently a study that found that kids typically use that to color in drawings of people as, like, a default skin color. So Crayola very wisely, I think, and magnanimously said, sorry about that. We're going to change it to peach, like you said. Yeah. And then they also said on their part, they said, what we were talking about was what they called the more or less universal color found on the palm of hands, but I don't know if I buy that. Yeah, that was apparently the company line and I'm not sure if I buy that that's even true from this article. What about this one? Just seems so patently racist that I can't believe it was ever a name until you look into it a little further. Indian red. Yes, which was apparently derived from a plant pigment in India. And they didn't mean it like that, but then they thought, hey, maybe that's an association people are going to make. Probably not a good idea. Again, apparently teachers saying, what are you guys doing? That's like as bad as having your team's baseball mascot, chief Knockahoma or something like that. Yeah, her chief wahoo. Yeah, they changed Indian Red to Chestnut. Chestnut, very nice. It's a great name. Bird sienna, apparently. Also they've only dropped one other name, although they have something like 301 order called true colors, but then something like 800 names. So they've clearly used different names for the same color before, like Magenta was renamed or red. Violet was renamed Magenta, I believe. So they'll do that old switcheroo here, there. But apparently there are only three names they just completely got rid of, or no, maybe there's a fourth when they retired or they retired the color dandelion just this year. Yeah, but Indian red, flesh and Prussian blue were all names that were taken out and never brought back. And Prussian Blue not for any reason other than kids couldn't identify with Prussia because no one knows what Prussia is anymore. I think you might have said 301. There's 331. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I saw an article, it was like a college newspaper on their website. They said that crayola sold more than 100,000 crayons. I think you're missing three or more zeros there. Unless it was like today. Right, that's pretty funny. Yeah, it got me now. Like any company can't just leave it with the good old fashioned crayons. You got to diversify. So you see things these days, like neon colors and of course they make markers and all kinds of good stuff. I love the crayola markers. Yeah, me too. The big fat marker, just the shape, the white with the color against it and everything. I loved them. Well, and a lot of those now for kids are washable, so when the kid draws on the coffee table, it just wipes right off. Right. Very nice. It's a brand new white couch, which why did you even get that when you have a kid? What are you thinking? We would never have that because of wine consumption. Sure. It would be a purple couch. After a couple of years, it'd be magenta. I've got some crayola fax for you. Well, first okay, go ahead. No, you go ahead. The largest one. Of course, any iconic brand like this is going to make a super giant one put on display somewhere. Oh, they did that? Yeah. Big blue. And it's kind of neat the way they did it, though. They took 123,000 old blue crayons that they gathered from kids all over the country, and they melted those down into big blue. Oh, that's cool. Giant 1500 pound crayons. That's a great fate for some used up crayons, you know? Yes. Make 3 billion a year, not $100,000. I don't know what that guy was thinking. I don't either. Maybe they meant a minute or they left off. There was something missing from that sentence, I think. For sure. And the average kid supposedly, and I'm sure they're talking about dumb old American kids, by the time they're ten years old, they have gone through 720 crayons. Crayola brand crayons. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. We probably could have gotten some dough out of these guys. Maybe we should retroactively. Isn't that how it works? Yeah. We get money out of crayola and we get sued by praying. Right. And then it all just comes out to zero. Right. We give prank or crayola money. Yeah. So Crayola apparently also did a survey to find out what the top ten colors are of all time. Oh, yeah. Blue. Sure. That's my favorite color. But my favorite crayon is probably violet. Okay. The whole concept of it. Yeah, that's number three. Violet is number two is red, green is four. Carnation. Pink is five, black is six. Just straight up black. You like the black crayon, huh? Well, for drawing lines, yes. Outlining things. Okay, that would make sense. I got it. Turquoise blue. Blue green. Yeah. Perry Winkle. Yeah. Nice name. I think so too. But it's also a nice, lovely type of silvery blue, if I remember correctly. Right? I think so. Silvery purplish. I'm not sure. I'm not very good with colors. Emily is great with that stuff. And it will ask her. Yeah. What's? Perry Winkle? Yeah. And she'll say, But I need a thing. She'll say like, whatever in our house is periwinkle. I got you. And then magenta. Yes. Not big on magenta. I think that's it. Chuck, what's your favorite of all time? No, I don't think I have a favorite color of crayon or maybe at all. I see. I like black. Okay, we'll go with that. Johnny Cash. I do have one more thing. It's funny that one thing that we usually do is look at just when we're searching things online, we'll look at news just to see if there's anything breaking. And believe it or not, I looked at crayons crayola, and it was an eight minute old story. Wow. Breaking story. That is breaking right before we record. It not like CNN breaking news. Like actual breaking news. That's right. They're releasing a new blue this year. There was some scientists at Oregon State University. Go Ducks. Ducks? No, that's University of Oregon. You almost got to kill Oregon State. The loggers periwinkle cowboy. In 2009 at Oregon State, they were doing some research, trying to discover materials for electronics. That's high tech, as often happens and something accidental occurred. They mixed in oxide with some other chemicals, heated it up, and they discovered a brand new pigment to blue in 2009. YInMn. Yinman. I'm not sure how it's pronounced. That's not very marketable, but it's sort of cobalt. I like cobalt blue. Yeah. This is very vivid. Blue. Wow. And we should do something on pigments at some point, because it's just weird to me that they could say, like, no, this is a brand new color. Right? Let's definitely do that. It would be kind of interesting, the science behind that. So Crayola is making this Yinman into A, and they outsource that. They let kids vote. Many entrance to this name, and they are naming it bluetooth. Oh, I know, right? Yeah. It's like, get your color naming staff back. Get the team back together. Crayola. Yeah. Bluetifle is what happens when you ask 100 six year olds. Right. So bluetooth is coming out just in time for the holiday season. Nice. Well, there you go. That's Crayons. Specifically. Crayola. Crayons. Sorry for the buzz marketing, but we couldn't help it. Did we get? Oregon State. They're the cowboys, right? No beavers. Thank you, guest producer Matt, for looking it up. I like Perry Winkle. Cowboy well, if you want to know more about Crayons, go get some crayons, break them open and smell them. It'll tell you everything you need to know. And in the meantime, it's time for listening to mail. And I also want to say to the good people of praying. Once again, people should support praying. Sure. As well as the OG. At the very least, go out and diversify your Crayon portfolio. Right. All right. Like Yamaha did with their keyboard. Yeah. And jet skis. That makes a little more sense. At least they knew how to make engines for motorcycle. Yeah. All right. I'm reading another Satanist reply, but it felt like this one should be read. Okay. Hey, guys, I'm a Christian pastor. Oh, I love this one. As such, I hold strong religious convictions, and yet I've always found it incredibly important, both personally and professionally, to learn what I can about other belief systems. So you're doing it right. Restoring my faith in humanity. I want to thank you for the episode on The Church of Satan. It's not an organization that I've taken the opportunity to learn much about, perhaps out of fear or pride, but I found what you share to be very informational. In any study of other belief systems, it is not only important to know what we disagree on, but perhaps just as importantly, what we do agree on. While there are clearly areas where Satanist and I would never agree, there are actually many things that we have in common. In a climate of increased divisiveness, it is important to focus on what we share, not what divides us. Your episode opened my mind and gave me new insight, and for that I am incredibly grateful. Thank you for your show. Please keep up the good work. Isn't that great? Yeah. Signed peace reverend Lee Benish of Temple, Texas. Thank you, Reverend Lee. Soon to be former reverend. And this is Lady Lee. L-E-I-G-H-I saw that. But it could be a man. No, it's a lady. Oh, it is? Well, thank you, Reverend Lee, again, seriously, we heard from you and from one other reverend who basically said, thanks for opening my eyes. Sure. I found it very interesting, too. Not just opening their eyes, but also, like, restoring their faith. Like to confirm their faith. Right. They're not running out to join the Church of Satan. Right? They was challenged. They thought about it. They said no, I'm doubling down. I feel good about this. After being confronted with opposing viewpoint. Sounds done, folks. Critical thinking. Yeah, nicely done. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua Clark and at SYSK Podcast, both on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck at Charlesw Chuck Bryan on Facebook or at Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@howstoughworks.com. And as always, join us at home, on the Web, stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Bye." | |
Do sin taxes work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/do-sin-taxes-work | Taxing things like alcohol, tobacco and gambling is big money and has been for a long time. But are these "sin taxes" keeping people from indulging or are they simply a way to raise revenue? Learn all about sin taxes in today's episode. | Taxing things like alcohol, tobacco and gambling is big money and has been for a long time. But are these "sin taxes" keeping people from indulging or are they simply a way to raise revenue? Learn all about sin taxes in today's episode. | Tue, 08 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=313, tm_isdst=0) | 49408696 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to Stuff You should Know from House ofworkscom hey. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there, too. So this is how are you doing? Fine, how are you? Doing? Good. This one, we did a podcast in June 2012. Should we have a fat Tax? Sure. I remember now that I look at the timeline, I'm sure we'll cover this. Now, about Mayor Bloomberg in New York in that was in May 2012, when he wanted to ban the sale of soft drinks over 16oz in New York City, and we released in June 2012. So that had to have been the impetus. Right? Maybe. It was probably something to do with it. But the difference with his 2012 push was that he was just trying to ban it. There was no tax. It was correct. You can't have this tubs. Yeah. Like, you're drinking yourself to an early death. Right. With these sodas. There's a very famous commercial that he had where this very large man is drinking like a Big Gulp, and Michael Bloomberg steps into the frame, smacks it out of the guy's hand, shoves him, turns the camera and smiles, and he's missing a front tooth. What? I'm just kidding. It's pretty believable, though, huh? I was with you until the tooth part. Then I was like, what kind of a monster would be missing in front tooth at that age? So Bloomberg did try to ban that, which, like you said, is different than a syntax. Yeah. By the way. We're not saying S-Y-N-T-A-X-S-I-N space. T-A-X. That's right. And this article paints one of the broadest political brushes I've seen from our articles in a long time with this sentence. Syntaxes are often considered a favorite tool of liberals out to impose a nanny state on free thinking individuals. Conservatives often impose syntaxes on the grounds that they amount to greater government intervention in people's lives. Now, let's all read some Iron Rand. It was just a pretty, like, nuanced. No, it's pretty unwanted. Remember those big plastic bats that you would get with the Whiffle ball when you're, like, two? So you're learning to practice baseball. It's like being hit with one of those. Yeah, there's no mistaking it. It's just weird in one of our articles, because I think that's sort of the old party line that people believe. It's just like all liberals just want to do is control your life. Well, I think the author very clearly sees it that way. And he slipped it in, I guess. Yeah, but he also slipped in. But not all liberals think this way because John Stewart thought it was ridiculous, right. More liberal than that. It's kind of funny. I don't remember John Stewart doing that. Do you remember him coming out against it? I don't remember, but that doesn't surprise me. He said it was draconian and would not have the proper outcome and John Stewart is a pretty smart guy well, yeah, if he thinks that, then I do. So he's probably one too and we'll talk a lot about this but syntax is to me. The proposed outcome isn't necessarily like what ends up happening a and maybe not even what they're after in the long run jury's still out on that like you talk to some people and say oh no. They're effective. Other people say no they're not effective and some people say sometimes they're effective. I think the third group is probably right yeah, sometimes. So we should probably tell people we're talking about with a syntax. Syntax is a type of tax that is levied against usually a good of some sort that society in general says we don't really think you should have too much of that as a matter of fact. We'd all be happier if you would not use that so we're going to have our government. Or go along with our government levying a tax yes. An exc which is a sales tax on one specific type of good. For example. With the syntax something like tobacco or liquor or gambling something that society tends to think of as a vice yeah and so they're saying there's a couple of things that are being said with the syntax it's saying we want you to stop. So we're going to hit you in your pocketbook but do you really want them to stop? Yeah, that's a good argument you can argue both ways yeah and then secondly, and I think this one's a little more that is costing the rest of us money in the form of higher insurance rates like you're abusing your body right? We're having to pay for community hospitals there's a cost of society, right? Yeah. There's a cost to society so if you want to do this yourself you're going to have to pay more for it so that we can use that money for things like health care systems to offset the social costs that you are creating yeah and a lot of times there is something specifically earmarked for a specific syntax like we're going to take the money in our state from this new cigarette tax and put it toward this healthcare measure right? And I think that they like to do that more because people might get behind it more if they're not just like it'll just go in the government coffers and I don't know how much faith there is that the public at large that the government spends the money wisely. Well, that's a big part of it like if you are not taking the money from a syntax and directly using it to offset the social cost of whatever that vice is, or whatever there is one, then you're scamming the general populace and you're shaming like a segment of your populace for that end to scam everybody yeah or which is not cool. Let's say you're not wanting to drink soda much, but every once in a while you like to get out there and have a big, tall, giant Big Gulp, then you're paying that tax. And some people might say, well, that's not really fair because you're not contributing to any social epidemics. Right. We're going to get in all this. But we should point out that Bloomberg, he lost that war. The soda industry, they're not just going to say, that sounds like a great idea, Mayor. They fought hard. They mounted a campaign, an ad campaign. They mounted a legal challenge, and the Court of Appeals eventually struck it down in June 2014. So later that year he said, all right, New Yorkers like to be pushed around. Let's go to Berkeley, California. Yeah. Well, okay, so Bloomberg is a billionaire, right? Sure. And he's a billionaire who is exceedingly liberal. He's a very liberal billionaire. And his foundation in 2010 said, we're going after soda. Not just we, the Bloomberg Group, but the World Health Organization said, soda, Texas probably the most effective strategy a government can undertake for improving the diet of the general population. There's mounting evidence that what are called SSBs, sugar sweetened beverages, they lead to increased weight gain and other comorbid health outcomes, like diabetes. Sure. And basically, they're becoming the central focus of a lot of negative publicity. A lot of people are saying these things are around the nexus of a lot of really bad, chronic health conditions. It's these sodas, right? Yeah. And so much so that there is this really great Guardian article that was written by Tina Rosenberg, and she puts it, soda is on the verge of becoming a liquid cigarette, and in part because of Bloomberg and his foundation. What would that make the Ecigarette? That's Ecigarette is the new cigar. Yeah. Soda is one that is easy to go after because childhood obesity and kids that you hear about, stories about kids, like going through like a liter or a two liter of sugary sweet soda a day and these just ridiculous amounts of sugar intake that any reasonable person would say, like, you can't drink that much sugar right, and expect to not have huge consequences. Sure. The UK has a sugar tax on the books that's proposed to take effect next year. And I was reading a BBC article on it, and they had, like, this little poll thing. Comparison, 35 grams of sugar in a can of Coca Cola. 30 grams is the maximum that the UK suggests it's children or people eleven years or older have a day. Sure. And so if you drink one can of Coke, you're automatically having more than you're supposed to have in one day as far as, like, a normal diet is concerned. And who just drinks one can of Coke? You know? Well, me. Well, I don't even drink. We've talked about this before. I rarely ever drink soda. That's true. You're drinking water right now. Yeah. It's not an effort to not drink sugar water. It's just sort of the way I was raised. We didn't have a lot of sodas in the house. Right. Drank a lot of water. Still love water. It's good stuff. That's right, it is. And as a sweater, too, it's what I need. Water? Yeah. So I can sweat more. It's just a system. It's called a closed loop. You swallow it. Yeah. So I feel like about 8 minutes ago, I said something about going to Berkeley. So Bloomberg went to Berkeley later in 2014 after he was rebuffed in New York and said, new Yorkers don't like to be shoved around. Let's go out west. They love being shoved around where all these Berkeley hippies will surely be down with this kind of thing. And instead of trying to ban it, let's try and get an excise tax imposed. And he was very successful. There was obviously the soda industry there tried to fight back as well to the tune of about close to $2 million in a campaign against it. But voters said, yes, we like the syntax to the tune of how much is it? A penny an ounce? Yeah. That could be substantial. Sure. 20 ounce coke used to be, what, like a dollar? I don't even know now. It would be a dollar 20. That's right. Yeah. That could be substantial. Especially if you're talking two liter, three liter. It's getting into the area where you would start to see an impact from it. Yeah. That's the way to do it, though, I got to say. Instead of just like a flat tax across the board, they're literally saying that the more you drink of this stuff, the more you will pay. Right. It's a disincentive to buy that product. Right. Which, again, society or the government or somebody has deemed unhealthy. Right. And in that case, in Berkeley at least, what they need to do is look at this stuff long term. But in the short term, over five months after the text, they saw that this is the American Journal of Public Health. They found that low income and minority residents of Berkeley drank 21% less soda than before. But in San Francisco, nearby, consumption went up by 4%. That's a pretty significant study. Yeah. Five months ago. Well, that's the problem. Look at it long term, I think, is what, because maybe initially people will stop and then they'll go back to it, maybe. Right. But why did San Francisco go up for people like leaving Berkeley to go get their soda fix? Maybe. I mean, that's entirely possible. I don't know. I don't think the money you would spend going back and forth to San Francisco unless you just went and bought, like, a truckload of cases of soda. If that's the case, then you got there are other issues in your life consider, like even just the people who live near the border. Close enough. Yeah. To where? On the way home, they're stopping or during their day, they're stopping in San Francisco, just on the border getting a Coke that would raise consumption in San Francisco. Coke. And the other companies might say, hey, we need to divert all the stock that was going to go to Berkeley over to San Francisco and maybe spend a little more on advertising there that could raise consumption. Yeah, I guess so. But you make a very valid point, and I'm not disagreeing with you. The jury is very much still out on whether soda taxes actually do work in the long term. Right. And then even more as we'll see whether they have the impact and effects that are supposedly desired. Yeah. Well, let's take a little breather and we will go huddle, huddle. Prince. Not puddle. Huddle, huddle. Okay. Puddle from all the water we've been drinking. People say that about their dogs. Like, he pitdled. I think this is a cute way of saying he feed. Right. Takes the sting out of it a bit. A little. But also, I think a pitdle is just a little squirt. Yes. But it's usually also a company with, like, I'm nervous or I'm scared or something, so I'm piddling. Okay, well, that's a weird segue. So we'll go pedal and talk about a little history of this when we get back. All right, we both got excited. piddled a little bit. Jerry mopped it up. piddled a little. Yeah. She was so scornful, though. Yeah, that's all right. All right, so history wise, this is nothing new, and this is a stat that I didn't know for about 50 years. In the late 1800 to early 19 hundreds, until 1913, 90% of our revenue in the United States came from taxing booze and beer, smokes wine. I feel like we talked about that in the customs episode. Tariffs episode. Did we do a tariff episode? We talked about tariffs in customs. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's a large share of your taxes, though, coming from Centax. Right. And as a matter of fact, the first tax on a domestic product levied by the United States was a syntax. It was a tax on whiskey or on distilled liquor. The famous whiskey tax that led to the even famous or Whiskey Rebellion. Yes. Which led even famous to the Whiskey Rebellion hangover. Sure. Right. So in 1913, that all changed when the United States said, you know what we should do? People are making money now. We should tax their income, because the more they make, the more successful they are, the more that we can get until they get to a point where they can get away from paying taxes. Sure. They're so rich. And people went, how does that work? And they went, oh, you wait. They said, Forget the supply side, we'll go to the demand side to tax. And from that moment on, the United States never collected a cent in taxes from another company again. But the point is, in texas were our most major source of government revenue up until 1913. Right. Which is a little ironic, I guess, considering our history as a country. Yeah, it is. But what's weird is the syntax actually goes back really far. There's a lot of governments throughout history that have collected syntaxes for all sorts of different reasons. And then they also used to take the form of something called sumptuary laws. Yes. So sumptuary laws were basically rather than taxing, it was kind of like what Bloomberg was trying to do by just outlawing soda altogether. But rather than necessarily being a moral thing, usually sumptuary laws were meant to keep class distinctions intact. Yeah. Like the word sumptuous expensive looking. It was a way to restrain extravagance. Right. And like you said, and they used Elizabeth I in this article, which was a good example because she was big on those. And it's kind of like, how am I going to tell the difference between my subjects if they're dressing all fancy now and thinking they're all that? Yeah. I don't want to accidentally talk to a commoner. Pretty much. I looked into these a little bit. Apparently they were not very readily enforced. If they were, it was usually because of a specific complaint that someone would bring against their neighbor or something. They're wearing fancy shoes. Yeah, pretty much. It wasn't like super police. They made a silk purse out of a source ear. Hey, this is good old fashioned ingenuity. Sure. When you open it, it moves. But apparently, when these young men would enter London, sometimes their swords would be measured, and if their swords were too long, they would break them, because that was a sign of extravagance. If you had some big flashy sword wow. Yeah. The sign of euphemism. Right. You're talking about a sword? I don't think so. It'd be weird and gross. So even in this country, the sumptuary laws almost made an appearance, I think, in the Puritan codes. There may have been some Sumui laws, but in the United States itself, george Mason during the Constitutional Convention said, hey, let's get some sumptuary laws. They've been done for centuries already. They work. Let's just keep it going. But Mason's aim wasn't to keep class distinctions, supposedly. Yeah. He wanted to basically say, hey, here's how you guys conduct yourselves. The way we say we're the US government, don't be so flashy, because don't be flashy. Don't waste your money, don't drink too much. So rather than saying, like, we're going to tax your whiskey, you who produce whiskey, we'll just go and say, you're, you member of the public, you can only have like, a pine of whiskey a day, and anything beyond that, you will throw you in jail for. That would be a sumptuary law. Right. But the other guys in the Constitutional Convention said, no. I think one of them very famously said, the law of necessity is the greatest sanctuary law. Right. Meaning if you tax people, they're not going to be able to afford it anyway. Plus, you the government, get the money, so why be a jerk and just outlaw it? Just throw a big old tax on it and everybody wins. Except for the poor loser. He's having to cough up this much more stuff to kill himself. Yeah. Forget laws. Up with taxes. Right. Which had been, like we talked about a long history. In the 1764, we were subject to a sugar tax, which kind of had a two fold purpose. One was, hey, anything that we can do to make the king richer, great. Sure. Kaching. And B, we know what you're doing with that sugar. You're making rum and you're getting too drunk. And we don't like that either. So instead of a sumptuary law there, let me just tax your sugar. And you remember we talked about swelling the planters with bumbo? Yes. Like that was just election day. Yeah. People used to drink in the United States. Yeah. Not like now. No, not like now. I know I was being facetious, but that is true. People like, everyone was drunk back then. Yeah. It was no reason not to be. No, it was a hard life for everybody. Yeah. You weren't driving around. No. You were wearing, like, weird pants. Yeah. There's a lot you had a lot of reason to drink. Yes. You could just get on your horse and your horse knows where to go. All right, just hold on tight, take old bets. Skipper. Skipper knows where to go. That was a weird neighborhood. So do these syntaxes actually work, is the question. Yeah, that is the big question. We don't know yet. I mean, it can work for sure. I thought this article confused me here there. Because it seemed to be making its own argument rather than reporting the arguments, which I found, like, hard to follow. Yeah. And then secondly, it just kind of woves all over the place. Right. Yeah. As far as that argument went. But I think what I'm getting is with the soda tax, that specific kind of syntax, which is the syntax du jour of the 21st century right now. Right. And I just said the syntax of the day of the 21st century just a little weird. The jury is very much still out. Like, a few countries have taxed soda, but they also text, like mineral water and diet soda. So there's no way to study whether that actually works as far as health outcomes and things. Yeah, I mean, there's a few different ways to say whether or not it works because there's three fold. It's like, can we improve health outcomes? Okay. Can we raise money? Yes. In that case, it always works, right? Almost always. Well, that's true. And C, or three, I don't know what I started with C. Three PO me and this is falling off the rail. No, it's not. And C doesn't help the public at large. In the case of Mexico, they couple of years ago imposed a soda tax because Bloomberg spending $10 million. Oh, really? That surprised me. But that was a good place to do it because apparently Mexico is nuts for sugar sweetened beverages. Yeah. And sort of junky food and sugary beverages. I think it has a reputation, for sure, as being a problem. And I think in 2006, there was, like a nationwide health report, basically like a study of Mexico, and they were finding, like, it was on its way to becoming the fattest country in the world. Well, and they were like, well, this is definitely opening our eyes. And that kind of planted the seed for Bloomberg group to come in a few years later and spend 10 million on a campaign against soda. Have you been to Mexico? I've seen it in person. It was noticeable to me, the amount of people drinking soda just right out there in front of people. They weren't even trying to hide it. I'm kidding, of course. So in 2014 is when, I guess, Bloomberg was successful there, they had to pay so per liter tax and an 8% tax on junk food. And apparently both of those consumption of both went down a lot because of that tax. Yeah, but like I said so wait, there's one thing that one of the three consumption can decrease as a result. Right. What they don't know is the long term health outcome, because that's just one thing that can lead to poor health in your future, is a sugary drink. Well, so that, to me, smacks of soda industry like obfuscation. Well, in a way, but it's true. It is true. But apparently in Mexico, the battle that's being fought by the soda industry is don't text us. You got it all wrong. Text the cheeseburger people, right? Get them. And the cheeseburger people are like, what? We're standing over here being quiet. Yeah, they said, talk to the pork rind people right now. They were saying, teach kids, like, get out and exercise more. It's calorie in, calorie out. Right? So who cares if our drinks have a high calorie? Tell these little kids to get off of their dust and get out there and start playing the hot spots or something. The thing is, diet is more responsible for obesity than exercises. You can exercise your heart's content, and if you don't change your diet, you're never going to lose any weight. It's diet that leads to a change in obesity. And again, obesity is kind of the central focus of this whole cluster of comorbid chronic illnesses that include things like insulin resistance and type two diabetes. And if you can change the diet, then you can conceivably cut down on these chronic illnesses. And again, the World Health Organization said soda, Texas is the best way to change the diet. Right. So that's being fought in Mexico right now, and it's having an effect at least on a reduction in consumption. Now what you're saying is we have to wait and see whether that reduction in consumption has a reduction in things like obesity and has a positive impact on health outcomes. And if that's the case, then Mexico will probably change, will lead the way for the rest of the world. Yeah, because everybody's going to start following suit after that. Well, here's the thing, though. Let's look at alcohol, for instance. We've long taxed cigarettes and alcohol in this country to great effect or great revenues, at least. In 2009, the state of Illinois said all the beer is going to be bottle and each serving of liquor is going to be which. I don't know what that means. Every ounce and a half, I think an ounce and a half is a serving of liquor. So is that just for a drink you get in a bar, show you're not slapping that on a bottle that you buy? I don't know. That'd be a lot of dough. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know that either. Well, let's think about it. It's a fifth. 5th is like 24oz. Yeah, that'd be like a dollar 20 extra for a fifth. I think so, because it's 750 is about 32oz. So three quarters of 32 would be 24. Right? I'm pretty sure it is. All right, so 24 hours. So maybe it wasn't that much then. But what they found out was that deaths, and this is where the Hinky reporting comes in, deaths associated with drunken driving stopped by 25% in the general population and 37% for young people and also went down for people who drink a lot, supposedly. Yeah, heavy drinkers. A population that everyone was like, you can tax it until the cows come home and they're still going to drink. So that was drunk driving accidents. And if you're someone like mathematics professor Rebecca Golden, you will look at that and say that doesn't prove anything. That's correlation at best. And you can't prove that that caused the drop in drunken driving accidents. Well, she actually said also that there was a larger trend of drinking less right. With that? No, that it had to do with the Great Recession of 2008. People had less money to spend on drinking, so we're getting drunk less. So we're dying in drunk driving accidents less. Right. She said it didn't have anything to do with this tax. But if you want to support the tax, you can cherry pick a study like this and say, well, look, people, because this is the third part of that equation, the public at large benefit, which is fewer drunk driving accidents, less domestic abuse in the case of smoking, less second hand smoke issues, that's when people are like, wait a minute, I'm the one smoking. That affect anyone else? Well, yeah, second hand smoke, yes. Or I'm the one drinking, plus let me destroy my own body. Everybody likes a pretty smile. Not meth mouth. That's the number one problem with meth. But the problem with that I don't know if it's the study or the tax or what, but that Illinois tax on alcohol leading to fewer drunk driving deaths, that doesn't mean that it couldn't work. I think I saw somewhere that like 20% is about the minimum that you want to slap a syntax on before it starts to have the outcomes that you're looking for. That's just nothing. Half a cent on a beer. No one's even going to notice that. $0.05 on a shot. No one's going to notice that. It just couldn't possibly have the kind of outcomes that that study concluded it had. Right, yes. But that's not to say that it couldn't if the tax were raised right. And the thing is, there's a sweet spot. There's a window where too low of a tax isn't going to do anything, but too high of a tax can have really negative outcomes, too. And we'll talk about those right after this break. All right. So you tease the fact that there is a point in time when you're raising these taxes to try and get more and more people to say, all right, enough is enough. I'm not paying $5.85 in taxes. Yeah, just taxes on a pack of smokes. Yeah. I think how much they pay in New York these days, new York State, if you buy a pack of smokes. I'm not sure how updated that is, but it's got to be around there. Yeah. Because, I mean, cigarettes are like $12 there. Really? Yeah, they're like $12 a pack. Wow. I know. That's insane. I remember a friend saying, like, I'll quit smoking once they hit $5 a pack. Did he? Some people say that and they don't. No, other people do. Yeah. And, like, even if it's 2% of smokers who say that actually do 2% reduction in smoking across the country, that's the size of the United States. So significant. No, agreed. But like I was saying, there's a breaking point, and Canada saw it for real backfire wise in the early 90s, they were increasing the taxes on cigarettes. It finally got to a point where it spawned a black market, and all of a sudden people I think in 1987, the black market was 1% of sales, and just five years later, it jumped up to 31%. Right. And not only are they is it defeating itself, but they're getting less money on taxes than they would have if they would have kept it more reasonable. Right. Like, I think Arkansas ran into the exact same problem. They up the tax on cigarettes in 2009. They doubled their tax. Suddenly it was a dollar $15 a pack, which is enough that they were expecting something like $86 million in revenue from tobacco. Yeah. And they had an earmarked for a specific health initiative. Right. Which is good, but also bad when you're like, hey, we're going to project this. Much money for this thing. Yeah. Not only did they not make the $86 million that they're expecting to, they actually collected 10 million less than they had the year before. Yeah, right. And the reason why is because they jacked the tax up too much and they made it in the interest of the smokers to go elsewhere, like just across state lines to buy their cigarettes in a black market developed. So there is a window where syntax can work. Right. But you can't go too low and you can't go too high or else it's going to not have the intended effects. Yeah. Here's a few stats. In the United States. Apparently. A couple of years ago, Rhode Island, Nevada, West Virginia, New Hampshire and Delaware led the nation in syntaxes. Tobacco at 17 billion for the country. Alcohol, 6 billion. Casinos, five and a half billion Russinos, which I had never heard of. Makes sense, though. Russian cena russian casinos. No racinos, I guess it would be called, because horse races or dog races with a casino right, where you're betting on them. Right, yeah. But it also has a casino attached. Is that what it is? I guess, like, we know you like to bet on the ponies, but why not throw some blackjack over here? Have you ever tried electronic bingo and then video gaming? Paramutel betting 700 million. So the United States brings in a lot of dough from these taxes. And one of the big arguments that you're going to hear politically is that I guess not even politically, is that it's a regressive tax, meaning a tax that infects a proportionately unfair segment of the poor population. Right. Which makes total sense because syntax is an excise tax and excise tax is a sales tax, and sales taxes almost to a single one, affect the poor more than they affect the wealthy, just because it matters more the larger share of their income. Exactly, right. Well, we also should point out, too, there are taxes, like luxury taxes. It's sort of a syntax for the rich, a luxury text? Yeah. Because you tax yachts at a higher rate or something like that. Sure, yeah. There's a different type of excise tax right. With the syntax, especially with, say, like tobacco. Studies show that poor people tend to smoke more cigarettes than the wealthy. So when you have an excise tax, a sin tax on tobacco yeah. You're definitely instituting a regressive tax because it's being shouldered by the poor disproportionately in that they have less income, but also because they smoke more. So some people say, TADA, syntaxes are regressive. Other people would say, well, actually, let's take another look at this. You could say that that's a progressive tax, right. Because it's having exactly the kind of outcome you want to have by basically making it so that the people who smoke the most can afford it the least. So therefore people are going to stop smoking as much. Yeah. Now that we have trapezed very clearly, syntaxes are always in this realm anyway, but now we can't avoid it any longer. What you're talking about is the government deciding what is good for you and what you should or shouldn't do, and they're doing it in a sneaky way, like we talked about in the PR episode, the one we released from Chicago, that kind of paternal liberalism where the government's like, oh, you just listen to us. We'll take care of you. We're not going to tell you what to do. We're just going to make it so that you can't really afford to do what we don't want you to do any longer. Right. But as this article points out, it's sort of a kind of talking out both sides of their mouth because the US government brings in $96 billion, I think that's the US. And states together, okay, so federally and state wise, $96 billion from send taxes each year that they use that money and kind of need it. Yeah, I almost said need, but it didn't depend on it. How about that? Sure. And they say, like, we don't want you to do these things, we want you to smoke and drink less. But well, just not completely, though. Right. Because we still want to collect these taxes. Right, exactly. Yeah. So that's why I know the UK had a big issue with some of their proposed syntaxes on alcohol. They had one that was the syntax, and they also had a proposal I'm not sure where this went yet, but on minimum alcohol pricing, and they flat out said, or most of the public flat out said, there's no way you can have that minimum pricing, because that is clearly going to affect poor people who drink cheap liquor right. And go to the store and get Mr. Boston vodka. And that Boston Vodka isn't cheap anymore because there's a minimum pricing on it, and it's not going to affect the fat cat who wants to go in there and get his what's a nice vodka. Vodka. Hold on. Gray Goose. It's not bad. Gray Goose, sure. Belvedere exactly. They're not walking in there sweating some minimum price on vodka or probably the tax. Right. Because they want their martini, right? That's exactly right. So I read this article. It's called The Wages of Syntaxes from the Adam Smith Institute. Out of all places, I bet they love capitalism. And they said they come out very obviously, very much on the side of saying syntaxes are ineffective. They don't produce the outcome you want. They're aggressive, and anyone who's saying anything else is just fooling themselves. What they're doing is trying to collect revenue. Yeah. Where do you fall on this? I'm very curious. I'm not going to weigh in on it. Oh, okay. I'm just staying neutral. I'm saying some people say this, some people say that. Good for you, Jack. Chuck just stays at home with his Tito vodka. Actually, I don't even drink vodka, but I do have Tito's in the house. Sure. Because you want to offer it to your friends. It's American. That's right. Sure. Oh, Bloody Mary every now and then. Oh, yeah. Although you got to drink that with gin or tequila. So much better than a vodka. Have you tried it? Yeah. And you'd prefer vodka still, huh? Absolutely. Really? Yeah. I'm surprised to hear you say that. Yeah. Tito's, not Mr. Boston. You make a blend of both. Two thirds Tito's, one third Mr. Boston, and then spit, my friend. Well, I do have that famous Bloody Mary recipe from years ago, the Caesar. But I've also been called out for not talking specifically about my redneck grabbed up. People are writing in saying, you can't just say that. Oh, they want the recipe. You can't say crack dip and not give us a recipe. So are you going to well, I don't remember. I don't do recipes because I like to just cook by the seat of my pants. But I know it's got the KRAB chopped up. It's got lemon juice, it's got mayonnaise, it's got Worcestershire, little salt, pepper and paprika. And that may be it. I just don't remember the exact proportions. And you can monkey with it. Sure. Like I mayo. Yeah, you do. You can go lighter on the mayo if you want, if you want to be a commie worcestershire. I don't remember putting a ton in there. A couple of Dashes or no teaspoons. Well, I mean, it depends on how much you're making. If you make a big tub for a party. Right. You're going to want more than a couple of Dashes. Probably, like, quarter cup or something, right? Yeah. I'll wake you up and I think that's everything I say, monkey around with it, get creative. Sure. And then next week, maybe I'll talk about my bloody Caesar recipe. I think you should. Which I didn't even know it's called the Bloody Caesar until recently. Again. I think it was the Bars episode. Yeah. Because we got clamato instead of tomato. The difference, right? Yeah, the clam makes all the difference. Do you like red beer or jerry, what's that thing called that you had? New York love them. We call them red beer and Yuma. Oh, really? Yeah. That's funny, because yuma is closer to Mexico than New York. It is. If anywhere. They call them a mitchellata. In fact, it's so close to Mexico, you can walk there. Oh, is it that guy? I didn't know yuma is on the border. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's right on the border of Arizona and California and Mexico. It's, like, right in that bottom corner. Yeah. You know, the worst is if you ever order a Mitchell out of somewhere and they have the gall to not bring you the can of beer as well. We just made you a Mitchell at a $8, please. And it's like there's a shot of beer. Not even that, because it's still kind of foamy. And they just try to pretend like they don't owe you the rest of that beer that didn't get into the glass at the same time. What kind of weirdness is this? It's not. Okay. Well Jerry, hold on. I'm not done. Okay, if you order a Mitchellata and they don't bring you the can, you tell them to bring you the can. Right. And then you throw that can back in their face. It's a little over the top. I guess you could especially if you chugged the rest all at once. Yeah. Jerry did not care for her Mitchellata that she had. No, because we saw the woman make it. It didn't have tomato juice. It was just made with, like, hot sauce. It's not supposed to have tomato juice. All right, so Jerry just waited in we took the tape off her mouth. Right. And she said that in Guatemala, they make the Mitchellato with clamato. Well, that's what they did in Yuma. That was a red beer, basically Bloody Mary with beer. So that's different from a Mitchellata in my experience. Okay. What's the Triple Crown horse race in Maryland? I don't know. So there's the Kentucky Derby preakness. Yes, the Preakness. At the Preakness, they make something like jerry was just describing where it's like Bloody Mary with beer. They didn't call it a Mitchellata. What do they call it? I don't remember what they called it. Kevin. Like, it is good, I'll give you that. But from my experience, Mitchellad is lime juice, beer and hot sauce. Well, that's what she got. And you didn't like it, huh? All right, so Joshua says jerry, she liked it, right? She said it was awful. The proportions were not correct. And did we get charged for that? We did get charged for that, even though she didn't drink any of it. So I'm not going to name the restaurant in New York. You're not going to shame them publicly? No, I will say the lobster tacos were good. I'm sorry. The lobster roll was good. Okay, so that could be anywhere in New York. Was there a cronut there as well on the main? No, that'll be a slight hint. Okay, slight hint. Yeah. So you narrowed it down to 3000 places. It's just a west village. Okay. All right, so that narrows it down. Okay, so syntax. Did you got anything else? No. So you didn't want to weigh in on it. I understand. I respect that. No, because to be honest, not only do I not want to weigh in just because I'm trying not to do that. Oh, really? You're turning over a new leaf? No, just for things that I feel really passionately about. I will, but I don't feel super passionately about this. I'm being torn every which way by this one. Well, that's what my deal is. I can't really speak to it because sometimes it seems like a regressive tax. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it seems like it might work, sometimes it seemed like it might not. Right. So I think that's where I lie is ambivalent and confused. Yeah. I'm interested to see how this comes out with Berkeley, with Mexico, the Navajo Nation, they instituted a 2% junk food tax and then simultaneously repealed a 5% tax on fresh fruit and vegetables in their grocery stores. Oh, really? Yeah. So there's a lot of natural experiments going on right now that I'm very interested to see what the outcomes are. People are going to be studying the heck out of those places. Well, there's a lot of natural experiments going on in my house, too, buddy. So if you want to know more about this kind of stuff, go listen to our fat tax episode. We did one on high fructose corn syrup. There's a great article about syntaxes that we use called The Wages of Syntaxes. It was in the Atlantic by a guy named Van Newkirk. To go read that too. Brush up on the syntax tip. And since I said brush up, it's time for Listener Ma'am. I'm going to call this Josh's choice every once in a while. All right. Every once in a while, Josh will send the email and saying, hey, I know this is your bag, but would you mind reading this one? That is exactly what I wrote. Yeah. So this is from Ada, and I don't remember where Ada is from, but Ada is in high school. Oh. From Canada. Okay. So that immediately means that Ada is probably smarter than we are. Well, I mean, the course she took in high school is pretty impressive. It is. I didn't run into those until well into college. All right. Hey, guys, I'm a 17 year old from Canada, and somebody caught my attention to your polar bears episode when Josh was talking about hunting, he said that people will say, well, the food you're eating came from the store that was killed unethically. It's a counter argument, and Josh found it kind of fallacious, but didn't know how to describe it. Luckily. I'm taking the English class. And we just finished a unit on fallacies. And I can confirm it is fallacious. So it would be qualified as a straw man argument. Because the counter argument isn't really arguing against your point that hunting is wrong. But it's arguing a slightly different and weaker point that food bought in grocery stores could be unethically killed. Which takes your attention away from the point that you're arguing. Nice. It could also be an ad hominin, to quote. Sure. Is that right? If my Latin is not as rusty as I thought. Q-U-O-Q-U-E-Q Egg. I didn't take platinum. I didn't either. Or utu. Youtoo not the band. Right. If you say that hunting is an ethical killing, and then the person is saying, well, you participate in the unethical killing of animals by grocery shopping. Another example of this kind of argument would be one person telling another that they shouldn't smoke. But the person says, well, you smoke. Just because the other person doesn't practice what they preach, it doesn't change the fact that it is wrong. Good stuff. The reason that you might not have been able to identify this is because policies like this are used so much in media today, and they're not accepted widely as fair arguments because they're really not. Hope this helped. Yes. Yes, it did. Yeah, you were delighted. Keep calling out these hilarious arguments. And that is from Ada. Thank you, Ada. That was desperavo. Although I have to say, we did get some good fallacious arguments in on the other side. They had nothing to do with what I was saying necessarily, but they did explain hunting a little more, which I thought was pretty great, including one that you read, but we've gotten some other ones since then as well. There I was like, wow, I want to go hunting and slap my own face. It was funny. I was at the park yesterday with my daughter, and there were these really cool kids, his brother and sister, that were probably ten and eight ish, and they were kind of hanging out, and they had a dog that Ruby was playing with, and they were just being nice. I was talking to them. And then this other kid came up later and they were talking to these kids, and they're talking about sports. This kid was saying he played baseball. The cool kid, right? I'm not saying that it wasn't cool. And the other kids said, I don't do any sports except for hunting and fishing. And the other kid looked at him like he was from Mars. You could just see the difference in their two upbringings. And this kid was just like, what? He's like, what do you hunt for? The kid is like, deer. And he's like, you shoot deer. And he was still young enough in that environment that his family is raising them in, where he was just like, Why would you shoot a deer? Right? They're awesome. And this kid's like, yeah, man, that's pretty cool. It was an interesting interaction to watch as an adult. I would have liked to have seen that. Yeah, because when you have that conversation as an adult, it doesn't usually go that way. Interesting. Well, I've been listening in on kids for sure. Just don't do it in a creepy way. They say everything you needed to know, you learned in kindergarten. Yeah, I believe it. Ada, thank you again for that. That was a great email. Thank you to Chuck for the additional anecdote. Sure. Beautiful. If you want to send in an anecdote or explain something that we put a call out for whatever you can tweet to us at Josh Clark and SYSK podcast, two different ones. You can hang out with Charles W, Chuck Bryant on facebook or you can go to facebook. Comstepyou know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseepworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com." | ||
What's the misery index? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-misery-index | Economists love their data because somewhere in the numbers lies the answer to the ills of the country. They also love to frame data in a way people can relate to. Such is the case with the famous "misery index." | Economists love their data because somewhere in the numbers lies the answer to the ills of the country. They also love to frame data in a way people can relate to. Such is the case with the famous "misery index." | Thu, 23 Jun 2016 15:04:22 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=15, tm_min=4, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=175, tm_isdst=0) | 42686665 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it, because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com.com. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from Housetepworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. The W stands for wayne to Wayne Coin. Heck at you every time. I know. It's funny to be 45 years old and named after Wayne Coin. He's, like, 48, right? No, he is in his 50s, but it would be weird. I would have been named after a very kindergarten age Wayne Coin. All right, maybe your parents were friends with his parents, and they really thought a lot about him. He's a real achiever. Wayne queen going places. Okay. That's a weird sidetrack. It was already out of the gate, man. How are you feeling? I'm good. Got a lot on your plate. Got a lot going on. Oh, you know what today is? What? Dude, today is the day that I leave this office and I go to a shop in Edmonton Park and pick up four brand new last Chance garage hats. Oh, wow. It's a big day. Very big day. Big day. So I have a couple of people I'd like to thank. It's a bigger deal than it should be for a grown man and a hat, but we all understand. First of all, Katie, my custom patch maker, this is really where it all came together. The patch isn't right. The hat is not right. Katie killed it. It looks identical, and you can find her work@tulipcake.com tulipk. And I said, people might ask you to make them Last Chance garage patches. Did you ever destroy the mold? And I said, it's on you. It's up to you legally. I'm just saying you might get requests. You should have been like Ivan the terrible who blinded his architects after they built his house. I don't care. I'd love to see these things around. And Lamood big hats. Lamood for big heads. Because part of the problem was finding big and tall hats. Yes, man. The problem I have with hats these days, I don't look like I have a huge head, but they just fit so snugly, and they don't go far down enough on my head. So I finally looked up oversized hats and found lemon hats and dude, they're exactly like the old hat. Nice. Except it doesn't stink. Yeah, these are great. I got four brands. It's an improvement, for sure. So are you going to put one in, like, the seed vault in Norway? Probably one there. There will be one in the nuclear suitcase, and I'll wear the other two at the same time. At the same time back. Like Sherlock Holmes. That's right. Anyway, I'm super excited, so it's pretty cool. Thank you to Katie and Lemode Hats for allowing me to spend too much money getting four hats remade. And speaking of what we're thanking people, we owe a long overdue thank you to a guy who made us a really cool sign. Oh, you mean the sign this guy made for us, like seven years ago? Yeah. His name is Matt Street. He's at Fatbison.com and he made a really cool woodcarved sign that it was in our TV show. It was the production company got clearance rights for it and all this stuff. And we love the sign, but we just forgot to ever thank Matt. So, Matt, thank you so much for the sign. We love it. We have it hanging here in the studio. It is a work of art and we appreciate it. We're sorry for the oversight. Yeah. Okay. Is that all the thank yous. Let's talk about the misery index, huh? Yeah. What a great transition. Had you heard of it before you came across this article? Yeah, I didn't know a lot about it, though. Apparently it's going a little bit out of fashion lately, from what I understand. Yeah, I think so, because let's get into it. Okay. It turns out economics as a whole is in danger of going out of fashion. I've read this really interesting article on Aon, which is maybe the greatest website on the planet, Aeon. It might be co it's British, about a lot of websites. I think I say it about a on a lot. Okay. And it just seems like I'm talking about different ones. But there's this article by Alan J. Levinovitz. It's called the new astrology. And he basically makes a parallel between economics and economists and economic theory when you take economics and try to apply it to future forecasting. Right. And the BCE, Chinese astrologers that basically directed the way that the economy or the government was going to move based on the movements of the stars. So what are they saying? You might as well just do that. He draws some pretty interesting parallels between the two, that economics in and of itself is not necessarily flawed, but when it's used to forecast the future, then it becomes inherently flawed. Yeah, this article really kind of yeah, a little bit, to an extent. I mean, the Misery Index is a legitimate economic tool, and it's hit or miss in a lot of ways. Yeah. I think one thing that hit home to me with researching this is it just seems impossible to say that there's one correct way of doing things right or that is absolute. And you're like, if you do things this way, then there will be nothing but growth in jobs and the GDP. Sure. And GNP. And it just doesn't seem to work that way. Right. I think the problem is that if you listen to economists, they like to act like they do have a handle on that kind of thing. But if you really look into economics, it's very politicized. There's liberal economics and there's conservative economics. And the fact that each one saying it's right kind of makes you think that maybe no one is. But the misery index actually started out from a guy who was pretty good at walking the line between conservative and liberal economics. A guy what was his name? Oaken. Yes, Arthur Oakman. And he worked on Kennedy's staff, his Council of Economic Advisers. John F. Kennedy, that is. And I get the feeling one of the main influences in talking Kennedy, who initially did not necessarily agree, but talking Kennedy into kind of trying to enact both conservative and liberal economic policies simultaneously. Right. The US. Was in a recession when Kennedy took office in 1961, and they talked him into not only increasing government spending, like welfare programs, they raised the minimum wage and some other stuff like that, but they also cut taxes, which you do one or the other. You cut taxes and hope everything goes for the best because businesses will start investing in spending or you start investing in welfare programs to help your Ailing lower and middle classes. Right. You don't do both, and Kennedy did both. And it was successful. Yeah. Well, at first he said, I don't know about this. I don't know about this, arthur, mike Kennedy sounds like a robot. Mike Kennedy did too, actually. Yours is fine, but Arthur mr. Oakun Oakin. Oakun, I think. Oakin. Oakin. It's a weird name. O-K-U-N. He talked him into it and said, trust me. And things worked out in that case. Yeah, well, and a lot of guys, including Oakin's names were made by this advice that panned out like, the US. Entered a boom and Oakin ended up as being the head of the Council of Economic Advisers for Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson. Right. Yeah. And one thing that economists economists love to do is they love to forecast and all that stuff. But it's all about data. True. Man. They love to pour over data, like stuff that makes the average person their mind bleed from boredom. They just find it fascinating. That's what they do on Friday nights. Friday nights they pour over data, historical data, trying to find, you know, it's like the big puzzle and they're all trying to solve it. Right. So they pour over this data oakland did, and he said, you know what? I noticed something here. Between 1948, when we started recording some decent unemployment rates, right. Which I didn't know. I didn't know we started at 1948. Yeah. It seems like it would have gone back before then, but between 1948 and 1960, he said, you know what I've noticed that the gross national product rises 3% for every percentage point that unemployment falls, with the caveat that unemployment has to be between three and 7.5%. Right. Which is a pretty bold statement to say, I've noticed this is a definite trend. It is. And it came to be called Oakland's Law because it was verified. Other people poured over the data. Like this guy's, right? Man, he just keeps coming up with hits, doesn't he? And the reason you would want to know some arcane piece of data like that is that if you know that that's the case, then you can say, well, if we attack unemployment, can get it down a couple of points, we can raise GDP or GMP by 3% every time we drop it. So when we need to bulk GMP up, we just attack unemployment. Right? Right. Easy peasy. Yeah. And everyone said, thank you, Art. Yeah, things worked out pretty well for a while, but then the 1970s came along. And we're going to talk a little bit about Stagflation now, but if you haven't heard it, we have a pretty good episode. What's it going, I think so called what is Stagflation? From February 24, 2011. Yes. I think as far as our economics episodes, it was not bad. Okay. I went back and listened to a lot of it okay, good. Before I got bored. So it checks out. Yeah, the first three minutes were great, but yeah, go back and listen to that. But like he said, he served as chairman of the CEO for Johnson. And then in 1973, a very unfortunate thing happened that kind of ended up rocking the world and the United States in particular, with our economy. So we're going to take a break and we're going to talk when we get back about the Middle East. Okay, friends? So imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill, and it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have afflac, you can worry less, knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Aflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event, things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let afflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy. Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's Lsuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, what happened in 1973? I'm two years old. I am negative three. Okay. The Arab oil embargo happened, right? That's right. So at the time, until very recently, the US. Was super dependent on foreign oil like other countries. We wouldn't even sit down at the table with we were getting oil from. Right? Yeah, we're doing better now with our dependency. But back then, very bad. Very. And it was a source of anxiety for a lot of people, and that anxiety actually panned out. So in 1073, Egypt and Syria and a few other Arab nations invaded the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula to attempt to take back land from the state of Israel, right? That's right. The US. Was found to be supplying arms to Israel. So as far as the Arab states were concerned, the US. Had cast a lot on Israel's side, and they were fairly peeved about that. So they literally shut off the tap of oil flowing to the United States and other countries that were found considered to be on the side of Israel in this war. Huge deal. It was an enormous deal, this foreign dependency, and the precarious situation that it placed the united States and came to pass, and the price of oil rose 37%. The long lines at the gas station were never seen before or since, even after the financial crisis of 2008. It was just insane. There was gas rationing in the United States in because of the oil embargo, and after a while, the taps were turned back on. But that shock to the system screwed the economy up for a decade. Yes. Inflation went out of control, and another unfortunate thing happened along the same timeline. Unemployment started to creep up. And these two things happening at the same time is devastating. Yeah. And up to this point. So, first of all, the US. Had never had a shock to the system like that. That was one thing. Yes. It wasn't a gradual thing. No. It was like Uber. Yes. But the other thing is, when you have something that has never happened before, you can look at it and say, wow, what happened? And new things that have never happened before come out of that. And one of the things was inflation and unemployment going up, because up to this point, economists just assume that the two were mutually exclusive. If inflation was up, prices were high. That meant that companies could go out and hire more people. So unemployment rates would be low. Yeah. It kind of made sense. Well, not after the oil embargo. The shock to the system led to, like you said, high unemployment rates and high inflation. And it was a miserable time. Yeah. And that was called stagflation. It also led to skateboarding, as we all know. Oh, yeah. Because of the pools. Right. Yeah, they could well, actually, that was the drought. But I think the drought was also tied into the economics. Sure. But they couldn't fill up swimming pools, so they started skating in swimming pools. Well, yeah. If you have a drought, then you lose your crops. And if you lose your crops, you lose money. A significant sector of money. Exactly. So, good news. We have half pipes now and quarter pipes and Powell parallel. They're still around, right? I think so. Of course, bad news is, like you said, it had a devastating effect for many years on the United States. Right. So Oakin starts to look around. He said, you know what? Things are pretty bad here. One might even say miserable. I haven't gotten any claim for a while. Yeah. Nothing's been named after me in a while. All right. So let me create this new method for looking at the economy. And it turns out to not be like a look over a period of time or anything, but just sort of like a Polaroid of that day. Not just that day for the country as a whole or for the Fed or anything like that. But what he did that was different was he looked into what it was like that day or that year for the average American in their daily life. Right. And he called it the misery index. Yeah. And it was very rudimentary at the time. It was just a simple calculation of the yearly rate of inflation plus the unemployment rate. Yeah. So if you have, like, 5% inflation and 2% unemployment, you have a 7% misery index. It's as simple as that. I don't know why it got so much, why it was hailed as a big deal. Because I think Oakin had a knack for noticing things that seemed obvious in retrospect. Right. But at the time, no one had ever noticed before. Okay, I'll buy it. Thank you. Why not? All right. So now he has this index, and not only can he look at a snapshot of that day, he can go back because he was a data walk. He could look at data throughout history. Well, at least yeah. When we started recording unemployment, like we said, which must have been frustrating for them, because our inflation rates data goes back to 1914. But that's only part of the equation. Well, it must have been like, oh, man. Sure. And to be able to look at the Great Depression, you could have learned a lot. Sure. So he went and he looked back and he says, here is what we've noticed. And this is so obvious to me that presidents and political parties are brought in and out of office largely depending on how the economy is doing. Yeah. But they kind of proved it. But not even just how the economy is doing. He was saying, like the misery index you can use to predict whether the presidency is going to change hands politically. Yeah. So 1956 misery index is 6.53, which is great. That's doing Ike. Yeah. Very low. Mr. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower. And he got reelected because things were pretty good. Right. As far as the misery index goes yeah. Everybody was pretty happy, even though they didn't really know what the misery index was because it wasn't invented yet. Right. They just had a general sense. Well, yeah. They didn't call it that at the time. No, they're just like, seems fine to me. You're miserable. We like. I no, I'm not miserable. Are you? So in 1968, Johnson came to the end of his term, and the misery index was up to 8.3. And then he had his Democratic successor, Hubert Humphrey, in line, and because the thing had crept up people a little more miserable, and they said, no, get out of here, I want Mr. Nixon in office. Right. I'm not sure about this. So I don't understand why Johnson was replaced by Humphrey, by the Democrats in this article. It seems to be because of this misery index that it would have predicted that. But he was the incumbent president. He would have I should know this. Yeah. He was a one term, or technically one in a third or one and a quarter, because he took over after Kennedy's assassination. But if his term was up in 68, then he would have won the 64 election. So he technically, I think, would have been able to have been president again. I'm not sure. We could have found this out, too. Sure. But I'll bet there's somebody out there who can explain it to us. And so email us, will you? At any rate, Nixon gets elected. And the misery index shot up to eleven point 67 during the first term, but then started to decline enough that he did get reelected. But then in 1974, with Watergate, the misery index left all the way up to 17.1. That's not good. No, that was the all time high at the time, from what I understand. I think so. And that happened around 1974, which meant that when Watergate broke. Some people who really subscribed to the misery index say Watergate might not have been quite as big a deal if the misery index had been low at the time. Right. He might have been able to squeak by without resigning or being forced out of office. I think everyone has more leeway if things are great, sure. But his currency had been spent. Man. I watched all the President's men a few weeks ago again. You ever seen that? No. Great movie. Yeah. I've always meant to. You really good. And just sort of like they don't make a lot of movies like that anymore. Spotlight reminded me of all the residents. Sure. I haven't seen that one yet, either. It's good. It's just I call it Movies for adults. There's no chase scenes or anything remarkable. It's just good dramatic movie making. Good stuff. Anyway, what's wrong with chase scenes? What's wrong with chasing? No, there's nothing inherently wrong with the chasing, but I know what you mean. Just for the sake of a chase scene, which we see a lot of these days, you know what I mean? Like, Mark Ruffalo is chasing a priest in a car and Spotlight yeah. Where were we? Okay, we're with Nixon. Well, not with Nixon. You know what I mean? Ford comes in office for a short time, and he actually managed to give the misery index sure. Down. Well, I think just the fact that Nixon was out, I think that probably helped inspire consumer confidence and the like. So it cracked back down to twelve point 66, but not enough to keep the Democrats and Jimmy Carter from coming into office. And Carter actually cited the misery index. Yeah, it was relatively new at the time. Yeah, he talked too much about it, but it was a g, whiz thing that you could really just point to, like this, plus this. This is the misery index. Can you hear me? Yeah, that was his famous quote, can you hear me? It came back to haunt him, though, to say the least, because he talked a lot about the misery index. And then in his term, it reached an all time high of 21.98%. Yeah. Which, man, I really think that shocked to the system under the oil embargo and plenty of other stuff. This stuff gets laid at Carter's feet, I think, unfairly in a lot of respects. Well, I would love for someone to really know their stuff, to explain to me exactly how much a president's influence has on the economy and how long it takes for that to bear fruit. Yeah, I would love to know that, too. I think, though, the guy who came after Carter, Reagan, is a pretty sterling, unassailable example of an impact a president can have on the economy. Whether you agree with his politics or his economic policies or not, he most decidedly had an effect on the economy. Yeah, I just remember hearing one time, I need to look this up, but somebody told me once that the economic impact of a presidential a four year term is felt the most, like eight years later or something. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Economies don't move on a dime. Yeah, I don't know if that's lumbering things that aren't fully understood by anybody. Yeah, it's interesting to me now more than ever before, though, because remember, economics used to just bore me to I know. I was really surprised when you suggested this one. It's slightly more interesting to me what changed. Just wondering, things like that and during an election season, like, are the decisions we make now going to affect us in one year, two years? Eight years? Well, if there's any economists who are still listening after that initial remark about the new astrology, we'd love to get a primer on how long it takes for a president to impact an economy, if they do at all. And I'm sure it's a range. It's not like starting at eight years. And really, honestly, was Carter that bad or was he a victim of crossstars? Yeah, I mean, you can make a case where a lot of ills of presidency is not being directly at their feet. But you remember that Simpsons where they unveiled a statue of Jimmy Carter in Springfield, and on the pedestal it says, Malays forever. And somebody goes, Jimmy Carter, he's history's greatest monster. Poor Carter. So like we said, it came back to haunt Carter because he talked a lot about the index. It rose a lot. Then Reagan came in and was like, well, let's talk about that misery index that you like to talk about so much. It's at an all time high. Reagan got in there, knocked it down to 9.55 by the end of his term, enough to get Bush senior in. It inched up some that Clinton was able to it didn't go up that much, though. And I read an interesting article today on whether or not Ross Perot really got Clinton elected, because that's sort of the popular thought. He was a spoiler. Yeah, I could see that. But he was definitely more in line with bush senior's policies than Clinton? Well, at the time, yes, you would think. But I read one article that said that it was kind of a myth that basically Clinton won by 6 million votes and it would have taken 75% of parrot supporters to have been aligned with Bush. And supposedly exit polls showed it more like 38% to 40%. And so they're saying it's sort of a myth that Perot swung the election to Clinton. I see. But, I mean, that was one person's opinion, so who knows? I've been reading a lot about, you know, that suspicion you can't quite kick, that there's really no difference between Republicans and Democrats these days, that they're really just kind of all in the same little club. I think people feel that way sometimes. I've been reading a lot about that, and apparently it's all based on neoliberalism. That's like the key. And there's a lot of if you look into neoliberalism and the policies of neoliberalism, you realize we're like, living in the thick of it, but everyone's kind of blind to the idea that it's just a single thing that basically everybody in power subscribes to and that it has a trickle down effect of screwing over everybody below the top. But just the name itself seems totally fine, but it's interesting. Yeah, I researched that a little bit lately, too. Yes, there's been some good articles. We totally should. Let's do it, Chuck. Agreed, man. We're going to get some emails for that one from Billionaires. Yeah. So let's just finish out this quick little recap. Clinton brought it down to 7.35. Things were great. Bush Jr. Gets elected despite the fact that Clinton had a low index. Well, it depends on how you look at the 2000 election. We should do one on that one, too. But that's considered one of those rare instances where the misery index didn't indicate where it was going to go. But you could also say it might have had things gone slightly differently in the Supreme Court. George W. Bush, the index rose from 7.35 to 11.4, and then Obama came in and went down to 7.87. But another weird flaw in the system is exposed there because despite the fact that the misery index was lower, things were not good. The stock market had crashed, unemployment was rising at a rapid rate, and they said it basically was another example of, like, look, this misery index isn't all it's cracked up to be, right? So let's work on it. Yeah, I think a lot of people said this is too simplistic, you can't rely on this. We'll talk about some of the additional factors that people have worked into the misery index after this. Okay, friends? So imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You. Get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do? Chuck well, if you have Aflac, you can worry less, knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Afflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare, and more. Yeah, that's affluent in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Aflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical goldmine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US. Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com slash stuff for your first year. LifeLock. Identity theft protection starts here. All right, chuck so the misery index oakin everybody's happy with them. They're like, this is just too simple, especially in what's called the postagflation era, after the oil embargo. Yeah. So some people said, okay, there's certainly there's other things you can add in to give a genuine, true snapshot of what the conditions are, like on the ground, as it were, right? Well, yes, not only what the conditions are, but whether or not performance over a period of time is getting better or getting worse. Yes. And rather than say, oh, under this president, the misery index was this. And it gives you a pretty good idea with this one guy named Robert Barrow. He wrote a 1996 book called Getting It Right markets and Choices in a Free Society. And in it, he takes the misery index, oakland's Misery Index. And he says, we can add some stuff to this to make it an even clearer picture, not just of the conditions on the ground, but you can take it and apply it genuinely to a president's entire term to see just how good their economic policies were or weren't for the health of the economy. Yeah. And he added some other stuff. Yeah. He added four main new measurements, took the inflation rate during the last year of the President's term, compared it to the average inflation rate over the entire course of the subsequent president's term, which is, based on what you were saying, that a four year term. The effects are felt like years down the road. Sure. So I think that's what he was doing there. Right. Yeah, it makes sense. Did the same thing with the rate of unemployment. That was number two. He added in changes for the 30 year government bond yield over presidency. And then finally he said, I need to look at the difference between the long term GDP growth and the real rate of growth. Right. Compare all these things along with the original. This plus this equals this. Right. And with the real growth rate, that's where you take the actual change, either the shrinking or the growth of the economy, the GDP year over year. Right. And he took that for year over the course of a presidency and averaged it out. I guess. That's right. Yeah. And he came up with what's called the Barrow Misery Index. And a lot of people think that that's where the misery index started, when in fact, it was Oakin who came up with it about 20 years before Barrow took it up and improved it. Yeah. So under Barrow's Misery Index clinton and Reagan this Bill Clinton, of course, came out on top. And then a guy named Steve Hanky about ten years later, this was originally in 1996. And then Hanky came along in 2006 and said, you know what? We need to add even more things. And this all just makes sense. If you want a more detailed picture, then add more detail to the data going in. Right. So he said, we need more detail. Why don't we do this? Let's measure inflation and unemployment like we're doing, and then let's now add interest rates and subtract annual percentages from the GDP to get a more accurate picture. Right. And he said, you can use this anywhere. You can use it all over the world. Well, that's what he did. And that's kind of what made his version of it pretty famous. He figured out how to apply it to other countries, even countries that used price controls to keep inflation in check, which means inflation is held back artificially. So Hanky looked into other things, like the exchange rate in the black market and the green country, that kind of thing, and he figured out real inflation rates, and he applied it around the world to find out what country is the most miserable in what country is the least miserable. And what he found in 2014 was that the most miserable country in the world was Venezuela, which had a hanky misery index of 79.4. It's pretty high. Very high. And then Japan had the lowest misery at 5.41. Yeah. The US came in at about 19. Correct. I think. Eleven. Oh, 11th. Yeah. No, eleven was our oh, I'm sorry, 19th. Yes. Ranked 19th with an eleven rating. I didn't hear that. Yeah, because my teeth are still going. You think it would be more pronounced the th if there were 19th. I would have heard. It clears, though. August can't get here soon enough. So there are critics of this one, too, though. There are critics of all these indexes. Yeah. A lot of them say no still to elementary. Yeah. Some people say this is all just tripe. Like you can't sure. You can't use this stuff to make any real predictions. You could use it to look back at the past, but to use it for the future? Probably not. But some people do believe in the idea that if you have enough data and the right kind of data, you can get a clear picture of misery. And again, that's what we're after here. The whole point of the misery index is to figure out how unhappy and just low the average person in a country is feeling at that moment. Yeah. Right. So HuffPo actually came up with a pretty good one. HuffPo boo yay. In 2009, HuffPo came up with what they called the Real Misery Index. Right. And so a lot of people cite the use of what's called you three unemployment statistics, which, when you hear unemployment numbers in the news, that's what you're hearing. That's what the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues as the official unemployment numbers. Right. Yeah. And that's the very first thing that people will say if they want to poo poo the unemployment numbers. These are just false numbers. Yeah. If someone says, hey, man, look how great ex president is doing. Look at the unemployment rate. Right. They say they're just using the U three. They need to use the U six. Wake up, pal. Open your eyes. Which is valid. Yeah. So the BLS has six measurements of unemployment, u one through U six. And U six is the broadest. It includes people who are so discouraged with the state of the job market that they've given up looking for work and they just have given themselves over entirely to Judge Alex. Sure. Right. And then it also includes people who are working part time, but wish they could work full time, but there's no full time work available. Yeah. Like I'm a graphic designer, but I work at Starbucks. So that's the U six measurement. And that's considered the broadest snapshot of unemployment. The real vision of unemployment. Yeah. Like you said, mostly they use you three, I guess because it's in the middle. I mean, you one. They would never use you two. Everybody used to like, but not anymore. I still like you, too. Yeah. Not like I used to. I'm not poopooing anything. But I did see that concert they did on the HBO, and I have to hand it to them. My big problem with you, too, for years was that they just got so out of control with those live shows like these giant spider spaceships and things. I was always of the belief that, man, you need to go back to basics and just get up on stage and play again. And that's what they did with this new tour. I mean, there was a cool visual element, but the stage set up in the way they did it was very much back to basics in it. That's cool. I think they really connected with fans again. Yeah, that's got to help. Yeah. Because you can only when the interactions between you and the fans, rather than the fans and giant spiders yeah. You can only go so far in that direction. I think they realize that. Sure. Anyway, where'd you go? You, too. I'll defend those guys, even though I know everyone in the world generally wants to punch pono in the face. I'm not one of them. I kind of feel weird. I like them. Yeah. I'm on record. Sure. Bono, if you're listening well, if your Jared indicator is any predictor, bono is going to come out to be canonized one day. If what? Oh, yeah. You're like, there's something about Jared. I don't like him. And we found out about Jared. Right. And then now you're saying Bono like Bono good guy. Something like they're going to find a cure for cancer in a saliva or something. You never know. So did we even mention what the HuffPo what kind of outrageous numbers they came up with? No, we didn't mention everything they use. We were talking about the US six measurement. HuffPo used that measurement, the most extreme one of unemployment numbers. They also used other things like the inflation rate of food and drink and fuel and health care, because the misery index just uses the consumer price index, which is inflation as a whole. HuffPo used the inflation of some really essential things that people can't do without, and where you're going to immediately feel the pinch when prices go up with those two factors. Right. They also included the rate of credit card delinquency, the cost of housing, how many people are using food stamps. That seems like a smart move. Totally home equity loan deficiencies, I guess. People who are laid on their payments. And then they took the average of the seven numbers and added it to the usage unemployment numbers, which here, you can step back and say, wait a minute, how are you adding this together? How does this make any sense? You can't just keep adding things, right? And really, you can take that all the way back to the initial misery index. Like what? You're just adding unemployment percentage and inflation, and all of a sudden you have a magic number that doesn't make any sense? This HuffPo metric really points out the inherent flaw in it, I think. Yeah, because in 2008, the Oakland Misery Index was 81. But HuffPos Real Misery Index, aka you think things are bad here's how bad they really are. Indexed was 29.9 compared to the 8.1. Right. And some people are like, oh, well, that just shows how off the oakin Misery Index is. Yeah, who knows? I know they quit doing the Real Misery Index at Hoppo, like, five years ago. I think it was am I going to call it a stunt? It was a bit of a stunt, maybe, but I'm sure, really what happened was the writer who was contributing it for free, like, left for a paying job. That's probably what happened as a HuffPo. Real misery in day. Yeah, you're probably right. I was reading this guy. Tim McMahon. He has a site or he writes for a site, I'm not sure if it's his or not, called InflationData.com jim McMahon. Tim his brother got you. Not the Super Bowl shuffle. No, his brother. So he mentioned this 2001 paper that concluded that unemployment causes 1.7 times more misery than inflation. And so if you're doing any kind of misery index that uses those two, you need to first multiply the unemployment number by 1.7 before adding it to the inflation number to properly wait it. How did they come up with that? So I looked at the paper, and it's actually pretty clever. There's like, 23 years of this survey of life satisfaction and happiness that these researchers looked at back in 2001, and they found that economically based or just like, how happy are you now? Here's the thing. It was how happy are you? It was like a single question, like, would you say, based on how you're feeling right now, that you are fairly satisfied, unsatisfied very satisfied with your life right now? Right. And then they took that measurement for the country as a whole, and you can do this for any country that participated in the survey. And then they looked at inflation and then they looked at unemployment for those years, and they could figure out the variation between the interplay between unemployment and inflation and satisfaction, and they found that unemployment was 1.7 times more miserable than inflation in regards to life satisfaction as a survey. That's pretty clever. Yes, it's a lot of hocus pocus, but I thought it was pretty clever how they did it. That makes sense to me because to be without work, like, if you have a job and things. Inflation is happening. You still have your job. Sure. And you're like, man, this sucks to pay this much more. But you could still conceivably pay for it. Yeah, I'll cut back here or there. If you're unemployed, then there's not a lot of hope, right? That number might be conservative. Yes, I agree with you. Very interesting stuff, sir. So that's it, man. That's the misery index. You got anything else? No, but I'm looking forward to hearing from economists that me, too. Like in an unbiased way. Try to explain things. Me, too. If you send just these crazy political emails, then they're going to fall on deaf ears because everyone yells at each other that they're right. I just want to hear some real numbers. Yes, do it. Chuck. If you want to know more about the misery index, you can type those words in the search bar housetoforce.com. And since I said search bar, just plain old search bar. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this follow up on vocal fry. Once again, regarding vocal fry, guys, you guys were offended because someone said local fry was repulsive. But there is another side to this dudes. I suffer from a neurological disorder known as misophonia, which we totally should do a show on this. I agree. It's a condition where a person has extreme emotional response, commonly occurring sounds. And I remember hearing a lot of times it's like people chewing noises or gum or whatever he said. In my case, my trigger noise is the high pitched f sound. When some people speak, it feels like my brain is cringing, as if an allergic reaction is taking place. I cannot stress enough this is not a mere noise. It's a legitimate mental disorder that can vary greatly in severity. I don't visibly freak out when I hear my trigger noise, but it really kills me inside. It gives me an instant headache and it's why which is why I will get away from the noise if at all possible. I believe in avoiding complaining in life and playing the victim. But this disorder really has made my life like a subtle hell. It's been especially toxic to my family relationships and my ability to learn in school. I felt compelled to email you guys because you definitely appreciate interesting medical conditions. I think it would be a great topic for a show someday. There's a documentary about it called Quiet please. If you watch the trailer, you might be inspired to watch it to learn what the condition is. Oh, yeah. Huge. Thanks to everyone. The stuff you should know. You make the mundane parts of my life interesting and educational. I'm going to anonymize this from Texas because I didn't hear back from him. Tax. Yeah. Text PS was in disbelief when Chuck said he had not seen Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore. That's a good PS. Believe it. It's a good postscript and post, not PSS. I think it's post postscript. Yeah, but people often put PSS. It doesn't mean anything. Do you think Stuff You Should Know could ever become a television show? No. Text? Never. We actually did that. We found out the hard way that it came. Yeah, we did a TV show on the Science Channel and ran for one full season that played out over the course of several days. Which will always have chuck. We'll always have that season of television. We did one. It lasted nine or ten days. Yeah. Let's just show them all at once. Yes. Out of order. But you never know. We might get another shot at Stardom, but we're not looking to it. I like it in this room where no one's looking at it. Yeah, jerry doesn't look at it. No, they're looking away and discussing the track. Good idea about the mesophonia. I think we mentioned that before. I really like that vocal Fry episode, and that was the one thing that I wish we would have mentioned because it's a legitimate thing that it does affect some people. But yeah, look for a mesophonia episode at some point in the future. Texts if you want to get in touch with us, we're all over social media. We're on Twitter and Instagram at Syskpodcast. We're on Facebook. Comstudiesnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athouseafworks.com and you can join us at our very own home on the Web stuffyshonow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. 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87103566-3b0e-11eb-9699-8f0f86981dbc | 2021 Halloween Spooktacular! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/2021-halloween-spooktacular | Dim the lights and join Josh and Chuck for their annual spooky Halloween story reading. | Dim the lights and join Josh and Chuck for their annual spooky Halloween story reading. | Thu, 28 Oct 2021 13:59:47 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=59, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=301, tm_isdst=0) | 54457577 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the Spooktacular, the Spookiest spectacular of the spooktaculars of all time. Spectacular. This is stuff you should know. The Spooktacular, as tradition, dictates ad in our contract. It is. We fight for it. Everyone. Do not put ads and ruin our bad readings of Halloween stories, which we try very hard to select from the increasingly small pantheon of public domain horror short fiction. I found a few this year, so I got a couple in my hip pocket. Oh, good. I'm glad. And I got to say, nice work. I think both of these that we dug up are really good stories. Agreed. Mr. James and HL. Menken. Right? I thought it was Mr. James. That's what he likes. Call me Mr. James. But you're a doctor, so what? Yeah. The one I picked this year is Lost Hearts by Mr. James, and I'm pretty psyched about this one because it is good to greed. It's a corker. You can figure it out, but it's entertaining. How about that? It's entertaining. It's fun. There are a couple of Spooky dates in this. Did you notice that? We'll talk about that? I didn't know. I can't wait to hear it. And I don't think we need a content warning. It's Spooky. But with kids, there's always a chance if you have kids, they may not want to listen. It's not over the top because it was written in the 19th century. Right? Yeah. And being written in the 19th century, we should probably point out there's a couple of touchy, semi racist terms that will explain yeah. Should we go ahead and say now? Sure, go ahead. Yeah. We did a podcast on the Roma people and took great pains to tell people that using the word gypsy is no longer something you should do or saying chipped off, which is something that I learned while doing that podcast. And they use the word gypsy in here a couple of times. They also use Chinaman in here, but they're actually talking about something specific, so we'll explain later. Okay. Right. And there's a general with this one lady, sort of xenophobic, bent, phobia people from other countries. Yeah, exactly. She's an archetypal, rural, dyed in the wool, salt of the earth woman. So all that is to say, the opinions expressed therein do not represent those of those discussions. Very nice here. With force, with guaranteed void in Tennessee. All right, everyone turned the lights down. I've got my lights dimmed to you. Yeah, let's do that. It's the first time we're not in the same room holding hands. I know. I'm a little scared. I'm a little scared, too. I can't see the paper as well with that light off, so I'm going to turn it back on. Okay. Turn the lights down and pour yourself a Spoofy drink and gather the kids. And here we go for the 2021 Spooktacular. And this is Lost Hearts by Mr. James. I'll start. Okay. Sure. It was as far as I can ascertain in September of the year 1811. Is that a spooky date, Chuck? Well, it's coming. Okay. That a post Shays. I think that's the kind of coach drew up before the door of Aswarbie Hall in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who jumped out as soon as it had stopped looked about him with the keenest curiosity. During the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door, he saw a tall, square, red brick house built in the reign of Anne. A stone pillared porch had been added in the purest classical style of 1790. The windows of the house were many, tall and narrow with small panes and thick white woodwork. A pediment pierced with round window crowned the front. There were wings to the left and the right, connected by curious glazed galleries supported by colonnades with the central block. These wings plainly contained the stables and offices of the house. Each was surrounded by an ornamental cupola with a gilded vein cupola. You know, I always said Kupala and then every single person on the Inspiration Four crew called that thing on the dragon capsule the cupola. So I'm just going with that now. All right. An evening light shown on the building, making the window panes glow like so many fires, so many away from the hall. In front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed with furs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church tower buried in trees on the edge of the park, only its golden weather cock catching. The light was striking six and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was an altogether pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn that was conveyed to the mind of the boy who was standing in the porch waiting for the door to open to him. The postshaves had brought him from Warwickshire, where six months before he had been left in orphan. Now, owing to the generous offer of his elderly cousin, Mr. Abney, he had come to live at Asworthy. The offer was unexpected because all who knew anything of Mr. Abney looked upon him as a somewhat austere recluse into whose steady going household the advent of a small boy would import a new and, it seemed, incongruous element. The truth is that very little was known of Mr. Abney's pursuit. Sir Temper, the professor of Greek at Cambridge, had been heard to say that no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did the owner of Assworthy. Certainly his library contained all the thenavailable books bearing on the Mysteries, the Orphic Poems, the Worship of Mithras and the Neoplatonists. In the marble paved hall stood a fine figure of Mithras slaying a bowl which had been imported from the Levant at great expense by the owner. He had contributed a description of it to the Gentleman's magazine. I think not that kind. Gentleman's Magazine? Right. And he had written a remarkable series of articles in the Critical Museum on the superstitions of the Romans of the Lower Empire. It was published in Hustler Penthouse. Let me tell you about my mitress laying a bowl statue. He was looked upon in fine as a man wrapped up in his books. And it was a matter of great surprise among his neighbors that he should even have heard of his cousin, Stephen Elliott much more that he should have volunteered to make him an inmate of Azwarbi. All right, so this orphan boy showed up at this house to live with his relative, who seems like a decent guy. It's a little dark, yeah. But it was a surprise because he was like wrapped up in his books, a bachelor not really interested in having a kid around. All right. Shall I? Whatever may have been expected by his neighbors, it is certain that Mr. Abney, the tall, the thin, the austere, seemed inclined to give his young cousin a kindly reception. The moment the front door was opened, he darted out of his study, rubbing his hands with delight. How are you, my boy? How are you? How old are you? Said he. That is, you are not too much tired, I hope, by your journey to eat your supper? No, thank you, sir, said Mr. Elliot. I'm pretty well. Oh, that's a good lad, that's a good lad, said Mr. Abney. And how old are you, my boy? It seemed a little odd that he should have asked the question twice in the first two minutes of their acquaintance. I'm twelve years old. Ex birthday, sir, said Stephen. And when is your birthday, my dear boy? 11 September 8th. Spooky date. I think he predicted the whole thing. I got you okay. Mr. James did 11 September. That's very well. Nearly a year. Hint, isn't it? I like haha. I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it's twelve certain? Yes, quite sure, sir. Well, take them to Mrs. Bunch's room, Parks, and let him have his tea supper, whatever it is. Yes answered the state. Mr. Parks, and conducted Steven to the lower regions. Mrs. Bunch was the most comfortable and human person whom Steven had as yet met in aswarbi she made him completely at home. They were great friends in a quarter of an hour, and great friends they remained. Mrs. Bunch had been born in the neighborhood some 55 years before the date of Stephen's arrival, and her residence at the hall was of 20 years standing. Consequently, if anyone knew the ins and outs of the house and the district, mrs. Bunch knew them, and she was by no means disinclined to communicate her information. So we got a nice lady that lives there who knows everything that's going on. Very nice person. Seemingly nice, aside from the Xenophobia, very nice, as we will see. Certainly there were plenty of things about the hall and the hall gardens, which Stephen, who was of an adventurous and inquiring turn was anxious to have explained to him, who built the temple at the end of the Laura Walk, who was the old man whose picture hung on the staircase, sitting at a table with a skull under his hand. These and many similar points were cleared up by the resources of Mrs. Bunch's powerful intellect. There were others, however, of which the explanations furnished were less satisfactory. 1 November evening, stephen was sitting by the fire in the housekeeper's room, reflecting on his surroundings. It's Mr harvey, a good man. And will he go to heaven? He suddenly asked with a peculiar confidence with which children possess and the ability of their elders to settle these questions, the decision of which is believed to be reserved for other tribunals. Can't wait to hear this one. I really haven't even worked out how I'm going to do it. Let's try this. Good. Bless the child, said Mrs. Bunch. Mast is as kind a soul as I ever see. Didn't I? She's like my age. She's 55. Yeah, but old timing. 19th century. 55. Way different. Didn't I never tell you? The little boy as he took in out of the street, as you may say this seven years back, and the little girl two years after I first come here. Now, do tell me all about that, Mrs. Bunch. Now, this minute. Easy. Sorry I added that. So this guy took in a couple of other kids, huh? Yeah. All right. Well, said Mrs munch. The little girl I don't seem to recollect so much about. I know. Master brought her back with him from his walk one day and gave orders to Mrs. Ellis, as was housekeeper then, as she should be. Took every care with. And the poor child had no one belonging to her. She told me so her own self. And here she lived with us a matter of three weeks, it might be. And then whether she was some think of a gypsy in her blood or whatnot. But one morning she out of her bed before any of us had opened an eye, and neither track nor yet trace of her have I set eyes on, since. Master was wonderful put about and had all the ponds dragged. But as my belief she was head away by them gypsies, for there was singing around the house for as much as an hour the night she went and parks. He declares he heard them a colon in the woods all that afternoon. Dear, dear. A odd child is that. Odd? I think she's saying odd in the old timey way, with an H. Okay, an odd child she was so silent in a ways and all, but I was wonderful taken up with her. So domesticated she was surprising. And what about the little boy said. Stephen. Oh, that poor boy, sighed Mrs. Bunch. He was a foreigner. Jeopardy, he called himself, and he kind of tweaking his herdy gerty. Roundabout he was tweaking tweaking his hurdy Gerdie. He wasn't twerking. At least no tweaking his rounded about the drive one winter day and Master Adam in that minute and asked all about where he came from, how old he was, how he made his way and where was his relatives and all his kind heart could wish. But it went the same way with him. They're an unruly lot, them foreign nations, I do suppose. And he was off one fine morning just the same as the girl. Why he went and what he done was our question for as much as a year after. But he never took his erdigirdy. And there it lays on the shelf. What is erdigurdy? Herdy Gerdy. It's like a kind of like a musical instrument, I think. Like a squeeze box, maybe. A little boy named Giovanni showed up squeezing his squeeze box on their driveway. And Mr. Abney. It is Avenue, right? I think so. Mr. Abney brought him in the house and was asking him a bunch of questions and then took him under his wing. Yeah, like every kid he finds, he's like how old are you? When's your birthday come inside your mind? No creepy at all. So I think you guys can all see what we're talking about with Mrs. Bunch, right? I think so. The remainder of the evening was spent by Stephen in miscellaneous cross examination of Mrs. Bunch and in efforts to extract a tune from the herdy gertie. That night he had a curious dream. At the end of the passage, at the top of the house in which his bedroom was situated, there was an old disused bathroom. It was kept locked, but the upper half of the door was glazed. And since the muzzling curtains which used to hang there had long been gone, you could look in and see the lead line bath affixed to the wall on the right hand with its head towards the window on the night of which I am speaking, steven Eliot found himself, as he thought, looking through the glazed door. That means there was a window in it. The moon was shining through the window, see? And he was gazing at a figure which lay in the bath. His description of what he saw reminds me of what I once beheld myself in the famous vaults of St. MCann's Church in Dublin, which possesses the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries. A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic of a dusty leaden color enveloped in a shroudlike garment. The thin lips cooked into a faint and dreadful smile. The hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart. As he looked upon it, a distant, almost inaudible moan seemed to issue from its lips and the arms began to stir. The terror of the sight forced Stephen backwards and he awoke to the fact that he was indeed standing on the cold boarded floor of the passage in the full light of the moon. With the courage which I do not think can be common among boys of his age, he went to the door of the bathroom to ascertain if the figure of his dreams were really there. It was not, and he went back to bed. Keep going. Yeah. This is getting creepy. I know. That's what I'm saying. It's a good one. He saw a straight up, scary, decaying ghost in the bathtub. Mrs Bunch was much impressed next morning by his story and went so far as to replace the muzzling curtain over the glazed door of the bathroom, aka the window. Mr Abnee, moreover, to whom he confided his experiences at breakfast, was greatly interested and made notes of the matter in what he called his book. The spring equinox was approaching, as Mr Abney frequently reminded his cousin, adding that this had been always considered by the agent to be a critical time for the young, that Stephen would do well to take care of himself and shut his bedroom window at night, and that the scents are innocent, had some valuable remarks on the subject. Two incidents that occurred about this time made an impression upon Steven's mind. Chuck will share those two incidents with us now. The first was after an unusually uneasy and oppressed night that he had passed, though he could not recall any particular dream that he had had. The following evening, Mrs Bunch was occupying herself and mending his nightgown. Gracious me, Master Steven, she broke forth rather irritably. How do you manage to tear your nightdress all to flinders this way? Look here, sir. What trouble you do give to poor servants that have to darn and mend after you. There was indeed a most destructive and apparently wanton series of slits or scoring in the garment, which would undoubtedly require a skillful needle to make good. They were confined to the left side of his chest, long parallel slits, about six inches in length, some of them not quite piercing the texture of the linen. Stephen could only express his entire ignorance of their origin. He was sure that they were not there the night before. But he said, Mrs Bunch stays just the same as the scratches on the outside of my bedroom door, and I'm sure I've never had anything to do with making them. I think it gets it across. I think I've nailed young Steven. I think you're nailing it. He's moving closer and closer to cockney as we go. That's the one I can do. That's the one anybody who can only do one can do. Mrs Bunch gazed at him open mouth, then snatched up a candle, departed hastily from the room and was heard making her way upstairs. In a few minutes she came down. Well, she said, Master Steven, it's a funny thing to me how their marks and scratches can come there too high up for any cat or dog to have made them, much less a rat for all the world like a Chinaman's fingernails, as my uncle and the tea trade used to tell us of when we were girls together. I wouldn't say nothing to Master, not if I was you, Master Steven, my dear, and just turn the key of your door when you go to your bed. So I should probably say, like I was like, what is this daft old middle aged woman talking about? And it turns out she's referring to apparently there is a trend among the nobility and the cortisans of China at this time in the early 19th century, I think before of wearing their fingernails very long and pointy. Okay. She's saying these scratches looked kind of like claw marks, and she kind of likened it to something that had long and pointy fingernails like that. Okay, not that that excuses everything, but I got you just a little background to it. I think we all learned something here. Mrs. Bunch is not totally out of her mind. All right? So she yells at Steven to go to bed, and he says, I always do, Mrs. Bunch, as soon as I've said my prayers. That's a good child. Always say your prayers and then no one can't hurt you herewith. Mrs. Bunch addressed herself to mending the injured nightgown with intervals of meditation until bedtime. Interesting, this is on a Friday night in March 1812. On the following evening, the usual duet of Stephen and Mrs. Bunch was augmented by the sudden arrival of Mr. Parks, the butler, who as a rule, kept himself rather to himself in the pantry. He did not see that Stephen was there. He was, moreover, flustered and less slow of speech than was his want. Master may get up his own wine if he likes of an evening, was his first remark. Either I do it in the daytime or not at all. Mrs. Bunch, I don't know what it may be very like it's the rats or the wind got into the cellars, but I'm not as young as I was and I can't go through with it as I have done. Well, Mr. Parks, you know it is a surprising place for the rats, is the hall. I'm not denying that, Mrs. Bunch. To be sure, many a time I've heard the tale from the men in the shipyards about the rats that could speak. I never laid no confidence in that before. But tonight, if I demeaned myself to lay my ear to the door, the further bin, I could pretty much have heard what they were saying. Oh, man, you're crushing it. Oh, there, Mr. Parks, I have no patience with your fancies rats talking to the wide cellar at Deed. Well, Mrs. Bunch, I have no wish to argue with you. All I can say is, if you choose to go to the far bin and lay your ear to the door. You may prove my words this minute. What nonsense you do talk, Mr. Parks. Not fit for children to listen to. Why, you'll be frightened. Master Steven there out of his wits. What? Master Steven? Said Parks, awakening to the consciousness of the boy's presence. Master Steven knows well enough that I'm playing a joke with you, Mrs. Bunch. In fact, Steven knew too well to suppose that Mr. Parks had in the first instance intended a joke. He was interested not altogether pleasantly in the situation, but all his questions were unsuccessful in inducing the butler to give any more detailed account of his experiences in the wine cellar. And we have now arrived at March 24, 1812. Spooky? Nope. Okay. It was a day of curious experiences for Stephen. A windy, noisy day which filled the house in the gardens with a restless impression. As Stephen stood by the fence of the grounds and looked out into the park, he felt as if an endless procession of unseen people were sweeping past him on the wind, borne on restlessly and aimlessly vainly striving to stop themselves to catch at something that might arrest their flight and bring them once again into contact with the living world of which they had formed a part. After lunch in that day, Mr abney said you're mr. Abney? I'm Abney. Yeah, you are. Remember you asked him what his age was before? That's right. That's right. We should probably just leave that in there. Steven, my boy, do you think you could manage to come to me tonight? I don't know if this is the same activity, it sounds like Mrs. Bunch is transforming into Mr. Abney. Do you think you could manage to come to me tonight as late as 11:00 in my study? I shall be busy until that time. And I wish to show you something connected with your future life which it is most important that you should know. You are not to mention this matter to Mrs. Bunch nor to anyone else in the house. And you had better go to your room at the usual time. Here was a new excitement added to life. Steven eagerly grasped at the opportunity of sitting up till 11:00. He looked in at the library door on his way upstairs that evening and he saw a brazier. Right. Which he had often noticed in the corner of the room. It's like a little grill. I think so. Moved out before the fire. An old silver gilt cup stood on the table filled with red wine and some written sheets of paper lay near it. Mr. Abney was sprinkling some incense on the brazier I'm pretty sure that's it from a round silver box. As Stephen passed, but did not seem to notice his step. All right, so what's going on here? Is he's doing some write? Some ritual? Looks like he told Stephen Like this is important for him to be a part of, right? Yes. And so now it's the night that he's told Steven to come down to his study at eleven. All right, go ahead. The wind had fallen and there was a still night and a full moon. At about 10:00, Steven was standing at the open window of his bedroom, looking out over the country. Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moonlit woods was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time, strange cries, as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mirror. I think that's a weird way to say meadow. Sure, they might be the notes of owls or water birds, yet they did not quite resemble either sound. Were they not coming near now they sounded from the nearest side of the water and in a few moments they seemed to be floating about among the shrubberies. Then they ceased. But just as Stephen was thinking of shutting the window and resuming his reading of Robinson Crusoe great book, he caught sight of two figures standing on the gravel terrace that ran along the garden side of the hall. The figures of a boy and a girl, as it seemed, they stood side by side looking up at the windows. Something in the form of the girl recalled irresistibly his dream of the figure in the bath. The boy inspired him with more acute fear. Whilst the girl stood still, Halfsmiling with her hands clasped over her heart, the boy, a thin shape with black hair and ragged clothing, raised his arms in the air with an appearance of menace and of unpeasible hunger longing. The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them. As he stood with his arms thus raised, he disclosed a terrifying spectacle on the left side of his chest. There opened a black enging rent. And there fell upon Steven's brain rather than upon his ear the impression of one of the hungry and desolate cries that he had heard resounding over the woods at Azwarbi all that evening. In another moment, this dreadful pair had moved swiftly and noisily over the dry grass, and he saw them no more. Wow. I know this poor Steven, he's like, what the h is going on around here? So this ghost kid, he has, like, no heart, right? He's turned into John Travolta. Oh, boy. All right. This is getting good. Do you want me to pick it up? Yes, please. All right. Inexpressibly. Frightened as he was, he determined to take his candle and go down to Mr Abney's study, for the hour appointed for their meeting was near in hand. The study or library opened out of the front hall on one side, and Stephen, urged on by his terrors, did not take long in getting there. To effect an entrance was not so easy. The door was not locked he felt sure, but the key was on the outside of it. As usual, his repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr. Abney was engaged. He was speaking. What? Why did he try to cry out? And why was the cry choked in his throat? Had he too seen the mysterious children? But now everything was quiet, and the door yielded to Stephen's terrified and frantic, pushing on the table. In Mr. Abney's study, certain papers were found which explained the situation to Stephen Elliot when he was of an age. To understand them. The most important sentences were as follows it was a belief very strongly and generally held by the ancients, of whose wisdom in these matters I've had such experiences as induces me to place confidence in their ascertations, that by enacting certain processes which to us moderns, have something of a barbaric complexion, a very remarkable enlightenment of the spiritual faculties. And man may be attained, that, for example, by absorbing the personalities of a certain number of his fellow creatures, an individual may gain a complete ascendency over those orders of spiritual beings which control the elemental forces of our universe. Wow. What it got like possessing these people? Something like that. Keep reading. Keep reading. It is recorded of Simon Maggots that he was able to fly in the air, to become invisible, or to assume any form he pleased by the agency of the soul of a boy whom, to use the libelous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine recognitions he had murdered. I find it set down, moreover, with considerable detail on the writings of Hermes Trace Majestus, that similar happy results may be produced by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of 21 years. That's why he's got to know the ages. To the testing of the truth of this receipt, I have devoted the greater part of the last 20 years, selecting as the copora Villia of my experiment such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning, a sensible gap in society. The first step I affected by the removal of one Phoebe Stanley, a girl of gypsy extraction, on March 24, 1792. Not creepy. The second, by the removal of a wandering Italian lad named Giovanni Pale on the night of March 2318. Five not spooky. The final victim, to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings, must be my cousin Steve and Elliot. His day must be this March 24, 1812. It's a creepy date. Any of those dates in there creepy? I don't think creepy. The best means of affecting the required absorption is to remove the heart from the living subject, to reduce it to ashes, and to mingle them with about a pint of red wine, preferably port. That's a lot of port, a lot of pork. The remains of the first two subjects, at least, will be well to conceal. A disused bathroom or wine cellar will be found. Convenient for such a purpose. Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts. The man of philosophic temperament, to whom alone the experiment is appropriate, will be little prone to attach importance to the feeble efforts of these beings to wreak their vengeance on him. I contemplate with the liveliest satisfaction, the enlarged and emancipated existence which the experiment, if successful, will confer on me, not only placing me beyond the reach of human justice socalled, but eliminating to a great extent, the prospect of death itself. Wow. So he's basically saying, like, I can't even be haunted and this may make me live forever. Yeah. I'm going to rip the hearts out of two now three little children, and it'll be worth it because I'm going to be immortal and an amazing dude. Wow. All right. I'm going to be like Bradley Cooper and limitless. That's his goal. What? Failing at the box office. So this last paragraph is pretty important. Everybody hang in there with us. And remember, Steven heard a cry in the office and then later found these papers that Chucked his read. Right? Right. Mr. Abney was found in his chair, his head thrown back, his face stamped with an expression of rage, fright and mortal pain. In his left side was a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart. There was no blood on his hands, and a long knife that lay on the table was perfectly clean. A savage wildcat might have inflicted the injuries. The window of the study was open, and it was the opinion of the coroner that Mr. Abney had met his death by the agency of some wild creature. But Stephen Elliott's study of the papers Chuck just quoted led him to a very different conclusion. So little Stephen Avenue, cockney boy at large, owes his took us to the little boy and girl who saved his life. Yeah. They killed him. Murderous ghosts killed a very bad man. I love it. Good stuff. Good voice work. That was great, Chuck. I guess now we should put some ads in here, right? Oh, wait, there's no need for ads because this is our ad free Halloween version. This spooky story brought to you by stamps.com. Well, that was great. So it's time for yours, right? That's right. Oh, boy. Who wrote this? Arthur Macken, I believe. That's right. M-A-C-H-E-N who is a Welsh writer. And I think the deal with the great god pan, which is what we're going to read, is that it was a I think this is the first chapter that originally stood on its own as a short story published in a literary journal or something. Or a magazine. The gentleman's magazine. That's right. And then he later, I guess, was like, hey, this is not too bad, and expanded into a novella length thing. But yeah, we're going to stick to the first chapter. It's one of those ones that if you ask any horror writer what the greatest horror story of all time is probably the majority of them will say, the great god Pan. Oh, really? Interesting. All right. So, nice find, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Here we go, then. I'm glad you came, Clark. Very glad indeed. I was not sure you could spare the time. Wait a minute. That's Abney and the old lady. Yeah, that was a lot. All right, I'm going to have to work. Shape this as we go, folks. Okay, I know you're locked in the punch. That's it. All right. So he's glad Clark came. Yeah. Clark with an e? Yes. I was able to make arrangements for a few days. Things are not very lively just now. But you have no misgivings, Raymond. Is it absolutely safe? The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Doctor Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western mountain line but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows and all the air was quiet. A sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above and with it, at intervals the soft, murmuring call of the wild doves below. In the long, lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills. And as the sun hovered and vanished into the west a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend. Safe, of course. It is. In itself, the operation is a perfectly simple one. Any surgeon could do it. And there is no danger at any other stage? None. Absolutely no physical damage whatsoever? I give you my word. You are always Timid Clark. Always with an e. But you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last 20 years. I have heard myself called quack in charlatan and imposter. But all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal. And since then, every day has been in preparation for what we shall do tonight. I should like to believe it at all true. Clark knit his brows and looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not a Fantasmagoria? A splendid vision, certainly, but a mere vision, after all. Speak up. This is as much as I can speak. It's the e. You are weak of chest and breath and very timid. All right, we made all that up. Here we go. Maybe we should just riff on this whole thing. Doctor Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a middle aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion. But as he answered Clark and faced him there was a flush on his cheek. Look about you, Clark. Look about you, Clark. You see the mountain and hill following after hill as wave on wave. You see the woods in orchard the fields of ripe corn and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you and hear my voice, as pleasant as it is. But I tell you that all these things yes. From that star that has just shown out of the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet I say that all these are but dreams and shadows. The shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. This is a real world. But it is beyond the glamor in this vision beyond these chases and auras dreams in a career. Beyond the mall is beyond the veil. Do you even know what I'm talking about? I just realized who you're doing, and it's Truman Capote. Is it? Dead on. Truman Capoted. Nice work. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil. But I do know, Clark, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense. It may be strange, but it is true. And the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan. Nice. Clark shivered. The white mist gathering over the river was chilly. It is wonderful indeed, he said. We are standing on the brink of a strange world, raymond, if what you say is true, I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary. Yes. A slight lesion in the gray matter. That is all. A trifling rearrangement of certain cells. A microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of 99 brain specialists out of 100. I don't want to bother you with shop, Clark. I guess you mean shop talk. Yeah, I think so. I might give you a massive technical detail which would sound very imposing and would leave you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read casually in out of the way corners of your paper that immense strides have been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about digby's theory and Brown Faber's discoveries. Theories and discoveries where they are standing now, I stood 15 years ago. And I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last 15 years. It would be enough if I say that five years ago I made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached the goal. It's very confusing. I feel like I'm driving people literally away from this. No, it's very luring in a weird way. After years of labor after years of toiling and groping in the dark after days and nights of disappointments and sometimes of despair in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I thought. At last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul and I knew the long journey was at an end by what seemed then and still seems a chance. The suggestions of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I attract 100 times already the great truth burst upon me and I saw. Mapped out in lines aside a whole world. A sphere unknown continents and islands and great oceans in which no ship has sailed. To my belief since a man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun and the stars of heaven and the quiet earth beneath. Yes. Keep going. Good Lord. You will think this all high flown language, Clark but it is hard to be literal. And yet I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well guarded. It now with telegraph wires and cables thought with something less than the speed of thought. Flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south across the floods and the desert faces. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world. Suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond. And the voice of articulate speaking men echo and the waist void that bounds our thought. What do you think about that analogy, sir? As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I've done. You can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening. It was a summer evening and the valley looked much as it does now. I stood here and saw before me the inutterable the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds the world of batter and the world of spirit. I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me. And in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore and the abyss was spanned. You may look in Brown Faber's book if you like and you will find that to the present day men of science are unable to account for the presence or to specify the functions of a certain group of nerve cells in the brain. Last one. I'm sorry, everybody. That group is, as it were, land to yet a mere waste place for fanciful theories. I am not in the position of Brown favor and the specialist. I am perfectly instructed as to the possible functions of those nerve centers in the scheme of things. With a touch, I can bring them into play. With a touch, I say, I can set free the current. With a touch, I can complete the communication between this world of sense and we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes, the knife is necessary. But think what that knife will affect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense. And probably for the first time since man was made a spirit will gaze on a spirit world. Clark. Mary will see the God Pan. Very nice, Chuck. Wow. I feel like we need to recap that. So he's doing these brain experiments, basically where he says he can connect. I mean, he really just needed that last paragraph where he can connect people to the spirit world, right? Yeah. Basically, with the scrambling of a few neurons that only he knows the true purpose of he can basically he can take you to a new, different dimension again. Where you can see God. Yeah. God. Pan, at least. Sure. So now we're picking up with Clark with an E speaking again. You ready? I'm ready. But you remember what you wrote to me? I thought it would be requisite that she whispered the rest in the doctor's ear. Be a virgin. No, not at all. That is nonsense, I assure you. Indeed, it is better as it is. I'm quite certain of that. Consider the matter. Well, Raymond, it is a great responsibility. Something might go wrong. You would be a miserable man for the rest of your days. No, I think not. Even if the worst happened, as you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter and from almost certain starvation when she was a child. I think her life is mine to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late. We'd better go. In being canceled as we speak. So he's saying he found this poor homeless girl and now that he raised her and gave her a life he can do whatever he wants with her life. So now poor Mary is going to be the first test subject for seeing the great god Pan. And I'll take up some slack from you. Please do. Dr. Raymond led the way into the house through the hall and down a long, dark passage. He took a key from his pocket and opened a heavy door and motioned Clark with an E into his fiber cord. It had once been a billiard room and was lighted by a glass dome in the center of the ceiling whence there still shown a sad grey light on the figure of the doctor as he lit a lamp with a heavy shade and placed it on a table in the middle of the room clark looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall remained bare. There were shelves all around laden with bottles and files of all shapes and colors. And at one end stood a little chippendale bookcase with a shirt off and oiled and baby oil. Raymond pointed to this. You see that parchment? Oswald Crowleyous. He was one of the first to show me the way. Though I don't think he ever found it himself. That is a strange thing of his. In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the sole of a star. Okay, I guess it makes sense in a weird way. Sure, there was not much furniture in the laboratory the table in the center, a stone slab with a drain in one corner, the two armchairs on which Raymond and Clark were sitting. That was all except an odd looking chair at the furthest end of the room. Clarke looked at it and raised his eyebrows. Yes, that is the chair, said Raymond. We may as well place it in position. He got up and wheeled the chair to the light and began raising and lowering it, lighting down the seat, setting the back at various angles and adjusting the footrest. It looked comfortable enough, and Clarke passed his hand over the soft green velvet as the doctor manipulated the levers. Now, Clark could make yourself quite comfortable. I had a couple of hours work before me. I was obliged to leave certain matters to the last. Raymond went to the stone slab, and Clarke watched him drearily as he bent over a row of files and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor had a small hand lamp, shaded as the larger one on a ledge above his apparatus. And Clark, who sat in the shadows, looked down at the great shadowy room wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and undefined darkness contrasting with one another. Soon he became conscious of an odd odor at first the merest suggestion of an odor in the room. And as it grew more, he decided he felt surprised that he was not reminded of the chemist shop or the surgery. Whoever smelt it, dealt it. Clark found himself idly endeavoring to analyze the sensation, and half conscious, he began to think of a day 15 years ago that he had spent roaming through the woods and meadows near his own home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August. The heat had dimmed the outlines of all things and all distances with a faint mist and people who observed the thermometer spoke of an abnormal register of a temperature that was almost tropical. Strangely, that wonderful hot day of the 50s rose up again in Clark's imagination the sense of dazzling all pervading sunlight seeming to blot out the shadows and the lights of the laboratory. And he felt again the heated air beating in guts about his face saw the shimmer rising from the turf and heard the myriad murmur of the summer. I hope the smell doesn't annoy you, Clark. There's nothing unwholesome about it. It may make you a bit sleepy, that's all. Clark heard the words quite distinctly and knew that Raymond was speaking to him. But for the life of him, he could not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken 15 years ago. It was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child. And now it all stood out in brilliant light as a picture before him above all there came to his nostrils the scent of summer, the smell of flowers mingled, and the odor of the woods of cool, shaded places deep in the green depths drawn forth by the sun's heat. And the scent of the good earth lying, as it were, with arms stretched forth and smiling lips overpowered awe. His fancies made him wander as he had wandered long ago from the fields into the wood. Tracking a little path between the shining undergrowth of beech trees and the trickle of water dropping from the limestone rock sounded as clear as a melody in the dream. All right, so he's experiencing, due to his trip, sleep induced, drug induced feel goods. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a pretty great picture. I'll have what he's having. You want me to keep going? Yeah, keep going. Now it gets a little weird. Thoughts began to go astray and to mingle with other thoughts. The beach alley was transformed to a path between ilex trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bow to bow and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes. And the sparse gray green leaves of a wild olive tree stood out against the dark shadows of the is. Clark, in the deep folds of the dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country. And he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed. And for a moment in time, he stood face to face there with a presence that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things, but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry, let us go hence. And then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting. Whoa. He went deep. He really did. He went hence is how you'd put it. How the kids would put it. Should I pick up? Yeah. Okay. Is your throat okay? It's fine. When Clarke woke up with a start, he saw Raymond pouring a few drops of some oily fluid into a green file, which he stoppered tightly. You've been dozing. The journey must have tired you out. It is done now. I'm going to fetch Mary. I'll be back in ten minutes. Clark lay back in his chair and wondered. It seemed as if he had but passed from one dream into another. He half expected to see the walls of the laboratory melt and disappear and to awaken London shuddering at his own sleeping fancies. But at last the door opened and the doctor returned, and behind him came a girl, about 17, dressed all in white. She was so beautiful that Clarke did not wonder at what the doctor had written to him. She was blushing now over face and neck and arms, but Raymond seemed unmoved. Mary, the time has come. You are quite free. Are you willing to trust me entirely? Yes, dear. Do you hear that, Clark? You are my witness. Here is the chair. Mary. It is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean back. Are you ready? Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me kiss before you begin. The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth kindly enough. Now shut your eyes, he said. The girl closed her eyelids as if she were tired and longed for sleep, and Raymond placed the green file to her nostrils. Her face grew white, whiter than her dress. She struggled faintly and then, with a feeling of submission strong within her, crossed her arms upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayers. The bright light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds flowed across the sun. And then she lay all white and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was quite unconscious. Raymond pressed hard and one of the levers and the chair instantly sank back. Clark saw him cutting away a circle like a tonsure from her hair, and the lamp was moved nearer. Raymond took a small, glittering instrument from a little case and Clarke turned away, shudderingly. When he looked again, the doctor was binding up the wound he had made. Clark is so timid. She will wake in five minutes. Raymond was still perfectly cool. There is nothing more to be done. We can only wait. The minutes passed slowly. They could hear slow, heavy ticking. There's an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint. His knees shook beneath him. He could hardly stand. And suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long, drawn sigh. And suddenly did the color that had vanished return to the girl's cheeks. And suddenly her eyes opened. Clark quailed before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face. And her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible. But in an instant, the wonder faded and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed. She shook from head to foot. The soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight. And Clarke rushed forward and she fell shrieking to the floor. Three days later, Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside. She was lying wide awake, rolling her head from side to side and grinning vacantly. Yes, the doctor said, still quite cool. It is a great pity. She is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped. And after all, she has seen the great god Pan. Very nice. Wow. Definitely not a doctor feel good? No, a doctor feel bad, I guess. Is the best way to put it? I think so. A doctor make bad. That was really great, Chuck. This is truly the most spooky spooktacular spooked time. Yes, and we appreciate everyone who listens to these every Halloween. It's one of our favorites to do because we get to just have a little bit of fun and be goofy. What do you mean? Like that was a straight read. But everyone, Halloween looks like it's probably on for the most part this year. So be careful out there still, and stay safe and enjoy yourselves. Yes, follow CDC guidelines for trick or treating or falchi will get you in your sleep. Happy Halloween, everybody. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-11-15-sysk-fireplaces-final.mp3 | How Fireplaces Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-fireplaces-work | They are dirty, harmful to your health, bad for the environment and utterly charming. Wood-burning fireplaces have been with us for centuries and, despite their many drawbacks, are sticking around. Learn more than you thought possible about the fireplace. | They are dirty, harmful to your health, bad for the environment and utterly charming. Wood-burning fireplaces have been with us for centuries and, despite their many drawbacks, are sticking around. Learn more than you thought possible about the fireplace. | Tue, 15 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=320, tm_isdst=0) | 54575509 | audio/mpeg | "Make your business official with Google and Squarespace. When you create a custom domain and a beautiful business website with Squarespace, you'll receive a free year of business email and professional tools from Google. It's the simplest way to look professional online. Visit squares.com. Google to start your free trial. Use the offer code works W-O-R-K-S for 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace make it professional. Make it beautiful. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerome. So this is stuff you should know. Jerry got a piece of mail the other day that said Jerome. Oh, yeah. Like real mail, though, right, Jerry? Yeah. I don't know how that happened. Oh, like mail mail, not like fan mail. Jerry just said confirmed. Weird. We've been doing a lot of this Jerry translating lately. Yeah, that's really weird. That's bizarre. I mean, I sold your address to a mailing list, but I've never been reimbursed for it. So how are you, sir? Great. We are fresh off our live shows in Boston, Mass. In Washington DC. And big thanks to everyone that came out. Those were a lot of fun. Yes, for sure. And thanks to the brightest young things for having us to the Benson Ball with Tig Natara. Yeah, it was wonderful. We got to meet Tig. She was just as nice and nonplused as I would have hoped. Exactly. She didn't make a fuss. No, nor should she. Wait, I mean that in a good way. Wait, is it non plus the opposite of what you think it means? I don't know. I think non plus means, like, you're agitated means you're plus. Yeah, I've learned things all the time on this show. Yeah, me too. My favorite part of my job, and most specifically the most recent thing I've learned, Chuck, is that fire, the use of fire, the technological application of fire, that's as far as I'm going, actually predates humanity. That it was Homo erectus who is the first upright hominid who controlled fire. And it was as long ago as a million years. There's evidence of the controlled use of fire by humans as much as a million years ago. Yeah. It says here in this article that you found that in China there are hearts of clay, silt, and limestone from like a half a million years ago, and signs, like you said, in Africa over a million years ago, that people and these are in caves. So essentially an indoor fireplace, right? Yeah. And if you are an anthropologist, you are familiar with the term hearth, but that's usually used to describe something that doesn't really resemble the hearth that we'll talk about today. Usually just a shallow depression. Maybe it did have some limestone or some clay or something else to keep it from catching fire, but nothing like the fireplaces we know of today. The ones we see and say there's a fireplace. They're actually about 700 years old. Yeah. And I think the history of the chimney isn't super clear, but by the 14th century, and of course, Europe, when you have little dough, you could then afford the nice chimney, or maybe just any chimney. Well, actually, yeah, people started to afford chimneys quite a bit, especially in, say, jolly old London. There was a lot of chimneys that sprung up. Yeah. They weren't happy about it. A lot of problems that arose is we'll see later on. But, yeah, it's kind of interesting to see the fireplace hasn't really changed much in, like, 700 years. And then you step back and you're like, no, actually, that's kind of evident when you think about the fireplace and how ridiculously inefficient it is. Yeah. It's kind of changed. I don't know, it depends on what your definition have changed is hole in the wall with a hole above it that's tall and narrow and leads to the outside. Yeah. Within that, there have been a lot of changes. Sure. But the overall general design has been relatively unchanged for 700 years. It's like toilet paper. Yeah. They're not as straight as they used to be. Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life. He was just the kind of person who would look around the world in his everyday surroundings and say, why do people do it like this? It's stupid. I've been Franklin. There's better ways. Listen to me. Right. Take a peek under my silken robe. Sure. He very famously wrote that on the back of the Declaration of Independence. But fireplaces used to get under his skin, apparently, because the design and we're going to talk about this. The traditional fireplace is fairly wasteful. Oh, tremendously so. And it can even make your room colder. Yes. Which is counterintuitive. Yeah. It's like non plus. I look that up, by the way. I'm correct. The nonplus means you're agitated. Well, it means that you are surprised and confused to the point that you are unsure how to react. So not necessarily agitated. Okay, got you. But you're definitely not just, like, laid back. No. Signature was not non. Plus she was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which is, Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, she's just chill. Right. And very sweet. Yeah. I didn't expect, like, some big show, trust me, from anybody that meets us. Well, no. So I just want to put that out there. I don't want to sound like I was disappointed she didn't, like, throw those snap crackers and start tapping into no, I got exactly what I wanted, which was a very nice lady who gave me a big hug in a photo. I think that's come across. Yeah, I'm sensitive to that stuff. Once I start opening my mouth, digging that hole. Yeah. You know what I mean? Here's a little more room anyway, let me give you a stat here. Wait. First, I think everyone wants to hear about how you felt when you met Tignataro. I was super excited. Can you tell? How was she? So here's a little stat for you. The National Association of Home Builders did a survey, and I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of 77% of home buyers, say. And that's, I guess, in the US. Yeah. That's accounting for the hot places as well. True. So I would imagine in the cold places, it's probably more like 100%. Yeah. Well, remember I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about how in New York it's very ghosh these days to have a fireplace that you use because it's so waste. Now does ghosh. Meanwhile, I think it means now I'm doubting everything. It means super lay back and not plus. So like New Yorkers, like, oh, you have a fireplace. Yes. How not green. Right. Which I mean they're correct. There's a lot of uncleanness associated with fireplace brownness. Sure. Especially as far as, like, air pollution goes. Air quality. Sure. There's a lot of problems that come out of it. Like, for example, I guess if we're going to talk about this for a second, if you are a kid and you have, I don't know, respiratory diseases, you're far likelier to be living in a house where your folks burn wood. So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be brought on because smoke is going to get in the room no matter how great the fireplace is. Right. Or if you're, let's say if you already have asthma or something, you're not doing yourself any favors by letting that smoke and the particles particulate matter creep in there. Yeah. And also, I mean, like house fires. There's like 25,000 house fires in the United States every year that result in like ten people's deaths. Yeah. From directly from fireplaces. Yeah. But no matter who you talk to, for the most part, people say, still worth it. I'm going to die of black lung and my house may burn down before I get a chance to, but I really love fires in the winter, and I'm willing to take that risk. So you know my deal. Or do you? I don't know. We live in a house that was built in 1935. Oh, yeah. And we're renovating it still forever. Yes. And we have the fireplace that is not used and is not able to be used I know. Unless we pay like, some pretty good dough to get it retrofitted in the chimney worked on. And I for years have been leaving just little sticky notes, and I'll write it in crayon on the bathroom wall and just little things like, hey, M, how about that fireplace? And she says, Quit writing on the walls. Right. We're not getting a fireplace just yet, but maybe you've been there for, like, ten years. When do we start living our life, is my question. With a fireplace, have you considered trading something she wants for the fireplace? It doesn't work like that. Have you considered begging? That didn't work either. Oh, wow. I don't know what to tell you. Well, I mean, I do. I wait until she goes out of town. They just do it yourself, but do it in a terrible way so that somebody, a professional, has to come in and go behind you. Yeah. And then you have no choice. You're like, I got to get the fireplace guy in here. Now there's a giant hole in the wall. Long story short, though, we still don't have a fireplace, and despite all the negatives, and I try to lead a green life, but I want that wood burning thing. We'll talk about the substitutes, and that's great if you're into that, because they are better in many ways. Sure. But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. Yeah. I want that particulate matter along my lungs. You and 77% of us, homeowners. Yeah. So, yeah, most people do say I'm willing to look past the problems for a wood burning fireplace, but like you say, there are alternatives. That's right. But we're going to talk about all of it here. Should we talk about the parts? Yeah, let's talk about this is when I say that there is very little change to the design over 700 years ago. It's true, man. Yeah. I didn't realize some of these parts existed, so I did learn quite a bit in this. I thought it was pretty much the firebox and the flu that ran up the chimney. Sure. And that's it. Right, but there's more to it than that. Well, yeah, I think these are the improvements that came over time. So you do have that heart that you mentioned that's going to be built out of something. Fireproof. You don't want a wood hearth. That would be bad. It's probably rock or brick. And that's where mache yeah, that's where you sit and drink your bourbon while you warm your back. It's like an apron on the floor that extends out from the fireplace. Yeah. And it can be even with the floor, as is the case now. Or the one I grew up with. I grew up with one of those MacDaddy, huge rock stone fireplaces. Those ones are like man, and you could sit on the thing. They're the best. They are the best, but they're also like just kid killers. They look like well, not if you don't climb in it. Okay. Which I never did. Yeah, that is pretty nice. What else you got? So, you know, like, the hearth extends out, but if you look usually up the walls along either side of the hole in the wall and then above it, that's called the surround. It's usually made of something. Either that's the same as the hearth, same material as the hearth or some other fireproof things like tile or brick or stone. Right. And that's just to basically prevent that fire from licking out of the firebox and setting the house on fire. Right. So straw no good as a material. Right. You have your firebox. That is just what you think it is. That's the square, typically, although they're shaped a little differently now. That's the square that holds your fire. Right. And it's where the smoke starts to collect. Yes. What you're sending this stuff up to behind the fire box is actually called the smoke chamber, and there's a transition area in between the firebox, which is where you actually have the fire, and the smoke chamber, which is above and slightly behind it. And it's called the throat. It's the opening that connects those two things. And the smoke chamber. Smoke box, I think I've been calling it. It actually connects the firebox to the flu. And it's got some pretty cool stuff going on. This is like where some improvements were made to the design. Yeah. And the flu is surrounded by the chimney. Also, again, not straw. Right. It's going to be brick. Almost always in the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf. Yeah. It's concave. Yeah. Because if you look at a fireplace, you just think it just goes straight back and up. Right. Well, some of the old designs did well, they were stupid. Yeah. That's how it's changed some. Right. So if you look at the back of the fireplace, if you could stick your head up into the fire box, you don't want to do that when there's no fire. You don't want to do it, period. You'll see that there's actually a shelf there, and it's angled forward, too, in front of that. Like I said, it used to be just sort of a cube and it went straight up. Now it sort of zigzags back and forth a little bit on its way to the flu. That's right. So the whole point of that shelf and the zigzag is so that when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. It's almost basically a protective overhang. And it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff from falling into the firebox too. Correct. That smokeshelf underneath it, you're going to have the damper, and that is that covering that it's moveable, and that separates the firebox from the place above it. And that keeps when you don't have your fire, that's when you close. We used to say close the flu, and we didn't use the word damper in my house. Yes. I don't know why, but that's technically what it is. It's the damper and you get your different mechanisms. But ours had a little eyelet circle thing that you would stick to our fire poker and we would just unhook it and then close the damper. And that when your fire is not burning. You want to keep that thing open when it's burning, obviously. Well, yeah. You're going to find out really quickly if it's closed. It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure. It's got a throat. Why not? Sure. What else do we have? Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the chimney. There's something called spark arrestor, which is usually like some sort of mesh grate that will allow gas and air out, but will keep little embers and stuff from going out onto your roof and setting your house on fire. Yeah. Especially like paper tends to float up and out. The chimney cap serves the same purpose, and that a lot of times, is one and the same. Like the chimney cap and the spark arrest are all one piece a lot of times. Right. Is that it? I haven't heard of this ash dump. That sounds pretty neat, though. Sure. It's basically, I guess, a hatch in the floor where you can just sweep the ashes. That sounds like in the olden days, right. When your house is built on to bricks and it would just drop into a bucket below, as would your poop. Sure. There are different buckets under your house right. That collected things. You wanted to make sure you knew which bucket you're grabbing at any given time. Sure. I didn't want a surprise. And then finally got your little door. It's either glass or metal or it might just be a screen. We never had in mine growing up. We never had the glass door seen. Sure. Just the screen. We had one of those in my high school house and we had a gas fireplace. Yes. It was fine. Sure. But I was like, this is not wood. All right, well, let's take a break and we'll talk about wood after this. So we're back, Chuck, and we're going to talk this would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about, basically, the physics of how a fireplace worked. Yeah. Because there are some physics involved. Yeah. Pretty impressive ones, if you ask me. Yes. I love this article, said lighting a fire inside your living room, and it kind of hits home, like how kind of crazy that is. Right. And said there are two challenges. One, not setting your house on fire. Two, keep the smoke from entering the room. Yeah, but yeah, I never really thought about it. And everything we just talked about, basically, was to prevent the first part, catching your house on fire, the surround, the heart, all that stuff. But then if you get a little more into the guts of the fireplace, that's to keep the smoke from filling up in the room. And when you look around your house, you'll find that there's a lot of different places for air to get in. And that's actually quite necessary for a fireplace. It's quite necessary for living and breathing. Sure, for breathing. It's important for that, too. But to keep a fire going and to keep the smoke from filling up your living room, which, again, you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your damper open, which I have before. Sure. If you have air coming into your house, then you can keep the smoke from the fire going up the way it's supposed to. And that happens simply because heat tends to rise. Yeah. One of the places I get a nice flow of air in my house is from closed windows. Oh, yeah. You got thin windows. Yeah. We've only redone a few of the windows that's on my must do list to get all the windows replaced. But it ain't cheap. No, but you're going to earn that money back over time with Efficiencies. But, yeah, I have those old windows. It can be fully shut and you can stand and your hair will blow. Right. Like, where's this coming from? It's going through the glass. It feels like it's defying the laws of physics. It's freezing near my windows. I remember you and I had a house like that, and it was I mean, the vaguely wavy kind of windows. Yeah, those were thin. It's kind of neat, though, to think that in 2016, I'm living like a settler, basically, in parts of my house. Draining your own butter. Yes. You want to talk about the different kinds of heat? Yeah. So you've got conduction, convection, and radiation. And fireplaces use convection and radiation, but not conduction. Hopefully. Not conduction. No conduction means your house is catching fire. That means you're literally touching something hot. Correct. Yeah. But confection, of course, is when that hot air is circulating to cooler areas of your home, in this case, and the radiation is just literally feeling that flame warmth. Yeah. In the case of the fireplace, it's infrared, invisible light, electromagnetic radiation, basically. There is actually some radio waves and some microwaves produced by a fire, which is kind of cool. Yeah. But for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation and you're seeing visible light radiation, right? Yes. So when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being emitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection. Yeah, big time. Big time is right. Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is moved through a fire. And because you want to keep the smoke out of your house, you're also actually keeping those convection currents from going into your house as well. Meaning, as Ben Franklin pointed out, because, remember, he was a huge complainer that most of the heat from a fire is just purposely being funneled out of the house up through the flu in the chimney. I think it drives him nuts a little bit, looking through some of these quotes. Yeah. Because he really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make fireplace better. You got to understand that, too, when he was alive, these weren't just for, like, charm? No, they were to stay alive. And the idea that you're wasting all this fuel, I think probably part of it also was the inefficiency probably drove him nuts. Oh, yeah. He's dead. Right. Like, you've got so much heat just going right up the chimney. And not only that, when you get that draft, because the fire needs the oxygen. Right. So that's another reason it's pulling this air in, but it's also pulling in you've got your thermostat on and your heat going. Sure. It's pulling some of that warmer air in and up and out as well. Right. And even air that it's warming through convection that's being irradiated out of the fireplace, it's being sucked in. And as a result, again, when the air is sucked into the fire and it's pushed up the flu through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. It's creating what's called a negative pressurization. Right. Yes. That means that air wants to come in and replace the air that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So cold air from outside is being drawn in, which is how, like you said before. Right, sure. But the fire can actually make your house even colder because it's pushing the warm air out through the fireplace and sucking in cold air from the outside. Yeah. And it says here's a stat that said that a traditional fireplace can draw four to ten times as much air from the room that it needs to actually burn that fire. Yeah. Something like 500 cubic liters of air a minute. Yeah. So compare that to the smart fireplace, aka. The wood burning stove, aka. The TV with the fire burning on it. Right. I love a wood burning stove. Man, those are great. I've never really been into this. Yeah, I got no problems with them. It's not good for every home. Aren't they incredibly dangerous? They get super hot. Right? They're really hot. So, like, if you fell onto one or something, you'd be in big trouble. Right? Yeah. You don't put the skateboard next to it with a banana peel. Okay. Step one. And you're not going to have, like, a super modern house with a wood burning stove. Like it's a little more charming in your cabin or something. Actually, I was looking through, I think a Popular Mechanics or something. I had different types of stoves. Stoves. And there are some that are kind of mod. Oh, well, that's cool. Yes. So they're trying to bring it into the future. Yes. Well, they're remarkably efficient. How much did you say? 500 cubic liters, I believe, of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace, an average fireplace, and only 20 for a wood burning stove. Yeah. That's pretty efficient. So they're super hot. You can cook on them, too. You can boil your water and do all sorts of things. Sure. Just don't touch it. No. I think the Rendezvous had one in their place in Connecticut. Oh, yeah. And I think it supposedly works super well. Sure. Like, it'll heat a room and then some. Yeah. Well, and the reason why is because it's like a contained fireplace, but it's not just wide open, it's out in the open. Yeah. But I mean, you shut the door to it. Right. You shut the door to it. So you're saving the warmer around it from being sucked in. Right? Correct. And then it's also removed from the interior of the wall so that it can heat on all sides. Yeah, it's right up there. So you can fall on it. Sure. And then the flu itself can go up and then out of the room so that the hot gas that's being carried out can heat the air in the room around it. So you've got that stove pipe. Yeah. You've got a lot of different ways the air is being warmed in your house by a wood stove. Yes. I'm going to look into these new ones. There's new ones. There's some famous ones that are like mid century design that are super mod Swedish ones, and then there's ones that look kind of like the traditional ones, but they're newly built and they're improved designs. Remember the old 70s fireplaces that were like orange metal? That's the sweetest one I'm talking about. Oh, really? Yeah, it's based on that old seventy S look. No, that's the one I'm talking about. The there's newer ones, too. Got you. But the iconic orange one. Yeah. Like, my friend one friend in high school, Chris Bouton, had the most 70s house. Dude, it was wonderful. Yeah. Like, it was the orange fireplace built in a terrarium set of deal with plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall. Was there Macrame? Oh, I'm sure there was macrame at some point. But it had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I like those. Yeah. And looking back now, it's a super cool mod house. Like, people now would be like, oh, my God, it's preserved in time. It's the greatest thing ever. Right. He had a waterbed, of course, but one of his walls, his entire wall was like a blown up photograph of, like, a Hawaiian sunset. We had a couple of those in our house. Not a Hawaiian sunset, but we had, like, a forest with a waterfall going through it. And then in our kitchen, a forest mural, no water. That's very ice storm. Yeah. I've not seen that movie, but I can imagine because key parties are happening and people are drinking eggnog around the orange lacquer to fireplace. It's a wonderful time. But let's say you have just a regular old fireplace to start. Yeah. Right. You come across it, you say, what the heck is this thing? What do I do? Well, the first thing you do is you log onto the Internet and go to house the forks and look up how to operate a fireplace, because how stuff works has you covered, man. Yeah. The only thing I could say this would probably be good for is if you've never literally never started a fire. But it seems like common knowledge to me. Yeah. There's some details in there that I don't know. Like hardwoods. Right. You don't want to burn pine or any soft wood. Okay. You want your hardwoods, like hickory, ash, oak, that kind of stuff. And you want it seasoned. That's the key. Yeah. You can't go cut down a tree in your yard and chop it up and burn it the next week. That's not going to work because it will smoke. And you'll see, literally, when I go camping, we get rooked all the time on firewood purchases. Yeah. And we sit down for the evening, throw the wood on there, and you just start hearing the sizzle, and you see the water just literally boiling out of it. Right. And we're just like, oh, man. Well, okay. That roadside guy, I'm going to go back. Here's how you tell him. You got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch them squirm. Take two logs and you knock them together. And what you're looking for is a hollow sound. No thud, hollow sound. Then it's seasoned. Yeah, but he would go like, city boy, this is North Georgia lab lolly pine. You don't know what you're talking about. You'd say, well, pine is a software I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods? I went to college off my property and leave the boiled peanuts. You'd say, I'm going to take half of the boiled peanuts for my time. Yeah. I feel like we always get wet wood, but at least six months. You want that wood drying out. They say a full year, what you're looking for is 20% moisture level by the time you're burning it. Right. You could also put in a moisture level temperature or moisture indicator in the end. Yes. There you go. That you buy the big city. Right. You look at the ends of the wood, too, and you'll see that it's cracked and split. It's usually dark, like gray. It just looks aged. But the deck giveaway is the hollow thud sound. Yeah. I didn't know that. So I'm going to try that. I'm sorry. The hollow sound, not the thud, right? Yeah. That's what you're looking for. So you take your fire or you take your wood, you put it on your fire grate. Although this is a component of the fireplace, it's not an actual part of it. Right. The fire grate is like this iron stand. The grate. There's really no other way to describe it. Although some fire aficionados suggest that you should use what are called and irons. Yeah, I like grates. Well, an and iron is basically a great missing the grate part in the middle. It's basically these two stands, a pair of stands that go in the fireplace and. It holds the logs aloft. Yes. So they burn through. The grate does the same thing, except it keeps burning like embers on the grade a little more. The reason why people are like and irons are great is because however you have a grade or an and iron, you want to keep a bed of embers going because that is going to eventually become hot enough that you could throw anything on there and it'll start to catch fire. So when you take your split logs, you put them on your grate or your and irons, put a little Kindling beneath them, which is like thinner wood that will catch fire easily. Light it on fire. Oh, I forgot. First, you want to pour about half a liter of kerosene on this. No. Make sure that it starts. You do not did I misspeak that is just a joke, kid. You don't ever want to use any sort of lighter fluid for gas or anything like that to start an indoor fire. Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place, so stop right now. Yes, this is for grown ups. That's right. But you do want to use something like newspaper, just a piece of paper to light the Kindling. But no, you don't want to use any sort of accelerant. Well, people don't get newspapers anymore, so you can just like your Kindle or your iPad, throw that in there. Sure. Instead it'll start, but that kind of thing is going to catch. And if your wood is seasoned, it'll catch, too. And then all of a sudden you got a fire. Yeah. You may want to adjust that damper a little bit just to keep your air flow how you want it. Right. And again, when you have a fire going, one of the two main things you're trying to do in addition to not burn down your house is to keep the smoke from coming back in the room. And sometimes that's easier said than done because every house has something called a neutral pressure plane. Okay? So above the neutral pressure plane, the air is pressurized, so it wants to push air out. And below it air, the pressure inside the house is lower, so air wants to be sucked in. So as long as your fireplace, your chimney, is above that neutral pressure plane, you're going to be okay. That air is going to want to go in. If it so happens that the air around your fireplace is a higher pressure, then the air is actually going to be pushed down the chimney, into the firebox and out into the room, which is no good, but you can solve it pretty easily by just opening a window and allowing air to come in or go out, depending. Or have a 90 year old window right, where you don't have to worry about it at all to do anything because the area just flows through freely. So if you want to we're talking about how inefficient they are. If you want to improve that efficiency, there are a couple of cool things you can do. One is called a tubular grate, and that is exactly what you think. Instead of just a grate made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. It looks like sort of like the motorcycle exhaust pipes and things. They're tubular, so it's going to draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes, and then it's going to rise and then loop back around and shoot out the top of the tubes into your room. Yeah. Which should work in theory. But remember, if your fireplace is working properly, it's sucking air from the room into the fire to fuel it and then shooting it out the chimney. So this air that's being warmed could be sucked right back into the fire. That's right. But if you have it so that the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the grate can go out into the room. Bam. You're set. Oh, is that a thing? Yeah. I haven't seen that. There's another thing called a well, this is what when Emily's parents have moved to Georgia now, but when they lived in Ohio, they had one of these recirculators that was a fan. Basically, you would turn on a switch and it would literally blow heat from kind of underneath the grate back out into the room. And it worked really well, but it always seemed to blow a little stink out with it. Stink? Fire stink. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't see smoke pouring out of it or anything, but still affecting your respiratory. It didn't affect me so much, but I could tell it was happening. Like every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has kind of had the same deal to me. Whether it's gas only or whatever, it always just seems to have this. But I'm very sensitive to odors anyway, so maybe that's something to do with it. I don't know. Maybe I'm a super smeller. Are you a super smeller? What do you smell? Right now? I smell knoll, like, three rooms over. Wow. You are a super smeller. Because we are hermetically sealed in here. Not true. And then those glass doors you talked about, it's another way to increase efficiency, but you're also going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much as 50%. Yeah. There's not a lot that you can do to have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of the fire. For the most part, it's going to lose more heat than it puts out. You just want to hope that you can warm the room you're in with the fire enough so that you don't mind. Yeah. Or if you're just after the aesthetic, then yeah. Good for you. You mean. I live in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years. Yeah, we were hooked on it. Yeah. And we could get that room like hot. Yeah. Toasty. If you keep the fire going long enough, that's the key. You just have to waste more wood than you can imagine. All right, well, we'll take another little quickie break here, and we'll come back and talk about some more options and a very depressing history of child labor. All right, Josh, we've been talking about wood a lot because it's clearly the superior fireplace. Seriously? But you can get the old gas fake log fireplace these days. My mom made the switch. Fake log is pretty good these days. So wait a minute, wait a minute. She had a wood burning fireplace and had a gas insert put in? Yes. Wow. Okay. Because she had, like I had growing up to the gas starter. So you would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off. Got you. So she just retrofitted it. Actually, I did it. My brother into full gas with the fake logs. Nice. They look good these days. You can arrange them in yourself in a way that looks aesthetically pleasing. Right. They don't come in that mound that shapes. It look like three logs laying on top of each other. No, it's come a long way, I'll say that. Don't they have beds of embers now, too? And all that kind of catches a little flickering glow. Yeah. What is it? It's come a long way with trying to simulate that. Look. Peca pika. Pika. I don't know what that is. It's like the Japanese word for that. Like the little tinkling glow. I don't know. I'm saying it wrong, but it's a throwback. I said it wrong on some other episode years back. Are you talking about putty pretty no, Pudda. Pudda. Yeah. But that's something different. Yeah. I'll have to go back and find it. We'll just edit this whole part out. So the gas logs covering the gas vent, you're going to burn that fire behind glass. It's going to give off radiant and convected heat. You're probably going to have a air not recycler what do you call it? Exchanger. Air exchanger. There working as well. Yeah. And one of the reasons it's so much more efficient is because it doesn't require any air from inside your room. It draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less. Right. Yeah. So it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to burn. It's just going to say, you keep it. I'm gas. I'm super efficient. I love you in ways that wood could never imagine. Yes, that's true. Wood is dirty and bumbling. And why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas. So if you're getting a new house, you're probably going to have a gas fireplace. If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably going to be a gas fireplace. Sure. That's the direction they're steering you these days. Yeah, I would guess. Because gas you pay significantly more for a wood burning fireplace to be built into your new house than a gas one. You think? Yeah, probably just because I'll bet there are relatively few, especially down below the Mason Dixon line, relatively few builders who know how to put in a wood burning fireplace. Yeah. You got to find a builder from 1973, basically. Yeah. And he's going to want to give you one of those orange modern jobs. You're like. Yeah, this is cool. But now I want the real thing. Yeah. It's like this is real. So they're very efficient to these gas fireplaces. Sure. The gas burns cleanly. They even have them that are vent free. But people also say, you know what, if your house is not like trucks and it is actually pretty tight as sealed and sealed up, then they can actually deplete oxygen or moisture can build up. So the jury is still out somewhat on these gas fires? I say the jury is in and I'm the jury and I say event free fireplace is a stupid idea. It's pumping carbon dioxide into your house. That's never good. You would think. Yeah. You can get an ethanol fireplace. This one seems like okay, you've seen them before, right? Like if you go to a Marriott Courtyard or something like that. Yeah. They'll have, like, the chairs situated around a table with a fireplace in the middle of the table. It's nuts. It's just burning ethanol. The flame is actually cold. It's basically like, it's basically like a stern fireplace. Yeah. You want to light your fondue pod or something like that from beneath. Yeah, it's the same thing, I think, virtually. And then you can get the woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace. Well, there's some now where you can get like an entertainment center with, like a TV, and then beneath it a fake electric fireplace. Yeah. It's cool. So an electric fireplace has no fire. It is a heater, and it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old. If you're squinty four year old. Right. But we don't want to yuck someone's. Yum. So if that's your bag, then more power to you. It's not for me. I have to take issue, though, with this article. It says that it's emission free. It's emission free on the user end. Right. Still electricity, which means it's producing emissions at the coal fire power plant that's producing that electricity. Yeah, that is. Don't be fooled if you're like, oh, it's a mission free. No, we're going to yuck that yum. Safety wise. Got to watch out for those sparks if you got carpet around or hardwoods, I reckon. Yeah. Keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace. Yeah, a big one. You might want a fire extinguisher, but don't put it in the fireplace. Right itself. Carbon monoxide. Investing in a carbon monoxide detector is worthwhile it doesn't have to be like a smart carbon monoxide detector. Although get one of those if you want. I'm just saying, if you are using a wood burning fireplace, at the very least, get yourself a cheap but decent carbon monoxide detector. Get a smoke detector is not quite enough. Yes, I think you have to have those now. Isn't that the new code? I don't know. I haven't read the zoning codes in a while. Building codes. You should take a look. This is one of those kind of once a year things. If you know what you're doing, you can at least get a flashlight and kind of look everything over and see if there's anything obvious. Like if your flu cap is no longer on your chimney, hurricane hit. Yes. If there are big cracks or anything. So what's wrong with yours? Cracks like your house would catch on fire. All I know is the guy did a lot of like maybe he just wasn't feeling it that day. No, he didn't put on a good show. He came over because their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces. Okay. So I thought, this guy is going to be like, oh, great, this is what I do. He acted like he didn't want to do the job. Right. But it's a lot of work, man. You're going to have to fix your chimney on the inside and it's cracked here and you got this and you got that. I was like, yeah, that's what you advertise. It's a fixed old situation. Right. You should bring somebody else out. Yeah, I didn't like that guy. Yeah, I'm going to bring out someone with some little moxie. But even if you think that your fireplace is doing great, it pays to pay somebody to come out and look at it inside. Like, is it too much to ask for a little energy from your fireplace guy? A little while factor, maybe? Yes, you are correct. You do need a pro every now and then to come out. And they're called chimney suites. And creosote is something if you look up creosote creosote online, it sort of looks like black lava built up on the inside of your chimney. Right. And it itself could catch fire. And you have a chimney fire, in which case and it sounds a little counterintuitive, like there's fire going through it all the time. Fire going through it is much different from fire. Like your chimney being on fire itself. Yeah, that's not good. And if your chimney is on fire, your house can catch fire fairly easy, especially if you have cracks in there, because it goes and all of a sudden, some pressure treated two x four is like you don't want to burn that. Pressure treated two by four, by the way. It's wood. Yeah, I don't think we mentioned that. One thing you can burn, though, which I wouldn't use. But it's called a chimney sweep log or a creyosote log, and it's just a special log. It's sort of like a dura flame. It's a prefab log. Right. It's a chemical log, but it's supposed to break down that creo soap. I don't know, something about that made me my radar went off. Like, I don't know if that's the best way to do things. You don't have any proof. But I hear chemical log that knocks that creo soap loose and it just didn't sound like the smart approach. Well, even the Chimney Safety Institute of America says, no, those things kind of work. But you want actual scrubbing of the interior of your chimney. Yes. Which is what chimney sweeps did. Yeah. If you want moxie in your chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say, I want to buy your four year old boy and make him my chimney sweep slave. Yeah. I mean, earlier we teased and promised the child labor horror show and that's pretty much what things were like in jolly old England. 1666. 2nd September. Sorry, 5th September. Technically, yeah. The Great Fire of London changed a lot of things and one of them was chimneys were a little bit narrow and they had a lot more rules as far as how clean you had to keep them. And so, like you said, what you would do is you can't put an adult up there. No, not really. But you can put a five year old boy or four, I think is the youngest I saw them doing. Yeah. So you would literally buy child from a poor person. Right. Stick this boy up in there. They were your, quote unquote, apprentice, which basically was child slave, unpaid child labor, $0. Right. And actually chimney sweeping at the time. So after the Great Fire of London in 1666, I believe it was mandated by the Queen or Parliament or somebody that everybody needed their chimneys, like, kept up with. So chimney sweeps became a thing, but they actually swept chimneys free. It was a free service. The way that chimney sweeps made their money was from the soot that they gathered. They would sell it as fertilizer. Oh, I thought you're going to say sponsorships. Like they would show up, like their Chevy Tahoe jacket or something. Nothing gets your chimney clean like Son of a Gun by STP. So they would stick these kids in there. Sometimes they would literally light a fire under their butt to make them work faster. The kids would shimmy and distort their body to shimmy in this little 18 inch wide chimney and chip loose because they're working above their head. It would fall all over them. They would take a bath once a week, maybe once every month, maybe once every two or three months, depending on who you're asking. Yeah. So these children are literally not I mean, if they survive this experience at all, they're not going to live past middle age. Right. So what you just described was a good day. Yeah. There were all sorts of other horrible maladies that could come about the formation of their skeletons, because these kids are like four, five, 6810, twelve years old. They're trying to grow. They're still developing, but they're spending like hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So their bones, especially the bones and their ankles and knees tended to grow in a deformed way. Unbelievable. There's something the first industrial length cancer ever identified. It's called chimney sweep cancer. Other people call it scrotal carcinoma, where the scrotum was irritated by silent and it would produce warts. And these warts, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually, if it wasn't cut out, the tumor would grow into the testes and then into the abdomen. And it was a very painful way to die. Kids like twelve years of age were dying of cancer. Groan cancer from this? Yeah. You get up pre dawn, you work till the nighttime hours, 364 days a year. The one day that these kids would get off was May Day. International Labor Day. Right. They would sleep then, we said they collected that ash and foot and sold it. They would store all the stuff in sacks and the kids would then sleep in those rooms, still ingesting all this stuff in the air. And quite often they would literally get stuck and dying in these chimneys. Here's the part where I start to hyperventilate just thinking about this. Oh, from Claustrophobia? Yeah. There's like this thing called positional asphyxia yeah, there's actually a pretty interesting vice article called like, a Brief History of people getting Stuck in Chimneys. And they actually illustrate how position or less fixia happens. Using the grinch. As he's going down the chimney, his feet start to get above his head and all of a sudden he's stuck. You can't get out of that position. Oh, man. This would happen to real live English boys, and American too, apparently, who would get stuck in the chimneys that they were cleaning out and would die there because they would just fix it. Their abdomen couldn't take in breaths any longer. Right. It happened a lot. And actually, finally it happened enough times that parliament started to get involved. They first got involved in 1788 with the Chimney Sweeps Act and they said, you know what? This is crazy. You guys are buying four year old kids. You can't do that. Chimney sweeps can be no younger than eight. Yeah. That was their first stab at reform. Right. Yeah. And obviously child labor was a lot different back then as far as how we thought about when kids should work. Right. Or the idea of childhood hadn't even come about yet. Yeah. But even so, even for a time where it was believed that children should put forth an effort and work like four and five year old kids, it's just ridiculous. Sure. Right. They also added though that if you are a master of a chimney sweep, you have to make sure that they are allowed to go to church on Sundays. That was the other part of the 1788 act. Right, yeah. Then in the 1840 act they up the age to 21, which was significant, but apparently it wasn't really enforced until 1875 when this one kid died and he was basically the straw that broke the camel's back for the public. Yes. His name was George Brewster and he worked for a gentleman by the name of William Wire. And I say gentlemen, what I mean is a scumbag. And he was cleaning a hospital chimney, full born hospital, and he got stuck and great efforts were made to rescue him. He actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died and Wires actually found guilty of manslaughter and his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody and it became part of the campaign and that was pretty much the end of using kids. He was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England. In England, I guess, in the US. They kept using them for a while. So shameful, really. Now if you see a chimney sweep tell four year old to go up in the chimney, you called police because that is illegal these days, no matter where you live. Yeah. Okay, let's all agree to that. Do you get anything else? No. Fireplaces. Just in time for the fall. Well, yeah, it's November here in Atlanta and in the mid eighty s. Right. Ready to get that fireplace going? That's right. If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light a fire, you can go find that out by typing Fireplace in the search Bar how Stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this grammar police. Hey guys, regular listener for quite some time. I finally become angered or inspired enough to write in about something. I use the sandwich technique proposed by Chuck recently, by the way, and I was listening to an older episode, does the Body Replace Itself? And you guys were talking about emails from the Grammar Police. Grammar only has strict rules to those who decided that it needed strict rules. As a society we have a rather dramatic ebb and flow of grammar rules. There's no one entity decide to decide upon the rules and therefore there is no real right or wrong. You can almost consider it like a fashion in a way. We can all generally agree that double negatives are wrong, much like we can all agree that socks and sandals are wrong and yet some will still use them or wear them without a problem as long as we can understand each other in the quote incorrect. In quote grammar does not take away from the meaning of your words and it should not matter. There are different times in which proper grammar is necessary and scrutinized, and then there are times when it frankly does not matter. There is a huge debate in the grammar world, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivist or descriptivists when it comes to the rules of grammar. It's a constantly evolving topic, and arguably, grammar is a constantly evolving entity. Just thought I'd share my thoughts and hopes that you wouldn't get down on your cells from the grammar police. And yes, feel free to pick apart my email for grammar errors. Nice happy face. That is from Colleen Zacre, an English teacher and grammar enthusiasts. Thanks a lot, Coleen. We appreciate that big time. We always love to hear support from people who are like, don't listen to the haters. Yes, if you want to get in touch with this like Colleen did is it Colleen? Sure. Who cares? Actually, I don't know. Because either way, whatever. Yeah, she said you can call me whatever. Sure. If you want to get in touch with us, like Cauliflower did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffiestoodnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housedaleperst.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you'll access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-09-sysk-permaculture-final.mp3 | What's permaculture all about? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-permaculture-all-about | Permaculture is a growing trend in the world of farming and home landscaping. It's basically a design principle that emphasizes sustainability and the would-be, natural ecosystem of an area. Simple concepts like planting downhill from a pond and using gra | Permaculture is a growing trend in the world of farming and home landscaping. It's basically a design principle that emphasizes sustainability and the would-be, natural ecosystem of an area. Simple concepts like planting downhill from a pond and using gra | Thu, 09 Nov 2017 18:38:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=18, tm_min=38, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=313, tm_isdst=0) | 49669515 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W chipper. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Rowland. And we're all engaged. Great moods, everybody. Because it's stuff you should know. Time. Everything else just falls to the wayside. When we record Stuff You Should Know, it's the reason we love doing it. Still, after a thousand episodes, you realize every single listener right now is thinking, why are they in a bad mood? And why is Josh being so weird? I don't think I'm being weird. Am I overselling it? I think so. Oh, sorry. It makes it sound like all three were in a big fist fight and then Jerry hit record. Right. She's, like, just jammed a Kleenex up her nose to staunch the bleeding. I am recovering a bit because we just got back from New York City. Dude, it has been a week. I know. So we did show a show Sunday, a show Monday and a show Tuesday, all sold out at the Bellhouse travels home Wednesday and are recording today Thursday. Yes. And I just want to say there is no way that people will ever hear Tuesday's episode because it was the filthiest thing we've ever done on seriously, man. I don't know what got into us. I think it was night three of three. So that is for the 350 people in that room. Yeah. I hope they enjoyed it. It was fun. And come on out whenever we do a live show. You never know for this going to be like this one's not getting released. Let's just go crazy. Especially it was a 21 and up show, which is really weird. Well, that's for sure why we did it. Yeah. That's what took the feedback off. That is saying I think so. Put the feedback on, take it off. Yes, I guess so. It's not really but we'll just press forward. How about that? Let's do so. Chuck, I know that you know this, but not everybody knows this. I had a personal conversation with one Charles C. Mann, who wrote my favorite book of all time, 1491. That is correct. And I was talking to Mr. Man, and he has a I was talking to him. I've got a show coming out on Existential Risk eventually, and he's going to be in it. It's just like, interviewed for it. But he has a book coming out this January and it's called The Wizard and the Prophet. Have you heard of it? No, but did you just say that he's going to be part of Existential Risks? Yeah, he's an interviewee. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's going to be pretty I was really psyched to just be able to talk to him. And even better than that, we were kind of rapping for a few minutes beforehand. Sure. And it was just as calm and casual as I had always envisioned talking to him. That's amazing. Yeah, it was a really neat conversation, but he was telling me about the book he has coming out, the wizard and the Prophet, and it's basically about him trying to find out how we can possibly, or even if it is possible, sustain 10 billion people on planet Earth. And not just sustain, meaning, like, keeping them alive, but how could we do it sustainably? And he goes back and starts digging in and finds that there's this long standing headbutt between the techno optimists. The people who are like. We humans are smart enough to invent our way out of any problem. And the people who are like. No. We need to really mitigate a lot of things that we're doing right now to make sure that we actually can keep doing this for the foreseeable future. And part of it is on Norman Borlag. Is he the wizard? He is the wizard. Absolutely right. The prophet is a guy named William Vogue. V-O-G-T-I believe his name. And I don't know nearly as much about him as Norman Borlaug, which is to say, I know basically zero about him, but he's the prophet, so I will know all about him when the book comes out in January. I'm psyched about it, but as I was researching this permaculture article, I was like, you can really see that same headbutt, that same push and pull between people who are saying we need sustainability, and other people are like, we need to feed billions and billions of people. And that really comes together in the debate over permaculture and whether it works or whether it is just a pie in the sky kind of idea. Well, I have a little something to say. Okay, I am a bit of an earth. Well, not a bit. I'm an urban permaculturist. That's awesome. Not me. I don't know much. What I do know about the stuff now after researching it, but we are redoing our front and backyards and we hired a permaculture company to do so. Really? The Permaculture Pros. That's not their name, but maybe it should be. Yeah. So we are like right in the middle of making our small little piece of Atlanta permaculture urban. I know it's hard to say now that I'm saying it out loud, and urban perm habitat, if you will. Urban, that's right. So I'll be peppering little things here and there. I think that would help a lot then, because permaculture, as it turns out, and I didn't know really anything about it until we started researching this, it is a woolly idea. It's tough to pin down, which is really weird because it's actually a set of design principles meant to grow food for people in a way that's sustainable and not harmful. And it basically stands in contradiction of what you would consider like big modern agriculture, which is we grow one kind of food and we squeeze as much as we possibly can out of it from the ground we have using as much artificial resources as we possibly need to increase our yield. Yes. And that's like people throw around the word sustainable or unsustainable, and maybe sometimes folks don't even stop to think about what that means. Sustainable. Or I guess we'll start with unsustainable. That means that you're depleting resources around you and you are depending very much on bringing in different resources to make that thing work. Right. Like, you're not just using what's available. That's what sustainable would be. You're using what's available. It all works together to ideally sustain itself without saying, well, now I need to bring in this thing from way over here to make these 300 acres of corn grow. Yeah, I've got to go burn a bunch of fossil fuels to create nitrogen based fertilizer, and it's not going to attach to the soil very well, so a lot of it will run off and be wasted. And even worse, it will end up in a pond, which will create an algae bloom, which sucks up all of the dissolved oxygen, which creates a fish kill. That's unsustainable. And it's weird because I hadn't really thought about that either, Chuck, but as growing up as, like, kids who were sentient in the hear unsustainable, and it's just basically, in your mind, equated with evil, like, almost intentionally malicious acts against the Earth. And that's just not necessarily the case. And that's another thing about Norman Borlaug, the wizard. He had the greatest of intentions, but you can also lay at his feet a lot of the ecological problems we're facing right now because of agriculture and the agricultural practices he helped pioneer in order to feed a bunch of people. So there's this tension between unsustainability and sustainability, but it's also a tension between what's realistic and what's not, you know? Yes, it's definitely a little sticky. It is a little sticky. But Permaculture basically is trying to create, like, a harmonious holistic approach to farming and whether it be a large farm or, like, in my case, like an small urban plot. And like I said, we'll kind of go over both of those through my lens and then through the larger ideas of the farm. And it's not like Robert Lam wrote this article from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. He did a good job with it. Always does. He does. But he does point out that it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go back to caveman days and you have to live like tuktuk and scavenge the earth. Right. He said to think of it in terms of a river, like, you're a boat floating down a river and you are sustained by that river, but you are also navigating it as well with your rudder. And if you have to pee right now, it just increased tenfold. That's right. So, yeah, it's not like just passively taking from the land what it has to offer. There's still management of it, right? Yeah. But the idea behind that management of it is managing the land in a way that the land is happy with. Yeah, kind of working with what you got. Like, you can walk past a dog that's just sitting there looking at you and maybe give it like a wink or something like that and keep walking. That's passive. But if you stop and scratch it behind the ear, you're managing that dog in a way or something like that. You're at least interacting with it more and the dog likes it. You could also walk past the dog and, like, poking in the ribs. That's interacting with it in a way that the dog wouldn't like. Permaculture is the middle one. Right, sure. So you're saying, hey, I want to get something out of you, like a good feeling, so I'm going to scratch you behind the ear. Earth. And again, like you said, you're doing that by trying to create a system, whether it's your little plot of land or a full scale industrial sized farm, in a way that it's sustainable. Meaning it requires as few external inputs as possible. That's right. Sorry, I just need to point out again, it's still being managed. It's still being managed by you, just in a harmonious way. Yeah. I think there's a word for the other thing where you just let everything do its thing. Right? Yeah. That's nature. Maybe like wilding or something, or rewilding. Have we talked about that? No, we never did. I'm probably wrong anyway, although we also thought we didn't do a cat episode, so who knows if we've talked about it before or not. All right, so this all goes back to Australia and see you in September of next year. Australia? Yeah. Right. Yes. Get excited. Oh, man, you just sold us a million tickets with that accent, buddy. In New Zealand, you got to take it better than that. Well, no, I'm super excited about going to New Zealand. Okay. I didn't want to not mention that. You say in New Zealand? In New Zealand. So in Australia in the 1970s, there were a couple of dudes named Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, and imagine they were sitting around smoking a joint one night in the version that I have in my head oh, yeah. When they dreamed up the word permaculture in 1978, which is basically what we've been talking about. This is just put a word on it, actually, two words, permanent and agriculture. Right, good point. And they said, let's join those up. And he said, Right. That was it. That's how it went down. And it's a self sustaining alternative to, like, what you were talking about, which is mass production of a single crop. And there are three basic ethics to the permaculture movement care for the earth, care for the people, and then setting limits on population and consumption. Right. And so Molassen, I believe, was a professor at the time, and homegrown was his student and they split within a few years. They had creative differences, I guess you could kind of call it. They both like, pursued permaculture but through different ways. So Mollison is frequently accused, or was, I think he may have passed accused of being kind of a dogmatic, charismatic, egomaniac maybe, where it was like, it's my way or the highway. And that extended to even principles of permaculture. Right. Like if he said it was just that was just true. Whereas homegrown apparently took a little more of a pragmatic approach to studying and finding out the best practices, discarding the ones that didn't work even if they were like precious to everybody, including the entire permaculture movement. And movement is actually the right word because there is like this definite mollison put the cult in permaculture, you know what I'm saying? There's definitely an adherency to it that's kind of fervent that the whole movement gets criticized for, rightfully or wrongly. Yeah, but they're both kind of I think the fact that they did split probably added to this field even more because there's two different courses of study or of thinking about it at least that we're able to develop in tandem. Yes, and this stuff is nothing new. They didn't invent this idea because Tuktuk and the Gang way back in the ancient days did things like this. They worked with what they had. They didn't have 400 acres of corn. They did forest farming. They had crop rotation, they composted, they had multiple crops. And they were not just out to be leading pioneers in environmentalism. That was just the way you work the earth back then. Right. And that's a lot of what permaculture is all about is returning to this idea of just sort of doing it the smart, right way. And again, this is probably not going to be the thing that feeds the world, but that's not to say you can't have a permaculture movement and farms and urban permaculture going on. Well, that's one of the things that it gets criticized about is that people who are big time adherence of permaculture do tend to say, like, yeah, this is what we need to feed the world and if we don't do this, then there's not going to be people around to feed because we're going to wreck the earth and die from climate change. Yeah, I get that, but I think I come from the reality camp and you're not going to undo conventional modern farming. You're not going to just completely supplant that anymore. It's kind of too late. I agree with you. I'm of the same mindset. I do think, though, that these practices, or most of them, should be incorporated as best as possible. Sure, that'd be great. So I think there's a happy medium between big time monoculture agriculture and pure permaculture just because they're both probably unsustainable for what we need, which is to feed a bunch of people in a way that doesn't wreck the Earth. Great. Yeah. I'm with you, man. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. We're going to take a little pause for the cause and then come back. That was so corny. It sounded like a radio DJ. It was great. And then come back and talk about design principles of permaculture right after this. Are we back? I'm back. Okay. I'm back, too. Jerry, you back. She's back. She's back. So like I said early on, Chuck, the permaculture is a little idea. There's so many different definitions of it, and as a result, image kind of suffers in the mind of rational skeptics, right? Yes. But I did find one definition of it that I thought really got the whole point across. Hit me. The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. That's a big one. There's a second half, even. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non material needs in a sustainable way. That is a great definition. I agree wholeheartedly. And I'm not sure who the actual person who said or wrote it was because it was misattributed to at least three different people. But regardless, it's a great definition. We should just throw your name in there, too. Sure. We'll say I said it. So you said you brought up the three basic ethics, right? The care for Earth, care for people, and setting limits on population. Correct. I feel like we should kind of go over those a little in depth, don't you think? Yeah. Care for Earth is not just like a lot of this is about plants, of course, but it's also animals and insects and how the air moves through the area and minerals in the Earth, and it's basically respecting all of the things within the ecosystem. Right. How's that? I think that's great. What about care for people? Right. Basically, that's saying that there's an importance to community. Every person isn't just an island. Right. And that this is a big one, too, that access to resources is a human right. And it's easy to take that for granted in places where you have easy access to land or water or something like that. But in places as diverse as Flint, Michigan, or Central America, the access to good stuff like water is highly restricted, or the water is just not good. So the idea that everybody should have easy, cheap, if not free access to something like clean water, that's a big one. It's kind of radical in a weird way these days. Yeah. And as far as the limits on population and consumption, robert puts it as recognizing how you have to reinvest money in surplus labor and energy into caring for the planet. It takes work. Right. So those are like the three ethics. That's not how you go permaculture. That's just kind of the basis for the designs to Permaculture, right? Correct. And I think you said that this is not new, right. This is something that's been around for a very long time or some of these ideas or the sustainable practices are adopted from generations and generations of proven techniques, right? Yes. Which is pretty interesting if you ask me. That's another thing too, if you have not read have you read 1491 yet? No. Oh man, you have to read it. It talks about this kind of stuff where from just looking into it they found that there's all these sophisticated land management techniques that were just totally lost the time until archaeologists started discovering them. And at first they didn't realize what they were looking at and they'd be like well there's a lot of kind of weird hills in this area, it's otherwise pretty flat. And then they realize, oh wait, this is entire system of berms that used to be planted. And in between the berms were aquaculture ponds where they raised fish and they were just doing all this sophisticated stuff that no one had any idea. And that book is just all about chasing that stuff down and figuring it out. So good. Chuck, one day you'll read it, right? Of course. Yeah. So before the break, I promise some design principles and there are believe like ten of these in our article and it breaks down like this. And this is talking about a farm, but we have incorporated in this company that's coming in is incorporating most of these same principles within place as small as our backyard. For instance, zones. We have divided our yard up into zones now and basically in the case of a farm, it's a little bit different. They divide areas into zones based on all this stuff. It just sort of makes sense and it seems like it would be intuitive and how would have done it. So it divides into zones based on how much attention certain things need on the farm and what does it require out of people in the different areas. And so if you think of it as a circle, you got your farm in the center. So obviously the stuff that needed the most attention would be closest to the center where the people are. And then as you go out and out, the activity decreases like the human activity and things are allowed like maybe trees to grow a little more wildly, right? Yeah. So like the zone is kind of like ripples in a pond or something. Right. They're concentric circles radiating from the center and I guess the center is the actual farmer, in this case your house. Yeah. Okay, so that's understandable enough. And then you look into something called sectors and that's kind of similar it seems like, but it's actually not with sectors. Again, the center of the whole Permaculture land or whatever is the farm where the people live or whatever. And then the sectors radiate outward. So the whole thing is one big circle around the center, but this time it's sliced into like pizza slices, basically. All right. I'm hungry enough. Okay, but with that so that doesn't mean like, you do sectors or zones. These are two different ways of looking at the land that will overlay one another. Right. And I've seen a couple of places that recommend if you're setting up a permaculture farm, you want to spend basically an entire year doing nothing but observing. Don't plant anything, don't cut anything down, don't dig upon, don't do anything like that. Just observe. Figure out where the sun is at different parts of the year. Where does the wind come from? Where does the water go? Are there pollutants that come onto the property that you need to manage? Where do the animals like if there's deer that come in and eat the garden, where would they be coming from? And so that's what you base the sectors on. And then that creates kind of like this underlying map beneath the zones. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay, I got that one. Right? Yeah, I think so. Okay. I mean, I'm sure a permaculture expert would say boys, relative locations. Another important part of permaculture that is basically designing things and again in a way that makes sense relative to one another. So the great example that Robert gives is planting a crop downhill from a pond. That way it's downhill. You don't need to install a pump system, the whole idea of sustainability. And so if you can have the stuff you need to water downhill from your water, then you have just created a sustainable environment. Right. And that one is an actual design principle like David Holmes came up with twelve of them. One of them was called integrate rather than segregate. And that one's definitely part of that. That's right. There's also having single elements with multiple functions, right? Yes. So going back to that, like a pond example, a pond also not only serves as a source for irrigation, but it's also a water source for your livestock. And depending on where you put it, it also acts as a barrier between your livestock and the edge of your property. Yeah. So you don't even need a fence. Exactly. Cows aren't going to swim across the pond. No, try to find one doing it. They won't do it. Or a hedge. A hedge, lovely hedge connected, a wind block, things like that. Right. And it can also produce seeds that your chickens eat. Right, right. Or shade, if you need shade. Right. That just makes total sense. Of course you want to do that. But when you stop and think about the fact that they don't do this on big modern farms, that's just wasted area where you could be planting more corn, you know what I mean? Yeah. Most people don't think about this when they're designing their home backyards either. They just say, this looks pretty that looks pretty and it may be laid out in such a way that it's completely unharmonious and working against each other at times. Right. Why is that thing dying? It's so pretty, like well, it's not where it should be. Another permaculture principle that stands in stark opposition to monoculture is having a single thing have just one function or have a bunch of different things serving as failsafes to one another. You see what I'm saying? Right. So like, that pond can also provide water, right. So it's a water reservoir, but you may also have rain barrels on site as well. So you have all these different things serving multiple functions, but also serving backups to the functions that they share with one another. Right. And again, the idea that you're doing this if you take the time to diversify, this is where the idea that you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket, it came from the farm. And some of these principles are just getting back to that very simple maximum, which is you have to diversify. And the more you diversify, the better off you're going to be. If something befalls like if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock, well, if all you do is raise chickens, you're ruined. Your family is going to starve, you're going to lose all of your money, and the farm is going to be taken from you. If chickens are just one part of a larger holistic farm you have going on, then you lose your chickens. And that's awful. But you can cut off a cow's foot and chew on that for the winter. You know where the chicken and the eggs in the basket comes from, right. Where little Bobby Joe going out to get the chicken eggs one morning, taking one basket, he says, Paul, I got them, don't fret. And then he trips on the way back and breaks all his eggs. And Paul says, Put all the chicken eggs in one basket. Now he ain't got no eggs. And then Bobby Joe says, well, then Paul have more kids, we get more baskets. That's right. And that happened in December of 1842 in Georgia. That's right. Those were my relatives. That was great. Were they chalk tall? No, this is from the other side of the family. The other side, okay. Yes. I was going to say the redneck side. Energy efficiency is a big deal using energy efficient designs, whether or not you are straight up using wind power or solar or you can just simply, like I said, build things in a way where you have natural wind breaks built in or places to allow the wind to come through and spread seed and stuff like that. Right. My favorite dude of all is the biological resources. Let's hear it. So it's just basically using nature to help solve the problems that you have. Right. So Moleson, one of the creators of it, what is his first name again? Bill Molasson. He had a saying, you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. Which is to say that that was a great T shirt, too. It was for a little while. It was almost outsold gas grass. Yeah. No one rides for free. Right. But the premise of it is that if you are overwhelmed with snails, get more ducks because the ducks are going to eat the snails and it's fine. It's good to have ducks because they do other stuff, too. Like they walk around and poop all over your property, everywhere, fertilizing it as they're doing it. Right. So just to kind of take a step back and look at it like, okay, just say, like, what would nature do? That's a great way to solve your problems through permaculture. Another one is using pigs or chickens to till the ground and to actually rotate where you plant crops every year. And so this year's pig pen is next year's cropland because you can move the pigs onto another area and they'll turn it all muddy and turn it up and get it ready for planting just like they did for this year's cropland that you're using now. Pretty great insects, too. Yes. Very big thing to bring in the right kinds of plants, to attract the right kinds of insects, to take care of the wrong kinds of insects. Right. I love it. This raises an issue, though, too. One of the criticisms of permaculture is like, well, where are you going to bring in those insects from? Right. So, for example, if you order ladybugs online, it can actually be really bad for the ladybugs that live in your area, because if they are lab raised or farm raised ladybugs, they very frequently carry a parasite that you're bringing now into your neighborhood and you can wipe out the existing native ladybug population. So what do you do? Well, the permaculture way would be to say I need to attract more native ladybugs because I got AIDS on my lemon trees. So how do I do that? Well, you just plant more high pollinating plants like sunflowers and voila. Native ladybugs parasite free. Love it. I didn't know people bought ladybugs online. Yeah, that's the thing. I know that because I've had aphids before I looked into it. You said duck, I got aphids in my limit tree. Come here. 1 million shots. Planned succession is another design principle. If you think about how land was before people were messing around with it, in a natural scene, things would just sort of grow and develop as nature intended. And fields might be barren and then grow into weeds, and that might eventually grow into plants that may eventually grow into trees. And then what do you know? You have a forest. Right? So Robert makes the case like that's, apparently the natural progression of a temperate area, that if you leave it alone for long enough, it's going to. Turn into a forest. I didn't realize that. I guess it makes sense. So this is basically saying, well, how can we do that? If that's the way the plan, if that's the way that the area wants to be, how can we accommodate that while also getting food staples from that, too? Right? There's also nutrient recycling, which is basically composting. And I was thinking the other day, I don't answer enough when asked what my favorite episode is. Composting is definitely up there. Oh, yeah. That was a great one. All right. If you're digging this episode at all, go listen to composting, if you haven't already. It's a good one. Yeah. And finally, diversity. Raising multiple crops, having different kinds of animals. Like we said, we kind of been beating up on corn, but the idea is to not have a thousand acres of a thing and have many different things. So, like you said, the benefits there, if something comes along that is an illness to a crop, you're not wiped out completely. Right. So speaking of wiping out, let's take a break for a second, okay. Are you wiped out? I'm a little wiped. I need to regenerate here. Okay. We'll be right back. Okay, we're back. I'm feeling restored, Chuck. Good. Well, you took a nap on my shoulder, and that always helps. I got a little drool on your sleeve. I'm sorry. No big deal. Okay. So when you're talking about this, design principles are great and good, and they are really interesting to me. I think ecology is incredibly fascinating. But to actually feed people, you have to take them into action and do something. And people have been trying this, right? To varying degrees of success and more importantly, to varying degrees of scientific study. I ran across a professor in, I believe the UK at a place called Schumacher College. Her name is Bethan Stag, and I get the impression shoehor college is a little crunchy. Sure. I think they're the fighting granola, little hippie dippy, just a tad. But one of the things they teach is permaculture. And so Bethenstag, one of the professors there, basically studied this permaculture next to traditional gardening plots that are the same size. Everything is the same. The amount of wind and rain and sun they're getting. The difference is one is cultivated through permaculture methods. The other one is more just like traditional gardening, like go by fertilizer and stuff like that. Who won? It depends on your definition of one. Well, which one was lying dead in a field afterward? The regular gardener. They both got a couple of good licks in on one another. Okay. Ultimately, I think most people would say that the traditional gardening or the normal modern gardening method won. The reason why it won was because for every 100 land, it yielded 13 edible food. Okay. The permaculture one yielded 2.3. Far less food was grown. But there's a couple of things you got to point out here. There is also far less time put into the Permaculture plot, because that's one of the tenants of Permaculture. It's just like, plant this stuff and then just forget about it. You're not ever supposed to mess with it again except to harvest stuff. There's an emphasis on perennials rather than annuals. There's far less inputs that are meant to be made into it. It's just supposed to be like a little engine you build and then start, and it just keeps going forever. So far less time and far less effort on the Permaculture side. So it kind of wins in that respect. Right. But then also, there was over this three year study, there were also at least one year where the weather was really bad. And so the normal modern gardening suffered as a result, whereas the Permaculture one, which was more diversified, had about the same yield as the other years. So they both won. They're all winners. It's like a soccer game. Yeah. And I think the idea, too, is it's not like that's the kind of test that should be carried out over 100 years, almost. Yes. And the whole point is, though, still, that Permaculture is not like they're not saying, we shall create more yield than any other farm. That's not the whole point. Again, though, it depends on who you talk to. There are definitely Permaculture adherents out there who think that anyone who doesn't use Permaculture is an idiot who's ruining the planet, and this is the way no, I'm not saying that. But are they saying that they can provide more yield, the conventional farming? I think if you back them into a corner, they would probably hedge that. But I think that when they're amongst themselves, they may yes. Okay. You guys totally know we can't okay. We just won't talk about it. Shut up. Simon so there are people doing this to varying degrees all over the world. Whether or not if you have a full scale Permaculture farm, then you are almost likely to be a Permaculture activist or an educator. It's not something you're doing lightly. You may also be someone who's like, well, I'm part of my farm here. I'm doing it in such a manner. Part of it. I'm not. But there are things that you can do even at your own home, like a forest garden. Well, that's like, what Permaculture seems to really be best at is backyard gardening. Yeah. So tell them about the forest garden, because I found this fascinating. Man yeah. I mean, if you have a back lawn, that is just a big grass lawn. And during our grass episode, we didn't get preachy, but a lot of people will say, like, that's the worst thing you can do is just to have a huge, flat thing of grass. Right. As far as what's good for the earth. And that's a total I mean, I think I remember we talked about that literally being just like an American creation in the something? No, it was even more than that, but yeah, I'm pretty sure it was pretty American, maybe English. So a forest garden is a food garden that you build or plant. You build it out of wooden iron in your backyard that imitates a natural forest. So you're trying to sort of replicate what you might find in that natural setting in your yard. And this is going to, like you said, make things a little easier on you because you're not going to have to rotate crops or till like you normally would, and everything's just sort of working together. And Robert has sort of a four part example, four layers, if you will, starting with trees, which are going to obviously the biggest thing in that forest garden, they're going to eat most of that sunlight, but they're also going to let dappled light through, which can be great growing conditions for certain things. Right. So you're going to grow things like blackberries or leaf lettuce or strawberries, any vines that are shade loving that produce food. But the point of this is, like, the tree isn't just like, well, here's a tree. Isn't that great? It's like the tree also provides stability for the vine to climb up. Right, right. Like you said, it provides shade for the shade loving plants. The point and I didn't really see anywhere explain why people do this. I know it's like an ancient technique from South America, I believe, like in the Brazilian rainforest, it's used to great impact what, the trees? Yeah, agro forestry, basically, is what it's called. But I didn't really see what the benefits of it are, especially if it limits you to shade loving food plants. Right? Because there's plenty of food plants out there that don't love shade. Isn't that correct? Yeah, I guess. Let me talk about what we're doing. Okay, so this lady came in and she's a company owner, and she takes a look at our yard, and she basically, instead of saying, hey, let's plant a tree that will take 20 years to grow to provide whatever shade and then go, she's like, let's look at what you got now. Because Atlanta is an urban forest on its own, as you know, and there are trees everywhere, so we had existing trees and stuff. And she basically just sort of looks at everything, draws up a design, and then comes back to us and said, here's what we're going to do. And she's working mainly with Emily because this was sort of her initiative and she knew more about it than I did, and Emily is more of the gardener in the family. Way to go, Emily. Yeah, but I was on board and I was sitting in on these meetings going, this sounds great, this sounds great. So she would say, all right, you got shade over here, so why don't we think about this here like blueberry bushes. This is where you might want to think about putting your herbs and downwind from there because of how the way the wind blows through your yard. You might want to think about this there. And we can move. Like, we had certain things that we wanted to keep, like some azaleas and some roses and things. And she was like, we got to move those because they're not in the right place. So we'll put that over here, move this over there, and then before you know it, she's drawn a schematic for a sustainable backyard that all works together. And the insects from the one plant are close to where they need to be to help kill insects that affect the other plant. Right. Well, it's probably great to get too wonky over my yard, but it just all works together in harmony, and we're doing it in stages. The main thing big, big change that we've done, aside from rearranging and planning new things, is we got a cistern finally. So we have a big, huge jeez, I don't even know how many gallons. I want to say, like, 500 gallon. No, it's large. Wow. I mean, it's as big as an above ground swimming pool. I think you're describing is it is that too many gallons? 500. That's a lot. I don't know. Let's say this. It's like half as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Wow. It's large. So this is under our deck, so it's not an eyesore or anything. All the gutters in the house, all the water that falls onto our roof is fed into the cistern. And then that cistern has pipes that they trenched and they go all underground throughout the whole yard and just sort of leach water where it needs to be. And then there's also a couple of pumps. We didn't have spigots in our backyard. We still don't. It's been awful. We've had to run, like, hundreds of feet of hose every time we wanted to water anything, and it just feels wasteful anyway. Right. And so we didn't have backyard spigots. Now we have these two posts with the little pumps, and it's sort of gravity fed in a way. Like, if the cistern is full and you turn that pump on, water will flow some. But then we have an actual pump installed on the cistern to where we can actually use a sprinkler if we want to. But the pump is squirrel run by a hamster wheel, right? I wish. And it's located in the chestnut tree, so it's going to attract the squirrels anyway. No, sadly, it does run electricity. I wish it was hooked up to solar, but we're not that far along yet. That's pretty cool, though, man. That's a neat plan you got. It is pretty awesome. And guess what? We have a swale. Oh, I was hoping we were going to be able to talk about swales. I have swales. Yeah. Robert didn't include this in his article, but I sent you a thing on swales. And we have a swale, which is to say in the back right corner of our yard. Now, we have a tiny pond. It's only about 5ft across by 5ft across. And it is round and it has a round berm around it. So it's like a little hill. And the definition of a swale, it is a level ditch that is dug across whatever site you're in with a purpose of stopping the flow of water in order to make the water slowly filter into the land instead of rushing over it. And the idea there is that most people design their yards so water won't accumulate and it's graded in such a way that rainwater will just run off of it as quickly as possible. Right. And that's very wasteful. And that's not how the ground the ground is supposed to accept the water. I know that sounds so hippie, but in an ideal situation, the ground accepts the water into it and it's not dry a day later, it is actually feeding the ground. And so this swale now has a runoff from the cistern. So when the cistern gets too full, the water will then run out into the swale and just sort of slowly leach into the ground around it. Or if we get just tons and tons of rain, obviously the swale will collect it and the water will leach it to the ground around it. That is very cool. That is swale. It is super swale. But it was an important part. Like when this lady came over, she's like, we got to have a swale. Yeah, all right. She's like, Whales are my biggest seller. And right now, it's not the most attractive thing in the world, but over time, we're planting instead of grass in between everything, or even mulch, we're doing ground cover. I can't remember the specific variety, but ground cover or mulch are the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard period. Yeah, that makes sense because the mulch will break down right. Degrade and become nutrients. Yeah. So it's pretty neat. Like we got a good scene. It's going to be years in the making. Well, that's another thing too. I mean, like, you got to be very patient with this kind of stuff. Yeah, we're in now. That's great, man. Congratulations. We're not going anywhere. There are and I'm wondering, you seem to have a pretty realistic approach to permaculture, though. Like, you're not going to save the world with your backyard, it sounds like, but it's certainly not hurting some of the issues that the world is facing, right? No, we're just trying to create our own little sustainable habitat. So there are we should mention some criticisms of permaculture. A lot of criticisms of permaculture, we should say, but we've kind of hit on a couple of them. But the big one probably is that it's not rigorously tested scientifically enough, that it's just kind of taken like, oh, yeah, that would work intuitively. And then it's just left at that in a lot of ways. So there are people like Bethan Stag, who I mentioned, and other people around the world who are starting to apply science to these things to say, this one works, let's keep at it. This one works better if you do it this way or this one doesn't work at all. Don't waste your time. Right. And as long as they're doing that, permaculture deserves any respect it can get, because it really is, again, intuitively, it makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's true, in fact, which is why you got to study that kind of thing. Yeah. And the other thing that I saw in the Robert's article that did make sense to me was one of the criticisms was to Mullison himself, because he apparently had a stress on bringing in exotic plants. And that goes counter to everything that Our Lady for her company talked about. She is all about native plants, like only native plants. And Molasses response was, well, we've already screwed up the Earth so bad that we're not trying to preserve ecosystems as they are specifically, we're trying to make them better through management. It's like, actually just contradicted everything you said back in 1978. And I think that's a pretty good example of from what I understand of that guy, he's like, well, this is what I'm saying now, so this is true. Got you. You know what I mean? And I've never met him, never heard him speak anything like that just from reading about them. That's the impression that I have got you. So to the Molsen family. Sorry if that's not right. Anything else? Got nothing else. You have to come over in two years. I'll take you up. I want you to see it now. I've been waiting for this invitation for ten years. Well, it's going to be twelve total sales. All right. If you want to know more about permaculture, you can type that word into the search bar, how Stuff works. And since I said search bar is time for listener mail, I'm going to call this harrowing story from a fashion design intern. Yeah, it's a good one. I got her permission. Hey, guys, listen to internships. I wanted to say thanks for addressing this issue. When I was in college, I went to work, or I wanted to work in the fashion industry, and the internship process was very difficult and exploitative. I managed to somehow get an internship without any connections, which felt nearly impossible, and worked my first gig for a top designer. And she did not name the designer in a follow up email. She did, but then said, maybe don't read it. Okay. But it's a top designer. Okay. And not only was the internship unpaid in one of the most expensive cities in the world, but I was also expected to wear an all black fashionable wardrobe at all times, so I had to find housing in New York, buy all new clothes. Luckily, my parents were able to help me out there. But I hated how prohibitive the whole thing was. While I was with that designer, the condon ass lawsuits were going on, and I remember people saying the lawsuit was just another example of stereotypical millennial entitlement. That's obviously not the case, because, as you mentioned, it's a social issue. Because of my internship, I was able to get more experiences in the fashion industry and eventually a full time job in New York after I graduated. Everyone I work with now had unpaid fashion internships, and almost everyone I work with is white, upper class, and from a good school. Unpaid internships have led to bigger problems and diversity that I think really have hurt the fashion industry. You always hear about how retail and department stores are dying. Well, all the companies are run by old white straight dudes, and we lack a variety of perspectives, which prevents innovation. I'm glad I had internships, and I learned a lot, but I think the internship market really needs to change. So thanks again for addressing this. A lot of people listen to your podcast and reevaluate how they do things at their own companies, and that is from Gail. Thanks a lot, Gail. Nice one. Yeah, great one. Actually, if you want to get in touch with us, like Gail did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Syskpodcast or at Josh Clark, Chuck Set, Charles W, Chuck Bryant on Facebook, and that Stuff You Should know on Facebook. I'm on there, too, somewhere, although I'm not sure where. You can send us all an email, including Jerry Jeri two stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And in the meantime, hang out with us at our home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstop works.com." | |
f43cb416-ff7a-45d5-8e39-ae5b00ed52ce | Selects: How Hate Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-hate-works | Hate is generally defined as an extreme hostility to something or someone, usually stemming from fear, anger or a sense of injury. But how does it work? Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they dig into the nature of hate.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Hate is generally defined as an extreme hostility to something or someone, usually stemming from fear, anger or a sense of injury. But how does it work? Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they dig into the nature of hate.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=78, tm_isdst=0) | 35554833 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, friends. It's charles W. Chuck Bryant. Here your friendly neighborhood podcaster setting up this week's Saturday Selects episode. And this week, everybody. I picked an episode all about hate. Oh, I hate this. I hate it when people do that. I hate it when that happens. You probably say that stuff a lot, but what does hate really mean? What is it the core of hate, and what does it mean for the world and our community? Well, we talk about all that stuff in this episode from 2011 and July 5, how hate works. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, the chipper and cheerful Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Man, I'm going ten different directions, buddy. Yeah, I'm a little screwy. Are you? Yeah. Well, focus on this one, okay? Because we're going on One Direction, and that's hate. I hate to focus. Okay. You hate broccoli. I do hate broccoli, and you know that. I also hate peas. Like, split peas. I remember declaring as a child that peas are some of my most hated enemies. I think a lot of kids don't like peas because they're mushy. Yeah, that's the problem with all vegetables, really. They're mushy. They're overcooked if you cook something. No, I've had pretty nasty broccoli, but broccoli is all that's separate. It's just disgusting in every single way. But cream spinach, I love that. It's awesome. Yeah, that's good stuff. You and I shared a cream spinach at Morton Steak just recently. Like two ladies. Yeah, it was something we couldn't even finish. It was so rich. It was really good. So, Chuck, we don't hate cream spinach. No, I hate broccoli. And one of the things I hate more than anything else is not having an intro, which I don't, because I was looking online. And strangely, the online world is a repository for hate in a certain way, as in, like, neonazi punk bands, pop music. Pop bands. This article calls it pop music. Pop music, yeah. Or Facebook groups dedicated to hate, like Holocaust denial and that kind of stuff. Sure. But this word is so ubiquitous in our culture that there is nothing there. Like, I found a guy in dairy and mass who was accused of a hate crime. Everybody wants to know why Cleveland fans hate LeBron. I can answer that. But, I mean, we throw this word around like some reality TV series. Was the show you love to hate, right? We use this word a lot, but yeah. I found a study out of the University of Texas that asked people how often they hated, and nobody said every day. It's not an everyday thing. So, like, we hate things like broccoli, but we also realize there's a real distinction between hating something and experiencing actual hate. You hit it on the head, and this is a pretty old distinction, right? Philosophers have been aware of this before. I think Aristotle was pretty sure he hated peas, but he really hated hemlock. Yeah, and he's not Webster, so I will read his definition. He's Aristotle. He said it was a dislike for someone based on our negative perception of that person's nature that is so intense that whoever feels it wants to cause real harm to another. Like, I really want to harm you. Yeah. So that's the difference. Like you said, people throw that word around, I hate Broccoli. But you're not going to go out and try and burn down Broccoli farms. No, I know that's silly. I'm not going to go burn down Cubby broccoli's family's, broccoli Farm. No, that was used to fund the James Bond movies. But Josh, I think and this is me surmising in my own personal purview, I think there are kind of two types of hate. Well, three types, really. Then one type that you just throw the word around, like, I hate that show, I hate Broccoli. One that is real hate, which I think is fear based, when you don't know someone personally or a group personally where you hate a group of people. Right. And then there's like, the anger, retribution based hate. Like someone personally has wronged you so badly that you hate them and either want to cause or which ill upon them. Right. Well, you just brought up a huge can of worms by using the word anger. Like, there is a real debate over whether hate and anger are the same thing. Right. They say they're not. It depends on who you talk to. But the people who say they're not say things like hate is brought on by humiliation or ill treatment or being devalued, where anger is brought on when you're treated in a way that you consider unfairly. Right, right. Anger is the result of not having any recourse frustration, perhaps, coupled with that. Right. And that kind of dances along the border because people who hate other groups often are frustrated. Like when we talked about the fascism in the Fascism podcast, getting groups all riled up against a scapegoat is one of the tenets of fascism. Right. So these people are frustrated at their lot in life. Their unemployment is high because of the Jews or something like that. Right. But really they're angry about their job while they hate the Jews. So the two are really intertwined. But a lot of people think if you look at them deeply enough, they're not one in the same. Right. Well, I think a lot of times that kind of hate is displaced anger and frustration at your own lot. Like what you're saying. Yeah. But there is also a very strong physiological basis to it as well. I mean, it's an emotion, supposedly, although it's not one of the basic emotions anger is. Yeah. What are the basic emotions? Anger, joy, fear, disgust and peckishness. I thought it was joy, pain, sunshine and rain. No. Who's that? Rob bass? No, I can't remember. I could sing it, but I can't remember sing it. No, I think it's Rod Bass. The duo. Oh, no. I'm thinking of. I want money. Lots and lots of money that was a duo that's good to be rich. Remember that stupid song? Yeah, kind of. They wrote a song about being rich, how great it was, and that was their only song. So unless they were already rich than they never were from that song. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Just blew my mind, buddy. So, do you hate that song? I do now. Because it's in my head. Sure. So, Chuck, what is this physiological basis of anger? Well, it's pointed out in the article, within an Iron Maiden song, which I thought was an odd choice. There's a thin line between Love and hate. Yeah. There's a whole other song called there's a Thin line Between Love and hate. Well, there's a much more popular song, I think. The Persuaders. Which was? It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate. The old Motown song. Right. Have you ever heard The Pretenders version of it? No. It's hands down the greatest version ever. Really? Between Love and Hate. The pretenders covered the persuaders. Yes. All right. I'm telling you. All right. So apparently Iron Maiden actually listened to that song on YouTube the other day, and it's an Iron Maiden song. Yeah. No, I looked it up to make sure that Iron Maiden hadn't covered the persuaders. And now Bruce Dickinson came up with his own lyrics. His own version. He's like that one's. Fine. I'm doing this one. That's right. So the point of all this, Josh, is that there is a thin line between love and hate as far as the brain goes. Because in 2008, there was a study at the University College of London, and that's in the UK. And they got 17 people. Not very wide ranging. No, I had a lot of problems with this study, but they got 17 people who said they hated someone else. Maybe that's why they may have a hard time finding someone who hates someone else. Maybe not, because I don't hate anyone. I was about to ask you that. Well, we'll get to the personal stuff in a minute. Okay, so this study, what they did was they found 17 people who hated someone else, threw them under the old wonder machine, and showed them pictures of the people they hated to record the results, I guess they're like, you need to bring pictures of people you hate. For this study. Yeah. They could have just said, think of the person you hate. I think, you know, would achieve the same goal. I guess. So. Anyway, what they found out was that a couple of regions in the brain, there's, like, a hate circuit. They call it the putoman putamen putamen. Okay. And the Jerry laughed at that. And the insular cortex both fired up with pictures of people that they hated. Right. And the significance of this is that both of those regions also fire up when you see a picture or think about someone you love, which is the longest way to say it's a thin line between love and hate. Right. And I think everybody kind of senses that. It's like passions flaring. It's virtually the same thing. They're two sides of one coin, in my opinion. If you truly hate somebody, the real hate to fear is not one where somebody's like, oh, I hate you so much, because that can be turned. Sure. That means that they have some sort of emotional connection to you. The one to be afraid of is the detached, calm, cool kind of hatred, because that's the one where you end up dead somewhere. Like I'm the Green River Killer, and I hate prostitutes. Well, that brings up an interesting sidebar. Yeah. Right. Do serial killers hate their victims? No. End of the sidebar? Well, they have long said that serial killers don't experience emotion on that scale, but they're starting to change their thinking in certain cases because a lot of serial killers suffer from antisocial personality disorder, and people who suffer from that experience a range of emotions. So I think it's both. You can't say every serial killer is the same. Well, they've been saying that for a long time. They've been trying to find the threads that connect them. And I told you about the sociologist I talked to. He was just really up in arms. That psychology had spent four decades or so looking at serial killers, and the best they come up with any social personality disorder. He's like, of course they have a personality disorder. They're serial killers. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. So back to that study, though, about the brain and the difference between love and hate. They did see a key difference, because the areas of the frontal cortex associated with judgment and critical thinking become less active when you see someone you love on the fMRI machine. Right. But when you saw someone you hate, most of your frontal cortex cortex, cortex is active. Remains active. Yeah. So that's a big difference. But that makes sense as well, Chuck, because I know you don't hate anybody, so you wouldn't understand this, but when you see someone you hate, you say that like it's a personality flaw. You tend to criticize them in your head, like, oh, you're wearing a sweater day. You look so fat and stupid in that sweater. Right. I hope you somehow get you strangle yourself on that sweater. Yeah. So the point is that it takes, like, hatred as an active thing. It's an active rumination on this. It's not a knee jerk thing, like when you might see a picture of someone you love. Right. So that's interesting. Right? That's what that study came up with, the 17 people. Yeah. It couldn't get 20. The other problem is, I'm sure they were weird Western educated, something rich and developed. I can't remember what the I stands for. And what would you spell? Weird? It's basically like the idea that all of these studies that are cited, a lot of them, they're just college kids, so it's like this really narrow niche of the human population that they extrapolate on to point. And in this case, they just use 17 of them. Well, we're here to report it and then criticize it, and we're done. We did both. That's right. What's the deal with old hate, though? Don't they have some inclination of early hate with cavemen and the like? Well, yeah, because closer to the center or the brain stem that you get in the brain, the more ancient that part of the brain is. And if there's a region like the putaman that's associated with a certain thing, eg. Hate. Right. Then that means that hate has been around for a very long time, because our part of the brain has been able to carry out that function for this long. Or should, ostensibly. Got you. Right. But then it's also new with the prefrontal cortex, which is a fairly newer aspect. So maybe we just hated, but we didn't criticize. We just hated. And I think possibly that we developed hate as a species or a capacity to hate as a survival mechanism way back in huntergatherer days, where we could feel justified by, say, taking food from another group because we hated them. Which I actually found that's a pretty inspiring idea yeah. That you had to work up hate enough to go in pillage. Yes. Okay. I think that's kind of neat because it makes it seem like we aren't naturally hateful beings, and I don't think we are. I believe everybody has hate and everyone has a vast capacity to hate. But I wouldn't characterize this as generally hateful. That's good. Thanks. I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that. It's true, though. All right, so it's in the Bible, Josh. It's an ancient texts all over the place. Hate has been around a long time. Right. Are we going to talk about Carthage? Yeah. Because I know you love this. The Carthaginian general hannibal Carthaginian. You gotta stop that. Hannibal pledged to his father, dad, I hate Rome, I hate Romans. I don't like the Italians. I hate them forever. And I will swear retribution because they have seized our provinces. Yeah. He said, Father yes, son, I'm going to kill the Romans. And he did. He made good on that. Invaded Italy and did quite a bit of damage. Of course, the Romans fired back because they hate the Carthage. Why can't I say that word? They hated people from Carthage, the Carthaginians and 146 BC. They did some pretty bad things, like burning them in their houses while they screamed. But is that hate? I don't know. I think that's an issue that I have here there with this, is that's kind of a jump to conclusion. Like is it hate? I don't know. Does hate form the basis for war or horrible acts in war? Well, I don't know because it's condemned pretty much in like the New Testament in the Bible, it's condemned in the Quran. Let not hatred other people incite you not to act equitably. And in medieval, in Renaissance Europe, you came up in you, but in Italy they came up with the vendetta. Right. Which is very much retribution for hatred. There you go. That's what I'm saying. Like I think let's say a Roman soldier comes to your town while you're away using the latrine pit that your village has dug and they burn your family alive in your house while you're using the bathroom and you come back and you see the Roman legions going away and your family is dead, burned to crisps. Right. I don't think the Romans necessarily felt hatred to commit that act, but that act would incite hatred in the person that it befell, right? Sure. So I think vendetta is an excellent example of hatred because somebody done you wrong and you're going to get back at them. Right. Or they did something to your father. The vendetta is very long lasting from what I understand. Yeah, and it's not I mean, this is obviously we're talking about mafia vendettas and war vendettas, but it can happen on a smaller level. You might not think of it as vendetta, though, but if someone does, you really wrong and you're like, I'm going to get that person back by doing this in six months when they least expect it. That's a vendetta. But you don't call it a vendetta. Well, in Italy they do. It's just come up and I'm going to get you, sucker. Yeah, bad people do that though. There was a word for it though, in medieval and Renaissance Europe, in the Messiatia, which is Latin for unfriendship. It was a legal term for hating somebody. Okay, so what we've done is established that hatred is definitely a thing that's been around a long time. Is that what we've done? Yeah. And Chuck, of course it's still around in recent modern history. There are other examples that we could go into, like hate groups. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Nazis really quick because again, we talked about fascism and one of the tenants of it being, I guess, inciting other group to hate. Yeah, group hate. That's where we are for sure. And that gave a lot of a body of data for people to study and that they're still studying. But one guy in particular named Martin Oppenheimer, who's a sociologist from Rutgers University, basically said, look, the Nazis are proof positive that you can, number one, get an entire group to hate another group. Right. And that you do this by identifying and exploiting the group that you're with their frustration, say, unemployment, joblessness, and then basically saying those are the people who are at fault. That's how you stir the pot. Exactly. That's how you incite hatred, which has got to be one of the worst things you can do. One of the worst nonviolent acts I think a person can commit is incite hatred. Yeah, yeah. And also, I thought what came to mind to me when I was reading this was some of these same tactics, like marginalized people, people who are insecure, who are seeking safety somewhere. It's also kind of the same thing they do with the cults and the brainwashing. They're seeking out the same types of people and saying, hey, you feel marginalized. You feel like you're not loved. You need a safe haven. But they're not saying, Go hate someone else. They're saying, just come and be with our group. Well, our association of in group and out group is like this emotional, psychological razor blade that can be exploited in any number of ways. Yeah, exactly. But it's always a marginalized people, it seems like. Yeah. Or you mean the people who are who have hatred stirred up in them. Yeah. Or go join a cult or something like that. Yeah. You mean teenagers. Yes. And well, a Stanford study in 2010 basically said, hey, if you want to teach teenagers to hate, here's how you do it. You can't just overtly say, go hate this group. Hate Muslims, hate black people, hate Jewish people, hate gays. You can't just say that it's not good enough. But if you tell a story that basically implies these are people you should hate, and here's why. Right. Like, homosexuals are Pedros, and so you can't let them into certain groups, and by the way, you should hate them because of this story. Right. Then that works. I think that I had a problem with that one because it was like that's true for everything. If you tell the story, it's going to hit home more personally to somebody. Yeah. You can say, hey, go love Sea Biscuit because he ran a horse race. That was pretty neat. But if you tell the story of Sea Biscuit, all of a sudden you're going to leave that thing going, man, I'm getting my butt to the Kentucky Derby next year because I love me some horse racing. I love Sea Biscuit. See, you saw the movie, right? No, I didn't. But the funny thing is that all that study made the careers of two Stanford researchers. Right. But they do have a point, because they point out in this article, or they don't, but we do. D. W. Griffith's awful movie. Awful in content. Birth of a Nation from 1915. It's no Sea Biscuit. It's no Sea Biscuit. But it did a really good job of getting people to hate black people in the United States. Yeah. Doesn't it feature like, the well, since it was 1915, it's like the first and everything, but it's like the first on screen rape or implied rape, or there was a rape of a white woman by an escaped slave, I think. By a white actor in blackface. Yeah, of course, at the time. Yeah. And it was a big, huge movie. It grossed $10 million in 1915. That's million that's $216,000,000 today is what it gross. Yeah. And it was based on a play. Yes, it is. It's based on a play in a book called The Klansmen. And DW. Griffith felt so bad about this afterward that he made a followup film that year called Intolerance, which was a three hour silent film meditation on four parallel stories of man's intolerance throughout history. Oh, I didn't know you did that. That's good. Yeah, because I want to, like D. W. Griffith. Yeah. I mean, he didn't write birth phenomenon, so he directed it not like getting them off the hook or anything, but I think at the time, he was just trying to make a movie that sold a lot of tickets. Got you. And that was the way to do it. Yeah, that's the way to do it. And then the Nazi, of course, anyone who saw Inglorious Bastards knows that Gerbles, Joseph Gerbils, was in charge of the propaganda department with feature films. Yeah. And they had one called Judsouss. Is it JuD or yud? Probably it would be Judas. So you're the one who speaks German. How did you say judsouss? I don't know. I was concentrating on the, UMLA, part in the sus. Okay. Yeah. Be Yudsous. Okay. But that featured a Jewish main character who was shunned by a Gentile woman. And so he raped her. Oh, yeah. Among other things. Yeah. And it was required viewing for the stormtroopers. Right. To get them riled up. Yeah, they loved it. And then they give them crystal meth. Really? Yeah. From what I understand, that will do it. And that didn't just go out with the Nazis. Media has been playing, like, more and more of a role among hatred as a concept and as a practice. Right. Yeah. Because I think in the 90s, Bosnian Serb TV showed something that's kind of referred to now as, like, basically hate mongering series called Genocide that stirred up a motion against the Bosnian Muslims. Right. Yeah. Well, you know what happened with that? The Balkan war. Yeah. Al Qaeda has done similar things on the Web. Obviously, the Web is a good place to go try and get this thing done. These days, they have chat rooms. They have chat rooms with Facebook's becoming increasingly available for people who have hate based Ideologies. And Facebook is like, look, we can't do I mean, we'll find them and shut them down when we can. But they're all over the place. Are they? Yeah, they are. And then also chuck pop music. Yeah, they call it pop music. And the reason I know I can't call it pop music is because I've seen some of those specials on I saw a really good one. I can't remember on neonazis, and they have musical groups that are neo Nazi songs, and they just sing about hating other people. And it's aggressive music. It's not pop music. It's not pop. There's no sense. No, it's not handsome. So, Chuck, the article begs a pretty interesting question, I think. Is hate a mental illness? Because don't you have to be slightly mentally ill to burn down a house with an entire family trapped inside? Maybe. Or maybe you're just following orders. Okay, excellent. I think you just hit upon it. Our understanding of hate is incomplete because our understanding of the things that we do that we associate with hate is also incomplete. Are you just following orders? Are you being whipped up into a mob mentality? Do you actually hate this other group because you lost your job? Or is this emotion just being exploited by someone else, a third party? And also, I think our understanding of mental illness isn't refined enough to say, yes, hates the product of a mental illness. Sure. Because they reference Hitler and Osama bin Laden as two people they suspect might have been mentally ill or at least antisocial. And they also referenced the columbine shooters right. As one of them suffered from depression and they had these hate filled rants that they ended up finding. And was there a link between that depression and hatred? Right. I guess that begs the question was Osama bin Laden and Hitler and Dylan Klebold so wrapped up in hatred that they were crazy? Or was hatred a byproduct of any mental illness they may or may not have had? These are questions we don't know. But my whole idea that hatred is brought out when you are mistreated by someone else is backed up by a 2000 study of people from Kosovo and those who'd gone through the most trauma and stress hated the Serbian troops who borne that out on them more than other people who maybe had pleasant exchanges with Serbian troops. I guess that makes sense. Yeah. We got to mention hate crimes and hate groups briefly. Hate crime is obviously a crime carried out against somebody based on their skin color, their ethnicity, their national origin, their gender. Disability, sexual orientation is one you hear a lot about. Yeah, disability is a sad one because it took a while to get that into hate crime bills. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. But the Congress has passed legislation now that makes hate crimes more serious offenses than just, like, a regular assault. Yes. Which is pretty awesome and how it should be. I remember when there was a child safety law that was being passed in 2006 and there was a hate crime language that was attached to it that made sexual orientation crimes hate crimes on a federal level. And there's a big outrage about it among religious groups. Do you remember that? I think so, yeah. They were like, Wait, we have a First Amendment freedom to hate gay people it's part of our religion. Right. So you're saying that that in and of itself is a hate crime by saying, like, no, these people are wrong. Homosexuality is bad, it's wrong, that kind of thing, and that they thought that that kind of infringed on it, which I don't think it does, but that was their argument for a while. I don't think it worked. Interesting. So I have a list here first, Josh, and then we have a couple more little stats about hate groups. Since 2000, the Southern poverty law center claims that hate groups in the US. Has grown by more than 50%. And since when? Since 2000. Oh, wow. Yeah. And they had the top five states with the biggest concentrations of hate groups. And this one was continued on the next page. And when I was reading it, I was like, please, Georgia, don't be on there. Please don't be on there. And it's not and we will count them down from five to create suspense. Idaho is number five for hate groups, evidently. Wyoming is number four. You got Arkansas. Number three. Mississippi is number two. Two from the south. And then number one, according to the southern poverty law center, is Montana. Yes, that's Montana. Grab your guns, fellas. Yeah, there's a lot of militias in Montana. Yeah. But there's also a lot of, like, super chill cool, like fly fishing, microbrew drinking hippies out there. It's an interesting mix. Yes. I spent time there, and I saw both in this town, and I could feel the friction even between those groups with an Indian bird. Yeah. I was out in a saloon and having a good time with some locals, and then a couple of cowboys came in that didn't like the people from La. Being in there. And you could, like, definitely sense there's two different types of people in Montana. There's probably more than two, but I'm generalizing. No, there's two. There's just two. Okay. Hate groups and hippies. So, Chuck, you got some stats for us? Yeah. You dug this up right on who people hate. Yeah. Acquaintances, 24%. Friends, 23%. Family members 12%. That's sad. exboyfriends and girlfriends, 12%. And within the family, it's fathers are hated the most at 45%. Yeah. Mothers at 23%, in laws at 13%, and siblings at 3%. That's kind of sweet. That's surprising to me, though. I would think siblings would be the highest because they're the ones that beat tar out of you most frequently in most families. Right. So do you hate people? Let's finish up with that. I have found that the best way to hate somebody is to just check them off. You'll write someone off, but not have that act of hatred. I don't generally like, I will just be like, I can't believe you wore that sweater, you fat pig idiot, in my head. But it's usually because I'm in a bad mood about something else. I don't walk around just actively hating people. It's. A waste of time. It's a total waste of time. Yeah. I don't think I've ever hated anybody. I had a situation and ex girlfriend shacked up with one of one of my best friends after I moved state, and we were broken up, quote unquote. But I also was like, I'm coming back for you. This isn't over. Are you going to find work in California? I was going west in my wagon, and they shacked up pretty quick after I left. And I had a few years of bad dreams and periodic bad dreams. I wasn't like every day I woke up thinking about it, but it faded away. But it was never even hate. It was just like, oh, man, why you got to do that? Really? Yeah. That sucks. Don't do that. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is, like, people who go and kill those people. Those two people. Oh, yeah. And that's like, former famous football stars. And I think it's all in the wiring. You're wired a certain way, and I'm not wired to indulge those kinds of things. I suspect it all has to do with the amygdala. You think? Yeah. All right, well, if you want to learn more about the amygdala, you can type that word into the search bar@howstoughfworks.com. You can also type in the word hate to bring up the article that we worked off of today. I should point out, too, Josh, that I made right with the dude years later and never made right with a girl. What does that say? I think it says that you hated the girl more. I just never felt the need to dredge that back up with her. Got you. But the dude, I was like, man, you can't have, like, an old friend that you're not friends with anymore. At least I can't I don't like that stuff. No. Yes. No, man. I don't like that hanging over my head. Okay. Try to make it right. That's what I say. You're done now I'm done. Sorry. Anyway, I think did I even say handy search bar? You totally threw me off. No. All right, well, handysearchpart housedups.com. I said that, Chuck, so that means it's your turn for listener mail. Yes. Josh, this is on suicide bombing. And this, Nick, brings up a very good point that I think kind of fits in with this podcast. Okay. Hi, guys. And Jerry, I think you are very brave for taking on the issue of suicide bombing. I don't know about brave, but I appreciate it. I don't want to contribute too much to the deluge of emails, but I would like to say you could have more explicitly underscored something that I believe is key to understanding suicide bombing and terrorism in general. Both are weapons of the weak and the beleaguered. Sort of like our hate thing. Okay. Do you agree? Yes. Well, I mean, we even said a suicide bomber costs about $150. Exactly. He points out if Palestinians, for instance, had access to Predator drones and guided missile systems rather than rocks and slingshots, I don't think that Palestinians would resort to martyrdom. I would also point to suicide bombings carried out by the Vietmen during the French occupation of Vietnam or the example of Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, both of which movements were secular in nature. All I want to say is, it seems like suicide bombings is a phenomenon often arising from situations in which there is a huge asymmetry of power between an occupying or apartheid regime or a native or oppressed population. You guys did mention this, but I think this dimension is at least as important to the issue as religion or notions of martyrdom. And that is sincerely from Nick. And I kind of agreed. Nick. Nick is a sharp tack. Yes. It's like right on the money. Yeah, thanks for that one. Wow. Okay. Well, if you think you're a sharp tack, we want to hear from you. Right, Chuck? That's right. Send us an email about anything at all. Anything at all. 20 stuff. Podcast at how stuff workscom. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
What was Operation Plowshare? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-was-operation-plowshare | America had already used two nuclear bombs to devastating effect when researchers thought "maybe we can use these bombs to dig big holes instead." That's right, atom bombs to replace bulldozers. And it worked great. | America had already used two nuclear bombs to devastating effect when researchers thought "maybe we can use these bombs to dig big holes instead." That's right, atom bombs to replace bulldozers. And it worked great. | Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:54:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=54, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=119, tm_isdst=0) | 41391072 | audio/mpeg | "Binge. Listen this and all your artist stations plus any song from our library of millions of songs all ad free. Get your free 30 day trial of iHeartRadio AllAccess. You'll love it. Don't be basic, be extra. Start your free 30 day trial of iHeartRadio AllAccess now. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Rowland. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast, it's the bomb. Not the bomb, the bomb. That's right headphones. But it was okay. It worked for this one. Have you heard? Go ahead. I was going to say, you know what didn't work for this one was this the intro. Long intro, which was a nice story but has nothing to do doesn't do it. I would like to cover that though at some point. Yeah, it's a true story. Let's leave it a secret. Yeah, everybody sorry. So have you heard of Operation Plow Share before? No. So guys, there's this really awesome Slate article about Operations Powshare. It's actually an excerpt from a book, I can't remember what the book is called, but it was on Slate. It's worth checking out. But just look up Operation Pleasure in Slate. This guy goes into it's actually called What Could Go wrong? It's by Ed Regis. Bam. I knew that. Is it's a guy who wrote a book on Operation Plow Share and they excerpted on Slate. Oh, I thought you were going to say he's like my important like Brian Gamble. No, I was baming like my own how quick I got the answer that I was looking for, I was able to stall without coming off of stalling while I found the answer. I understand. I was just self proud of myself. Faming. Yeah, so I've heard about this when I read that article but I hadn't heard about it before. Yeah, but Operation Plushare is basically this idea that we could use all of these surplus huge atomic bombs that were laying around for civil engineering projects. Basically that we had to move Earth. Yeah, that we had at our disposal, developed in World War II this incredible explosive capacity. Why not use it to move Earth? We could use a canal. Let's make one. Yeah, why bring 100 bulldozers in for months and months and man hours when we can just drop a bomb and have a big hole. Right, exactly. Weirdly. It makes sense. It totally makes sense. Here's the problem with it, though. It's insane, because to use this successfully, you have to literally ignore radioactive fallout from nuclear blast. There's just no way around it. Yeah, but this is a time where they were blasting bombs up, way up high in the sky. They were blasting it well, as you'll see, underground. Well, these cats knew what was going on. It was the public. It wasn't hip to it yet. Well, sure, but there was little regard, I think. Yes. I mean, they dropped them on people. Yes, that's a little regard. They had pretty little regard. Japan. That's a really great point that you bring up after Japan. This idea of using nuclear bombs for peaceful civil engineering projects led to the title of this operation. The name of this operation operation Plow Share. Based on that, I think it's an Old Testament thing about beating your swords into Plow shares so that you're using things not for war, you're using technology not for war and to harm other people, but to further humanity through technology. Yeah, they lifted the name straight from the book of Isaiah in the Bible. So very clever title. And supposedly the legend goes that there's a physicist named Isador Issa Robbie, and he said, So you want to beat your old atomic bombs into Plow shares, huh? When they went, Robbie, you did it again. So should we talk a little bit about what led up to this idea? It's something called the well, have you heard of the Suez Canal? Once or twice. Have you heard of the Suez crisis? No, I hadn't actually had you? I had heard of it, but I didn't know much about any of this stuff. Yeah, so the Suez Crisis is what preceded this idea. And it goes a little something like this. The American government and the British government were starting to get well, for a couple of years they had been a little bit annoyed with Egypt, specifically their president, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nassar, or Nassar nasser, I think it's NASA. We'll go with Nassar. Okay. And he had been cozying up to the Soviet Union, kind of getting weapons funneled through Czechoslovakia, and they were arming the Egyptian army. And we're talking about the Cold War. So people were getting a little annoyed by it. They were, because Egypt had been formerly first World, because it was not only allied with the British, it was under British imperial rule until the early fifty s. And a military coup basically threw off the British shackles, but not immediately and not necessarily in the most bloody manner. The British ended up hammering out a timeline where they left Egypt. Right, yeah. But the Brits were, I mean, for a couple of years. At this point in 1956, egypt was still trying to get Britain to end their military presence around the canal. Right. And then at the beginning of July 1956, the last British troops left the Suez Canal, and on July 16, Nasser said, oh, we're nationalizing the Suez Canal. See you later, everybody, it's ours. Yeah. And that was a little bit in retaliation for the US and England and Britain pulling out of our promise to help them finance their Aswan Dam project. So it's sort of like there's a lot of back and forth sniping, like, oh, yeah, you're not going to finance this. Well, I'm going to nationalize the canal now that you guys aren't here anymore and I'm friends with the Soviets now and they're giving us weapons. Yeah. So that was a big deal. And not only was it a big deal because there's a lot of geopolitical maneuvering going on, it was a big deal to Britain because the British Empire was very much in decline. It had just been bombed to holy heck, even though it had come out on the successful side during World War II. And because of World War II, America kind of came out as like the new big kid on the block, the kind of tough bully in charge, basically. And this is happening as America was ascending at the same time Great Britain was declining. And the British ego was a little touchy at the time. So it assaulted the British Empire's ego for the one. But it also had a more practical problem, and that dam was important. Not the dam, the canal. Yes, the canal was it obviously controlled a lot of trade in the Middle East, specifically the oil supply. And it wasn't just Britain, it was France as well. They actually ran the Suez Canal Company, even though the Brits were the largest. British government specifically was a big stakeholder in that company until it was nationalized. It was run by a French company. And they were also exposed, basically. Britain and France were both kind of exposed. Like Egypt stood up to them. Right, exactly. They were like, Wait a minute, egypt shouldn't be standing up to us. We're Britain. Exactly. We're Great Britain. Exactly. So there was egg on the face of, I guess, omelettes or wait, crepes on the face. Yeah. Of France. Yes. And eggs on the face of Britain. Right. Because they had eggs. Yes. But what's, like toast and pork and beans, which is weird. So the British and the French have egg all over their face and they decide that they're going to do something about this. Now, they don't technically invade Egypt themselves, right? Yeah. What they do is they go to Israel and they say, you guys should probably invade Egypt, don't you think? Yeah. Like you guys have been battling Egypt already on the border. Yeah. What's one more invasion? Yeah. So they got Israel to invade, basically as a means of setting themselves up, the French and the British of sending troops into act as peacekeepers man. Yeah, it sounded like all three of them. I don't think they like snowed Israel. I think they were all three on this plan. Yeah, that's the impression I have, too. So, basically, they said, you guys attack on October 26, 1956. We're going to call for a ceasefire, but we'll be in there a couple of days later, don't you worry. Right. And that's actually a very post Imperial maneuver. Had it been Imperial, they would have just been like, these guys are brown and they're rising up, so we're going to invade. That's totally fine, isn't it? Rest of the west. Right. And the rest of the west would have been like, sure, but this was post Imperial. They had to do some maneuvering. They sent Israel in, they came in as peacekeepers afterwards. And remember, America now is the big kid on the block, and there's such a thing as a UN in America. Went to the UN and went, what is that? They can't do that. We condemn this. They basically acted without telling the US, which really rubbed the American government the wrong way. And by this time, it was initially successful. They took control of the Suez Canal. The Israeli French British thing. Yeah, the force did. So it worked. But then the Soviets got involved and they said, you know what? Khrushchev said? I'm going to start raining down nuclear bombs on your head, because this is a big issue. So the US said, I don't like any of this. I'm going to threaten sanctions against all the countries involved. All of you, time out. Yeah. Go in the corner. That's right. And when Christopher said, I'm going to rain bombs down on you guys around the canal, it worked. Yes, it did. It actually ended the Suez crisis. Right. Like, really quickly. At the end of October is when the invasion took place, and in December is when France and Britain withdrew. So it was like six weeks. Yeah, that's pretty quick. And then in March, Israel withdrew and it was all over and the Soviets were able to puff their chest out and say, a nuclear threat worked. You guys know how well nuclear bombs work. Yeah, because you did it. And the British went back and drowned their sorrows in a pie and a bitter and the French went back and drank wine. Sure, sure. I was going to say Greg Goose vodka. Wouldn't that be the soviets? No, because Greg Goose is made in France. Oh, well, sure. I just hear vodka. I know a lot of people in France have that same reaction. So, Chuck, somebody said, I think he said, cruise ships, that I'm going to rain bombs down on you. Nuclear bombs down on this canal, on all of you. And that must have struck an American physicist, because at some point somebody said, you know what? Raining bombs down with canals is not a bad idea. It might make a larger canal. Exactly. So, in a very strange way, the Suez crisis actually helped lead to Operation Plow Share. And we'll go into that right after this. How about that? Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, Card members get access to built in travel benefits. 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And a dude named Herbert York, he was the director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, and he was a nuclear scientist. And he said, you know what? What Josh Clarke said before the break was right. He always follows me around. He says, Maybe we can use nuclear weapons to move a lot of Earth. And they got the name, as we said earlier, from the Book of Isaiah, and took it to the Atomic Energy Commission. And they said, this is a great idea. Let's try it. Yeah, they had a meeting and just brought people together and said, hey, all of you guys, let's figure out a better way to use these things. There's a lot of projects we want to do, so let's pretend like the pies in the sky and we'll all shoot for it. Isn't that the old say? I think so. They all got together and started thinking, putting their heads together. And again, the US and the Soviets and Great Britain and then France as well, I believe, are all just testing nukes all over the place all the time. But they're testing nukes throughout this era, throughout the too, I guess, to basically figure out how to make a better nuclear weapon. Yeah. What operation Plough Share was. It was different. It was using these nuclear detonations to study things that could be used for like industrial applications. And one of the first tests like this was called the Renew Shot, which was actually a part of a larger operation called Plumb Bob, which is pretty great. All the names, when you read them out are pretty funny, right? Yeah. And the Renew Shot, which is one nuclear test in a larger program, was the first fully contained underground nuclear test. That means that none of the nuclear fallout escaped into the atmosphere. And it was a pretty big deal because it showed that you could do this. And they also were looking at whether it was basically a proof that you could use nuclear bombs for underground engineering projects. Yeah. And it went so well, in fact, that the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission, which approved the project to begin with, said, you know what, we're not even going to hide this one. We can actually talk about it in the press. Yeah, like we're proud of this, basically. They did. And so actually renew again, it was part of Operation Plumb Bob. It wasn't part of Plough sure, but it was basically a proof of concept that this could happen and that you could just kind of study these explosions for things like industrial uses. Yeah, it was their sizzle reel. Right, exactly. So the problem was that the nuclear weapons you would be using for a civil engineering project were really basically the same thing as the nuclear weapons that you would be using as weapons that are extraordinarily highly classified and just couldn't be given to civilian companies for testing in use. So the government, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and all of those guys, they had to carry out the tests themselves to make sure that they basically kept a lid on it before handing the technology over to the civilian sector. Right. And they did. And that was where Plow Share officially came from. And it started at a really bad time, actually. Yeah. I mean, they weren't long. I think it started in the summer 57 and in March 1958, Khrushchev said, you know what, Niet? No more testing of nukes for US which put pressure on the US. But Eisenhower, he wanted to see testing, too, but he didn't feel like he could be the first one to do that because the rest of the people in the United States would think he's a big was. Isn't that interesting though, that Khrushchev and Eisenhower both wanted to stop nuclear testing and totally neither one of them had the support at home for it. Yeah. So it took Crews chef, to start it. So then Eisenhower said, well, now we can stop. And there was a moratorium on nuclear testing for a while. Yeah, but the nuclear physicists who were involved in Operation Plow Share were like this isn't going to last very long. The Cold War is just too cold. And as a matter of fact, a series of events led to the end of that moratorium within, I think, two years or was it 1958 that the moratorium started? Yes, March 1958. So then I think it might have been, yeah. Three years later, the US and the Soviets started squabbling about West Berlin and the Berlin Wall which was one of my all time favorite episodes that I always forget about when people ask like, what's one of your favorite episodes? That's definitely one of them. Fascinating. It was a good one. And then they also started squabbling about the shooting down of a YouTube spy plane in 1960. Yeah, that really popped up everyone's chest, obviously. Right. And so in September 1961, they said I think it was Khrushchev again, was the first one to say remember when I said yes? Now I'm saying whatever the Soviet word for DA? Yes. Is it DA? DA. So let's start testing again. And so then the US. Of course, said, well, we'll start testing again. Right. And Operation Plow Share, they had gone into serious pre production because like you said, they knew it wasn't going to last. Yeah. So they just started planning all the things they would do once they got these bombs back. Yeah, they had some downtime and they wanted to be able to be shovel ready when the moratorium was lifted on nuclear bomb explosion. By shovel you mean atom bomb. Right, exactly. So Edward Teller had gotten his people together and said, start thinking about this stuff. And some of the ideas that had come up with they were going to blow a channel through the Capinga Morangi Reef in the Marshall Islands. I think I actually said that correctly. Kapinga Morangi. Yeah. Thanks, man. I support that. So they were going to use a nuclear weapon to blow up a live coral reef off the Marshall Islands. I can't imagine how devastated that area is just from the stuff they did do there. That's where we did so much of our Pacific nuclear testing. I can't imagine what has anyone ever done a lot of studying on Nevada? Nevada? Excuse me? Not Nevada. No, Nevada, but Nevada. I think 90% of these plowshare tests took place in Nevada. Yes. And there's got to be nevada has been rained down with nukes underground all over the place as testing ground. Right. Not just Nevada, but I think they were definitely, like, took the lion's share of the abuse. For sure. I'm curious. I'm sure they've done tests. I'm sure they're just, like, when the results come in, maybe that's why they don't have to pronounce their own state's name for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about. Anytime we say Nevada, we get 18 emails at least from people who live in Nevada telling us kind of firmly that we're saying it wrong and please say it right from now on. Yeah, they say it's Nevada. And my response is always the same. I was like, we know, but you should know that only people from Nevada say it that way. Right. Everyone else says Nevada. Yeah. And now we'll get email from six more people say, I don't even live there, and I say it. Right? Yeah. We poke fun. We should do a show in Vegas one day. Sure. No, we should have our own theater in Vegas one day. Yeah, we should. We should have, like, one of those yeah, that's what I was looking for. Like Britney Spears. Yeah, we can get who is that guy that sings, like, all the impressions? Rich little now, the singer. Danny something. Danny K. I can't remember his name. Who are you talking about? He's a dude. He's got a big act in Vegas where he just like, now I'm Frank Sinatra. No, I'm Bruce Springsteen. Now Billy Joel. Those are terrible impressions. Well, I'm not the great Danny. Danny Gans. That sounds familiar. Wow, man. I thought you were so good at impressions that you were doing an impression of Danny Gans is bad impressions. No, I think he's supposed to be pretty good. Yeah, I think that name is right. You don't get your own theater in Vegas unless you're top Notch Buddy way. You got to be Sammy Gans or Britney Spears. Yeah. Or David Copperfield. Oh, yeah. It's got me. The Jet disappear and the Statue of Liberty, let's not forget. Yeah, just gone. No trickery, either. No camera tricks. He literally made the Statue of Liberty disappear. I know. I just said Liberty. Where were we? I have no idea. Operation Plow Share. Oh, we were talking I know, Chuck. We were talking about all the insane projects that Edward Teller yes. Father of the HBomb, and his crew came up with during the downtime during the moratorium. Correct, sir. So it's blowing a channel in the Capinga Marangi Reef off the Marshall Islands. Yeah. How about a new harbor in Alaska? Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah, that was a big one. It was a big one. Making canals. And not just canals, sea level canals, because we did an episode on the Panama Canal and one of the issues, I guess you could call it, with the Panama Canal, is that there are a series of locks as part of the canal that basically are steps for ships to go up and down a mountain range. It's genius. Sea level canals are where you below a flat line all the way through anything that gets in the way from sea to shining sea so that the entire canal is at sea level. So a ship can just go. So that's what they're looking at. Sea level canal excavation using nuclear bombs. Yeah, they were going to call that. It was either that one or the widening of the Panama Canal. The Pan Atomic Canal. Come on. That's way too cute. Yeah, well, everybody was blitzed on martinis at this time. That's true. All right, well, let's take a quick break, and then we will pick back up with the restarting of Operation Plow Share in December 1961. All right, Josh, it's December 1961, as promised. Liar. If you are in Carlsbad, New Mexico, you might want to take a weekend away to Nevada and go work on a healthy glow, maybe. Because if you live near there, they had something called Operation Gnome, codename Gnome, and that was a three kiloton blast. And this one, it seemed like hold on. Chuck, do you remember that huge coffee table book that was an illustrated guide to the life of gnomes? It was big in, like, the late 70s, early 80s. No, man, I grew up with this. Really? It was wonderful. That's all I have to say. Okay. I thought for sure you're going to be like, yes. Hopefully my dad still has it at his house. I really hope he does, because I want to get my hands on it. What's the deal with gnomes? Why are people so into that? They're just cute and they're helpful and they hang out around psychedelic mushrooms as like, where they hang out under shade and stuff. See? Another cool. Right? Got you. So they set off the bomb and Operation Nome, and they had a few objectives here. They wanted to see how much heat it produced. Is it going to cause an earthquake? Let's measure the seismic activity. Right. They wanted to see if they could generate steam to using turbines for electricity, basically setting off nuclear bomb. Yeah. But what they kind of really wanted to do was see how big of a hole they could create. Kind of. And again, this one was also underground, and I think they blew it in Carlsbad in a salt mine. Right. And they basically just created a huge cavity underground in a salt mine and loosened up a bunch of salt. Neat. They said, wow, that really worked. And actually known was the first actual Plow Share test. Everything else has been kind of laying the groundwork for it before then, so that no went really well. And everybody's like, this is great, let's do it again. So july 6, 1962. We just celebrated the 4 July, so let's celebrate again by setting off 104 kiloton bomb in the Nevada desert. And, man, this thing was huge. A 437 yard in diameter hole that was 109 yards deep. Right. It's actually the largest man made crater in America. Huge. It's on the Register of National Historic Places because obviously it's still there. It's like tahoe now, actually. That's funny. The Soviets developed their own similar program a few years after the Americans called the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy Program, and they blew up. They created a crater lake in Kazakhstan with one of their explosions. Oh, really? So it has been done, but with this one, it's a dry crater. The one from the sedan test, right? Yeah. I cannot hear the word Kazakhstan without thinking of Borat. Yeah, that's where Boratte is from. And I watched the other night, I came home after a late night out. That's all I'll say. And Borat was on, and I hadn't seen it in a long time. And I found myself watching it and laughing as if it was the first time I'd seen it. It will hold up forever. So funny. Oh, man, I love that character. So the sedan test. Yeah. So, again, 104 kiloton kiloton bomb. You can say it right either time. Kiloton. Yeah. What is wrong with me? I don't know. Anyway, the one from the gnome blast is three kilotons. Yeah, it's huge. And you were talking about Nevada getting, like, fall out and all that. Chuck yeah. This explosion was so huge and it released so much radioactivity into the atmosphere that apparently they have done some calculations and they figured out that this bomb alone, this test alone released 7% of all the fallout from all the tests in Nevada combined. It was huge. And it went everywhere. It went up into Iowa, it went to the Northeast. It was everywhere. Unbelievable. And they were like, let's try it again. Yeah, they did move 12 million tons of dirt, which was the objective. Again, I sort of see where they're going. And if there wasn't nuclear fallout, it'd be great. If it was just a bunker buster that could do that kind of dirt moving, it would be great. Well, not great because you're still wrecking wildlife in the ecosystem. They can find somewhere else to live. But you're right. They did say it went great. So let's move on to Operation Buggy. They wanted to string together a chain of nuclear bombs. Right? It's like they started smoking weed one night and said, hey, what else can we do? Right? Like Beavis and Butthead. And they said, all right, let's link some bombs together like some black cats. Yeah, let's get five of them and see if we can make a channel. It's a nuclear road charge, basically, is what it was. It's the one and only that the US. Ever conducted. And again, I guess it worked five. One kiloton bombs detonated simultaneously. That must have been a heck of a thing to see. Yeah. And then, of course, those dopes. They're always standing somewhere nearby, like behind a lead shield. Right. And then they turn and look at the camera. Yeah. And then their teeth fall out. Isn't that a sensitive I think so. And we're laughing. It's not funny. The Simpsons are hilarious. Okay, got you. One of the other things that we're looking to do here is what we know now is fracking. Yes. And this is actually the, likeliest, thing you could have used a nuclear bomb for as far as, like, civilian projects go. Yeah. But far less precise is fracking, to, say, the lease. Yeah. So fracking is where you basically explode some oil that's locked up in shale or natural gas or something like that, so that you can get to it more easily. But they use it with hydraulic pressure these days, not nuclear bombs. Right. It's a little more surgical. Right. It's amazing that fracking could get even worse. But sure. If you apply a nuclear bomb to it, it makes everything worse, basically. Yeah. They called it then gas stimulation, which I have ten jokes I'm not going to say. Sure. I think that's good. Yeah. And that actually turned out to be one of the more promising aspects of the whole program, because that could generate money. It could. And they were actually corporate sponsors on that project. Of course. The problem is, they found out later on that when you use a nuclear bomb to loosen up gas underground, locked in rock or whatever, it taints it with tritium, actually, and it renders it basically unusable. And they figured out that even if you could do it without tritium yeah. What are you laughing about? I can't say it out loud. Then you would still be wasting tons and tons and tons of money. They figured out yeah. Things became they found out cheaper ways to get these resources over the years. They said non nuclear was exactly safer and cheaper. Yeah. And actually through this investigation and the gas stimulation, which one was that? Was that Buggy? I think. Yeah. Buggy. Okay. No, sorry. Buggy was the Row charge one. Right. I'm not sure what that one was called, where they looked into it. But for the gas stimulation project, they figured out that they had poured $82 million into it by the time it was over, just that one program, and that it would take 25 years of continuous gas production from these sources just to make back 40% of that. So they're like, this isn't adding up at all. That's probably the only reason they stopped, because it didn't financially make sense. Well, that and then also, like, it was painting the natural gas with tritium, which made it unusable. So this testing went on for twelve years under Plow share, 27 experiments, 35 bombs, most of those in Nevada. Like I said, and then in 1973, it finally stopped. The Big daddy hadn't happened yet. Yeah. You want to talk about a couple of more of these jobs? Yeah, for sure. These jobs carry all. Operation Carry All was going to move on. He said, you know what? That highway should move through that mountain range in Southern California. So we'll just blow a valley 2 miles long through it. We're Americans. Why should we drive around mountains? We'll just blow right through them, pretty much. And not only were they going to move I 40 through, but they were also going to move a couple of rail lines through it, too. Yeah. And this one, they didn't do this one. This is proposed, right? Yeah. I don't think they of course, this would have been enormous. So remember that 22 bombs they were going to use in total for that one. Right. And then remember the one which one was it? Sedan had 7% of the fallout from all the bombs in Nevada. That one was 104 kilotons. Right? Yeah. Operation Carry All planned to use 22 nuclear devices ranging in payloads from 20 to 200 kilotons each. Yeah. Yes. It takes a lot of nukes to blow up a mountain, my friend. Right. And they were going to blow about 68 million cubic yards of earth. That's what they were planning to blow out of there. Wow. It's really fortunate for everybody anywhere near the area that they didn't actually try this. Yeah. The boy sure would be able to drive from Arizona to La. Quicker. Slightly quicker, actually. Don't know if that's the area, but that's my best guess. How about I 40? Yeah, probably. Maybe. I would guess. I'm not sure. I think I 40. Well, I'm going to be wrong no matter what I say. From Santa Barbara to Kansas from Milan de Minsk. So Operation Chariot was sort of the Big daddy or one of the big daddies. This is when the United States said, alaska, congratulations, your state. Now we're going to drop nuclear bombs in an area the size of Delaware to see if it works. Let's do it. That was sort of the reason. I mean, they said apparently there was some sort of military advantage, but I think it was non specific. You could just get weapons close to the Soviets, I guess, because we're talking Alaska, and you can see Alaska from Sarah Palin's house. Right, right. So, obviously, if you have a means of getting into further into the Arctic Circle by blowing a harbor up, then why not? Well, creating a harbor, right. That's what they're going to do. Right? Yeah. We would like a nice body of water here. So your state, congratulations here. We're going to rain nukes down on you. Right. And some of the local tribes there, it wasn't heavily populated, but they were like, I don't like this idea. Right. We live here. Two different villages that were inhabited that were within 40 miles of the site. And actually, the land was under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, I believe. But these Inuit groups had real rights to this area and had a real say in it, and they were, like, not happy with this idea at all. Yeah. And other people jumped on board the Audubon Society and all kinds of environmental rights groups. But Edward Teller again, he's the father of HBomb. He wrote in Popular Mechanics in, I think, March of 1961, very excitedly about this project. He said that it was going to use in a matter of milliseconds. The energy will move 20 million tons of earth and rock, blast out a channel 1800ft long and 750ft wide at the same time, create an inner harbor a quarter of a mile wide and a half a mile long. Minimum water depth will be around 30ft. And they were just going to do that in a matter of milliseconds, just create an artificial harbor. And it sounds cool and everything, but when you really look at, like, Why are you doing this? No one had a really good explanation. Yeah. Teller in that same article, said there's vast oil and coal reserves. They're just waiting for people to show up with boats to take it out of. He left out the fact that it's actually behind ice nine months of the year, so it wouldn't be very easy to industrialize. Yes. And there was just holes in this plan bigger than the harbor they were going to create. Yeah. We're going to put water and fish with five eyes. Right, exactly. Another Simpsons reference. Yeah. Blink. Is it five eyes? Four eyes. Three eyes. Linky the fish. I guess anything more than one is enough. Or more than two. Well, yes. One on each side. I got you. Yeah. Linky. We just mauled him. Yeah. So the first idea for Chariot was 2.4 megatons. And then they knew that was ridiculous, and they said, all right, how about 400? Would you call it a kilotin? Yeah, a kiloton. But thankfully there was enough hay rays in Alaska. They said, we're a brand new state, why are you treating us like this? And we said, all right, well, maybe you're right. Bad idea. Yeah. Which is great, because people started to question it and say, you guys just want to see if you can do this, and that's not good enough, so stop. And then plow share as a whole kind of ran into the same type of resistance. So because of all of these worries about fallout, because here's the problem. If you're the United States government, you can't be like, you really need to fear the Soviets and their nuclear weapons, but try not to worry about the weapons we're actually blowing up in your state. Right. That's tough to really spin that in a way where people aren't worried about it. And the public became more and more and more worried about fallout and nuclear testing, and especially these underground ones where they're basically fracking or trying to open up aquifers and that kind of stuff. They were worried about groundwater getting contaminated, and that really kind of brought Operation Plow Share front and center in the nascent environmental awareness movement. Yes. And then secondly, when they figured out there's just way cheaper ways of doing this, sure. The operation. Ploucher was dead. I wonder if they went to their top spin doctor. And even that person was like, I got nothing for you here. You know who their top spin doctor would have been at that time? In the 70s? Edward Bernays is a man himself. Wow. Yeah, man. Chills. You got anything else? No, sir. And that's the end of that chapter. If you want to know more about Operation Platform, just type those words into the search barhouseofworks.com, and it will bring up this article. And since I said File share, it's time for listening now. I'm going to read a quickie and then a real one. But the gauntlet has been laid down. We got a message from John Hodman. Oh, yes. He listened to our nostalgia episode. Yeah. I never thought he'd listen. And I said, I think we both offered him a chance to rebut. We're like, It's not cool just to slam your theory without you being in the room. I thought it was perfectly cool. If you want to write a listener mail for us, we'll read it. Oh, man. The Indignance. Oh, man. So he sent this in. That guy gets set off, like at the drop of a hat. Life was so much better. Before you trashed me in my nostalgia theory all over your podcast. You can't pull that and then get me to write something for you for free. I love it for free thing. Call me up and I'll discuss it with you, dudes. Or else let's talk about it on stage when you're in Brooklyn, because we're going to be in Brooklyn this June for two shows at the Bellhouse. Either way, I demand a special episode. Looking forward to your reply in the future. That is all. So we're going to have John on Viacomlink? Yeah. And he'll probably rush the stage in New York, I assume. I sincerely hope not, but we're going to have him on soon to officially rebut via phone. I'm excited about this, Chuck. Yeah, it's going to be good. Oh, it's going to be great. All right, so here's the real listener mail. I'm going to call this the Gender Pay gap episode. And there's going to be a couple of these over the next couple of weeks because it generates a lot of mail, right? Yes. Lot of email. Just listen to the gender pickup. Guys, I'd like to say thank you both. Chuck said at the end he felt a bit clumsy with getting your points across. And I know you may not have meant it this way, but I want to commend. You guys, for all the times you've handled sensitive topics like championship, we handle champions, it's apparent when you speak you're mindful of how your words could be interpreted by others. And it's uplifting to think you guys have young impressionable fans in podcast land who have taken notice how you are considerate of other perspectives that are not your own. We try, but we do that up too, but I appreciate it. A little side note, when you were talking about gender dominated professions, you mentioned that these are jobs that men or women prefer. However, I don't think that the ratio of one gender of another in a profession or industry is indicative only of a preference. I think it is still the expectation of certain genders having specific jobs that is the stronger determinant of professional choice, profession choice. Imagine if men and women of all races have been given equal opportunity from the get go. What would be the gender make up of various industries and positions that are currently dominated by one gender begin to change us? I think it's great importance to instill in young people in understanding that they are not constrained to any set of jobs due to gender. That is from Emily tree. Emily, that is such a great point. Couldn't agree more. And we got so many emails like that about just these little details that if you just mentioned them, it just changes the complexion of everything. It takes this concept and makes it even more, like, apparent. Yeah, I wish we could go back in time. Well, I sort of do too, but we can do that now. Because one thing I wanted to mention was one point I wish I had made was I got a lot of responses, mainly from dudes on our Facebook page saying, well, you said it yourself, men are more apt to ask for raises. Men are more aggressive about negotiating their salary to begin with. And I was like, Fine, but step back. And then why is that true? Don't just say, well, that's the reason. Maybe take a more macro view of that even, and say, well, why are they more apt to do that? Is that part of society? And is that systemic? Right? And I think it is. So that's all I have to say about that. Well, thanks again, Emily. Thank you, Chuck. Sure. Thank you, Josh and Jerry. Thank you. All right, Jerry. Should we go wake Noell up and thank him? We'll just leave a note on his head. There's already three notes on his head. I know one's from last week. If you want to get in touch with us to make an excellent point or flesh out a point that we made or what have you, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyoushotko. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushenknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts, banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. 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c3a1f236-5460-11e8-b38c-3f06adb4a254 | SYSK Selects: How Pez Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-pez-works | PEZ began in Vienna as a mint meant to help people quit smoking. But once American kids got ahold of it, the candy took off and a symbol of childhood - and healthy secondary market among collectors - was born. Explore Pez history and culture with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | PEZ began in Vienna as a mint meant to help people quit smoking. But once American kids got ahold of it, the candy took off and a symbol of childhood - and healthy secondary market among collectors - was born. Explore Pez history and culture with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. | Sat, 05 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=278, tm_isdst=0) | 40825496 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, friends. I hope you're enjoying your Saturday, and you're going to enjoy it a little bit more if you listen to this Stuff You Should Know. Select episode from October 2015 how Pez works. Love these pop culture episodes, everyone. PES. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles, Debbie, chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel. And this is stuff you should know. Nice. I like that. Another Noel cast as well. Yeah, pretty exciting. It's part of the Noel stent. We're going to call it do you Like Pez? I like PES. Do you like the candy? I do. You like the taste? I like the taste of pez, yes. Describe to me what happens when you put a pest candy in your mouth. Well, I put a pez candy, I pull the head back, the kicker kicks it out. Pop. Yes. Nice lingo. And I take it from the pez dispenser with my tooth. Oh, you don't really you'd like, go mouth to mouth with it? Sure. Well, tooth to kicker. Okay. Yeah. What do you do, use your hand? Well, I don't eat pez, but back when I was eight, I would be delighted when I would pull the head back a little candy would shoot out and pick it up with my hand and put it in my mouth. Yeah, I use my teeth. Interesting. I would feel like I was going in to make out with a Daffy Duck or something if I did that. Well, that's half the fun. Anyway. I don't care for the candy, though. I wasn't done describing pez. Go ahead. Sorry. And then I take it onto my tongue, right. And I start to savor the flavor of it. Typically, I prefer maybe. Well, definitely one of the fruit flavors. I've never had a mint pez or chocolate pez, which is new. I would try the chocolate one, but say, like orange. We'll just go with orange. Okay. I'm sitting there. I let it sit on my tongue for all of six nanoseconds, and then I started to bite into it. Yeah, you chew, and it's very much like this explains why I like pest, especially orange pests. I once ate almost an entire bottle of orange flavored baby. Aspirin for the taste, that's why I like pests. How old were you then, to be a kid? I was, like, 20 something. Yes, I was a kid. Okay. Well, did it hurt you? No, nothing happened to me. We talked about that before. Is that because it isn't even medicine. It's just a placebo. But how could you use a placebo on a little kid? I mean, I guess it worked, but certainly there's an age where they're just like I feel like half of parenting is probably placebo. Probably. Well, you would know now. Well, not yet. Well, let me know. She doesn't believe my lies yet. That will come later. Yeah, surely kids are pretty dumb, so you can get them to believe anything. Sure. But there seems like there would be an age where they wouldn't make that connection and a placebo wouldn't work. I don't think a placebo would work, like, say, from birth, and I don't remember what age. You can start giving kids baby aspirin. Just baby aspirin and even children aspirin. Yeah. Anyway, I like Pez. I like how it tastes. I like the experience of eating at Pez. All right? I don't care for pez. I also like the shape, the brick. It helps with the taste. I saw we did the La podcast fest this last weekend, and I can't remember her name, but a very nice young lady brought us some different candies and things. The Lego candy. Well, you jumped on that bag. It's like, you want these Lego brick candies? And you're like, yeah, give me a second time. Man. I love those things. Yeah. And that's sort of this I put those all in the same category, which is just like compressed sugar, right. In, like, a brick form. As a matter of fact, it turns out the pet company to the state uses about \u00a350,000 of sugar every four days, making it Pez candy. That's right. And here's a factoid for you, all right? It takes \u00a33000 of pressure to compress the peas ingredients, which is not just sugar, into the delightful tiny, disgusting brick that you love. I don't think it's disgusting. I don't like candy. I have another one for you. Okay. They make 12 million tablets a day at their Orange, Connecticut facility, the headquarters of Pez. And 3 billion PES bricks are consumed in the US alone each year by people like me who like Pez. Yes. Roughly twelve at a time, because that's how much the standard dispenser holds. And if this kind of thing floats your boat right. Now go check out how Stuff works. Brain Stuff series on YouTube. And specifically look up the one on Pop Rocks that I did a year or two ago. It was really interesting stuff. Candy manufacturing is fascinating. I don't care what you say. No, I like manufacturing processes. I just don't like to eat candy. I got you. You know what I mean? Yeah. You just go to the plant, watch it made, and then turn down the free samples. Like, no, thank you. I find that disgusting. Yes, they're like, now. Would you like to try some? I don't do that on beer tours. I'll sample that. You mean? I went to the Maker's Mark Distillery. Oh, did you dip your own bottle? Yes. No, yes, we definitely have one, but I don't remember if we I guess we did dip it. Yeah, I think that's the thing. But it was like a mini, so maybe not. Maybe we bought a mini that was, like, just a mini to commemorate it. And they made you buy, like, a fifth or something and dip your own bottle. And we're like, man, got you. It's fine. Because we'd be like, we wouldn't want to open it. Yeah, we didn't dip our own bottle. I forgot that was exactly the conversation we had. Wow, you guys put a lot of thought into that one. Anyway, it's a pretty cool tour, to tell you the truth. I strongly recommend it. Yeah, I've never done a distillery. I'd like to do that. There's a new one here in Atlanta, in Avondale. Oh, really? Yeah. Whiskey distillery. Nice. Well, I can tell you go on any whiskey tour and you will find what Mila Kunis is talking about with the Angel Share stuff. It's a real thing. Yeah. The evaporating whiskey fills, whatever, the place where they're aging in barrels. And it's actually really dangerous. Like, the place could blow up at any time. Flowers. Very much. So we're a sugar factor, right? Yeah. But the smell is one of the most amazing smells I've ever experienced in my entire life. Like, smell good or just weird? Yeah, good. Oh, wow. Great. The half of a percent of whiskey. That is just glorious. It's in the air, right? It's amazing. Oh, man. Now I'm thirsty. All right, so let's talk pez in 2011. This is something I didn't know there was a wedding, while I did know, this part in the United Kingdom between a guy named William and a little lady named Kate Wady katie. Do people call her that? Some people did. What, like that she's overweight? No, that she waited around. Oh, okay. I was like, man, how mean can people get? Yeah, that would be even meaner. So they made specialty pez dispensers out of Prince William and Kate for that. And they were expensive. $13,360 at a charity auction. Clearly, that's the most expensive pez dispenser ever sold. Not so, my friend. What supposedly that is the $32,000 in 2006 for an astronaut limited edition, astronaut themed. It was from the World's Fair. And there were two of them. Two in existence. Yeah, that's why it's expensive. And what's neat is that auction took place on ebay, which is very appropriate that pez dispenses are sold on ebay because the guy who founded Ebay what's his name? Pierre. Pierre OMAD. Right. He founded Ebay in partner. He was inspired to found Ebay because his girlfriend at the time, I think his wife is his wife now collected peas. And he thought, hey, this would be a really great we may not have ebay today if it weren't for pez pez dispensers. Collecting pez dispensers, which is a relatively new thing. It really took off in the 80s, late 80s, actually. It wasn't until the late 80s that people really started collecting pest dispensers for the Tweedy Bird episode. I had to go back and look it up, but once I did, I started to remember. Yeah, I think Elaine and Jerry and George were at George's girlfriend's piano recital, and Jerry put the Tweedy bird pez dispenser on his lap or on Elaine's lap. And Elaine started laughing, ruined the performance. And then she was later outed when she laughed again in front of that lady. Right. And then the tweedy bird pez dispenser also factored into the plot because Jerry and his friends had an intervention for another friend who had a drug problem, and he was resisting. Resisting. And then for some reason, Jerry brought out the pez dispenser. And the wave of nostalgia that washed over this guy caused him to admit that he had a drug problem. But then he became hooked on pez. Well, nostalgia figures in a lot. It really does. Well, kids of all ages grew up with pez. Kids of all ages. One of my circus announcer yeah, step On Up. What do they call? I was going to say circus barker ringmaster. Circus Barker. Well, there's two different those are two different things, I think. Oh, really? Unless you're in, like, a low budget carnival, then it's maybe the same thing. Yeah, it would be, but the Barker's the one who's like step on up. Well, guess your wait. Yeah, he's trying to get people to come in. The ring master is the one who's running the show. Once the show starts, I feel like I'd be the barker, you'd be the ringmaster. You'd have to wear a straw boater hat and, like, striped suits. Yeah, I'd be the barker, and you'd be the guy that swings from things with his teeth. Do have strong teeth? As opposed to my riddle weak teeth when I fell off. And there's some of my teeth jammed into the trapeze bar still. You like a Looney Tunes cartoon now? Yeah, but imagine it in reality, even worse. It is. I feel like we should take a break and regain our composure. Okay. All right. We'll be back right after this. All right, so we're back, and I think we should start in the traditional way when we handle our pop culture casts and talk about history, because I thought it was a pretty interesting history, actually. Yeah, I love this article. Edward Haas III. He was an Austrian. He made sweets. He was a confectioneer. Well, his family was in the grocery business, and he was successful in that. But yeah, his heart was in candy, like yours. His heart was in candy. It was also in hygiene. I get the impression that he was a very strong germophobe. Well, it's probably good when you're running a candy factory. Yes. He was also anti smoking, and he decided he went to a chemist pharmacist, and said, hey, give me some really strong peppermint essence. And he used that with some sugar and made mint, basically a protoalkoid, and put them in little tins and marketed them as quitting smoking or smoking cessation AIDS. Basically, if you're trying to quit, you needed something to put in your mouth. Just chew one of these pesmets. That's right. And he got the name Pez from the abbreviation, the German word for peppermint, which is starts with three consonants, which is always fun. Come on. You take Germany. No, German. Well, I mean, I would just say ffamence. I would say mince. I like that better. This one's like the remix version, but it does start with two PS and an F, but shorten that and take out letters from the beginning, middle and end, and you get Pez, like you said. He said, you can either use this to try and quit smoking as a sort of an early version of nicorette gum, right. Even though it had no nicotine in it that we know of. Or you can use it if you do smoke to make your breath fresh because no one wants to smell you stinky smokers. And we'll wrap them up in, like, a little candy bar at first. And that's how he sold them for, like, a year. Well, yes, they were also sold in ten. Right. And he invented peas in 1927. That's when they first hit the market. But again, I get the impression that he was a germophobe and he didn't want everybody to put their grubby hands into the same peston and touch the other ones that other people were putting in their mouths. And he probably imagined all the poop and bacteria and who knows what on those people's hands? German sausage touching his beloved pez. So he thought, there has to be a better way to dispense PES. We need some sort of, I don't know, pez dispenser. That's right. And so there was an employee at his company, Oscar Ooksa, and you know what Ooksa does? He's a dispenser genius. Yeah. And he says, hey, how about this? Why don't we make a dispenser that looks like a cigarette lighter? Because this is for smoking cigarettes. And I'll have a little contraption on here, the kicker that'll spit out one at a time. And he said, it's genius. Right. Edward hask kicked the Kleenex boxes off of his feet and stood up and hugged Oscar Oopsa. Yeah. And by the way, they're selling them in tens again now in peppermint. Oh, yeah. With a little throwback, retro looking one of the Pez ladies. Pez girls. Yeah, the Pez girls, which were supposedly like this very sexy thing to sell. Pez. Did you see them? Yeah. They look like the bellhops. Oh, yeah. They're basically drawn, like pin up girls, except not nearly as racy. And they have little bellboy hats. Sure. A lot of them did. And they went from the think all the way up until the early 80s, they used Pez girls to market pez. You know what they reminded me of was back in the day, when you would have, like, be at a club and a woman would come around. Cigars. Cigarettes. Yes. They would have a little tray that was hung around their neck with cigars and cigarettes and mints and who knows what else. Pez, I guess. Pez. I guarantee you Pez was in there. You're probably right. So they were a hit among adults in Europe. Big time. Yeah, they did the trick. Yeah. They were already pretty popular. But once they packaged them into these cigarette lighter dispensers, they really cemented themselves as like, iconic candy. People say, look, you just pop it open and the candy comes out and you put your teeth on it. It's wonderful. It makes your monocle pop off. So they went nuts for the stuff. And then he said, you know what? Let me expand. The United States is where he found out that kids in America were delighted over this because I guess kids in America were like adults in Europe at the time, and they loved the way these things popped out. Plus, it probably made them feel a lot like they were smoking. You think? Probably. I never got the tie to the lighter. It was completely lost on me. So you like, flick a lighter. I get it now, but I never had made that association until I knew that. Okay, so imagine a pez dispenser without the head. Yeah, that's what the original I can imagine that because I used to take the heads off much. Okay. All right. So that's the original pest dispensers, which are called regulars now. The first ones, before they started adding heads, they're very much resembled, like, a nice, slim lighter. So if you're a kid sure. Like this kind of thing. Like, there's the manual thing where you're flicking a lighter. Then there's the oral fixation that's satisfied by putting the mint into your mouth. And it's mimicking smoking, which is one of the reasons why it was one of the ways it was marketed. The idea was that it would alleviate that desire for those Freudian fixations that you had when you were a smoker. If you were trying to quit, if you were a little kid and you wanted to smoke but you just couldn't get your hands on cigarettes yet. In other words, a good way to do that. I didn't have arms in the 50s. Yeah, probably. I saw candy cigarettes the other day in a store. By the way, I thought those were can't believe they make them. Yeah, I thought they were completely gone. Okay. If you want to know a candy that I think is abhorrent and disgusting, candy cigarettes. Gum cigarettes are awesome. You remember those? The kind where you puff them? Those are great. The candy cigarettes. They're just like sticks of candy that are disgusting. No, I'm talking about the gum that would blow out face smoke. I love that they still make those. But the gum cigars, I think were gross. They had some weird chemical taste to them. I never saw that. They were not one in the same, which is surprising. And they still make those? And they still make big League chew. Yes. It's amazing that they can still, like, with good conscience, market tobacco products to children and that they're allowed to. I remember probably the greatest tasting gum of all time. Juicy Fruit? Big Red? No, it was a rainbow gum that was sold to commemorate Rainbow Three. Tastes like sweat. It was market as, like, black raspberry or something like that, but it didn't taste like that at all. I've never tasted anything like it. Usually you run into a taste years later, like, only ten tastes or $0.10. I've never experienced it before after. And it was the best tasting gum ever, but it was in the big league pouch. Wow. And it was big league Chew shreds. So clearly it was made by the same company for the makers of Rambo, but the flavor they used was perfect sweat and gunpowder, and you could get it for, like, one summer. Did it have a cartoon version of Stallone on it? No, it was a photo of him with, like, the very famous rocket launcher. Okay. The rocket launcher. Yeah, from Rainbow Three. And it was just a picture of it on the big league two pouch. Wow. Yeah. I loved it. I guess they had to market it that way because first blood gum didn't go over so well. Exactly. Tastes just like blood, man. I'm wondering all kinds of things. Well, hold on, hold on. We're getting ahead of ourselves, all right? No, we're getting super distracted. That's what it is. In the 50s, kids very surprisingly liked pez, but they were like, this is pretty strong mint, and I'm a little kid. Sure. I like fruity flavored stuff. Yeah. I like the dispenser, but kind of get your game going with the candy. Exactly. Haas and company listen big time, so they kept mint pez still, but they started releasing lines of fruit flavored ones and cola. They had one called Chlorophyll coffee flavored, a yogurt one that probably was just European. What is the Chlorophyll? I couldn't get a read on what that was like, and I looked I think it's like it's a mint. It's a definite mint flavor. Did they just use the wrong word? There's a gum out there that has a similar sounding name. It's like a very bright, like, mint, not peppermint. It's not a sweet. It's mintier. Okay. But yeah, chlorophyll just interesting. Right. But they had other stuff, too, like orange and I think cherry, maybe something like that. Sure. Traditional flavors. Yeah. But not peach. This is fun. Trivia fact for you. They have had peach flavors, but it was never at least in the US. Yeah, I'm a weirdo. I don't like peach flavors or peaches. So since they realize that kids are going bonkers for this candy with bonkers, that was another good candy, too. I don't know what that is. It came out in the 80s. It was great. Okay. They decided to try to make PEDs a little more parent friendly, because even back in the Think, parents were like, I don't want you teaching my kid to smoke with this candy. Right. So they said, well, let's change it from a cigarette lighter into something different, a toy, and we'll add, like, a beloved cartoon character on there. How about that? And that's fine with me. It was genius, because what he did was he combined candy with a toy and not only a toy, but a collectible. And it was genius for kids. That was all they needed. They were pretty cheap, and so kids could buy them. They could go around and probably find enough money on the ground in a given day to go buy a little pest dispenser. Right. Or build, like, a soapbox racer and sell it to the rich kids in the neighborhood and buy a bunch of pez. Did you see find it? Yeah. That's another thing, too. I didn't like the stick that you had to lick, but the sugar was just great. So the sugar stick that you dipped into the sugar the sugar stick didn't have enough flavor for me. Yeah, I was thinking about Fun Dip the other day when I was driving. For some reason, it was just remarkable to me that they would just make a sugar stick that you dip in different flavors of sugar, and you would then eat the sugar off the stick and then eat the sugar. Right. Well, they didn't even try back then. Smax used to be called sugar snacks. Yeah. And then they changed the Honey Smacks and they were like, let's just go with snacks. Oh, is it just called Smacks? I believe so. It's not Sugar smax? No, it hasn't been Sugars Max for years. I don't need much cereal. They would get chased out of the grocery aisle whenever they tried to restock. That if they still called it sugar snacks. Just don't mess with cats and crunch peanut butter. That's all I've got to say. Captain Crunch has one out now. I saw in the cereal aisle the other day, it's sprinkled donuts Captain Crunch. And it looks awesome. Yeah, the peanut butter is so good, even though it tears up the roof of your mouth, it's worth it. But that's a fatal flaw, don't you think? Not to me. I'll get a box of that, like, every three or four years. I'll get a box of that, like when Emily's out of town dinner time. Because if she would come home and see that, she'd be like, what are you doing at our house? Are you a child? I have to save those moments. All right, so it's super rich because he's selling tons and tons of these dispensers. He sells the company and they move well, the manufacturing of the dispensers is actually now in China and Hungary and, like, Slovenia, I think, to Central Europe and now Asia as well. But the actual candies are and have been for a very long time made, I believe you already said, at a plant in Orange, Connecticut. Yeah. And they kept it going. PES was always a privately owned company. I don't think it's ever been public, but they kept the whole thing going even after Haas departed. And that was helped very much by this explosion and collecting that came from the mid eighty s, I would say. And as a result, PES itself added feet to the dispenser so that they could be displayed from that point on. And they realized like, oh, wait, people are collecting these. There's like a secondary market that's generated will speed the addiction. Exactly. So they added feet to it. So now a Pez Dispenser can stand up. But that was introduced in 1987. So if you see feet on your Pez Dispenser, you know that it's at least 1987 on. All right, so let's take another quick break here and we will come back and talk a little bit more about the odd collecting of Pez Dispensers. So, Chuck, people started collecting Pez Dispensers partly because they came of age at a time about the mid 80s when they were high on cocaine and had a lot of disposable income and were nostalgic for their childhood. Yeah, I have a theory, and it's not like I'm sure everyone knows this, but I think Pest Dispensers became collectible because you couldn't throw it away. Like you'd eat the candy and what are you going to do as a kid? You can be like, let me throw away this Garfield toy now. Well, not only that, you can put it on your chef, right? Your chef, you're like, Standstill chef. Stop making that stew weird. So I can put this pesticides here on your Bully Bee. Can wait. But the whole thing is they're reloadable. You get the little packet of twelve, pop it in there and you want more. Like if it's one of those same deals, like collect all four. Right. But this is not all four. This is constantly new licensing deals being cooked up. Everything from Looney Tunes to Star Wars to Hello Kitty, which was the other stroke of genius, was partnering up with these iconic brands and cultural icons to say, hey, a Chewbacca head on this thing. They're grown adults that will buy that. Right. The thing is, Lucasfilm definitely charges a pretty penny, or did before they sold the Disney. Now it's even more, I'm sure, to license anything from Star Wars. Right, sure. So Pez also very frequently came up with their own stuff as well. There were the pez pals. There was a very famous misstep called make a Face Pez, which is like a tiny Mr. Potato head where you could put on different eyes and mouth and stuff. But of course, those things were a major choking hazard. Yes. And actually there's a lore among PES collectors who are called Pez heads, that if you look at some of the 1973 Indian chiefs that were released, their headdresses are marbled. They have marbled color. Oh, wow. And they're saying that those are ground up, make a face dispensers that they reused in the headdresses. That sounds like a PES enthusiast. Conspiracy theory does, but it's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Another one that they released was a series for the Bicentennial that includes the funniest character of all time, in my opinion, the colonial soldier with a head wound. Okay. I thought you can say the Paul Revere. I think there is a Paul Revere. No, there is. Which I thought would be a pretty weird one. There's a Paul Revere Daniel Boone who looks like he has a well formed beehive on his head rather than a coonskin cap. There's an Uncle Sam. Yeah. There's a Betsy Ross. And then there's the head wound soldier. He's got, like, that white gauze on his head with a little blood dot coming through, and he looks just kind of out of it. It's a really weird pez dispenser. That one is probably my favorite, although I like a lot of the Halloween themed ones from the 70s. Yeah, some of those glow in the dark, which is pretty neat. Like Mr. Skull. Did you see him? Yeah. Or Dr. Skull, I think. I think he's probably my favorite. Or the pumpkin from the 70s on the green stem is probably the best pez dispenser of all time. Well, there have been 400 more than 450 dispensers since 1955, including three different Santas. And the Santa is the best selling of all time, which makes sense, of course, especially the first one, because the dispenser wasn't just a little pet dispenser. It was like the whole body. Sure. But then they're like, this is way too expensive. Yeah. They're like, I bet you people just buy it with the head. Yeah. And they did the Salvador Dali tribute. I don't know if it's a tribute. I bet it was is my favorite in psychedelic hand. It was a hand with a green eyeball, and it's just very cool looking. Yes. I would want one of those. Of course, I wouldn't pay thousands of dollars for it. No, I'd like to just find one on the street. It is pretty neat, though. Yeah. Do all of them cost that much, that specific collectible? No, but I mean, I would say they range in the hundreds and thousands. It's really rare. But what was interesting about this, I think Patrick Kyle pointed out, compared to a lot of other collecting hobbies, pet dispensers are relatively cheap. Yeah, not too bad. You can get into them pretty easily with a minimal amount of money. Yeah. One of my favorite pez dispensers is the PES gun series. Oh, really? First it was a ray gun, and then they made it into a handgun. And then when Star Wars came out in, like, 1980, they released another space gun that looked an awful lot like Han Solo's gun, but it wasn't really. So you don't sue them, but a kid would. Put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger to dispense the candy. Wow. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Unbelievable. They have had some kind of weird ones over the years, like the airline pilot and stewardess, which I don't know. Is that a big seller? I don't know. Well, this is back in the day, I think, when they were they were revered figures in culture. Yeah. The pilots weren't drunks and the flight attendants weren't flight attendants. They were stewardesses. They were fancy clothes, but they have, like, hard chiseled features. They look like real people. They look like pilots and flight attendants from the Mother Road during the Depression or something. Like really chiseled features. And actually, apparently the Pedal company says that they very infrequently do real life humans. Those bicentennial figures were the first humans they ever did, or real life humans, I should say. And they didn't even do fictitious ones very often, like a stewardess or the pilot, because they just found that the human face wasn't nearly as interesting as, say, like a bubble man. Yeah. In 2006, they issued the first ever has dispensers of living humans when they decided to pay tribute to the fellows from Orange County Chopper. It makes me so sad. That goes down in history. It's the worst one ever. But, I mean, those were the first guys to ever have living. Why? I don't know. A licensing deal. And it opened the floodgates after that. After that, it was on there's like a Kiss collector set. Well, of course, because Jean Simmons, he'll put his face on anything. What else? Well, people get turned down a lot. You said that other little fact sheet, kim Kardashian wanted a Pez dispenser. They said no. Yeah, they turn down people all the time because apparently everybody wants one. I would suggest just go make your own bobble head, because you can get that done. It sounds the same. Well, you could just put candy in your bottle head. There are newsletters, there's a Pez collectors news, there are conventions, and there is even a museum that a husband and wife started in California that started out weirdly as a museum for computers and PES dispensers. No, I think they were a computer sales company. Oh, I thought they displayed like vintage computers. Yeah, it was a computer dealer, and they were selling computers. And just to kind of make the place look a little more interesting, they also displayed pez dispensers. Got you. And they found that people were way more interested in coming to see the Pez dispensers and weren't buying computers. So they transitioned over to a straight up PES museum. The Pez or the Museum of Pez memorabilia in Burlingame, California. Yeah. And you can pay some money to go in there and look at all their rare and vintage Pez dispensers. They have one he paid three grand for the pineapple wearing sunglasses because in the early seventy s, I think. Yeah, it's nothing special to look at, but again, it's rarity. They didn't make many of them because it was ugly, probably. Yeah, I thought it's kind of cute. Did you did you like the California Raisins? Yes. Okay. There you go. That explains it. Have you seen? Straight out of Compton. No, not yet. Is it good? Oh, you haven't seen that yet? I haven't been to any movies. You should. The California Raisins appear by mention. Wow. They're mentioned in a surprising way. I look forward to seeing that on television. Oh, you should go see it, man. Yeah, all right. I'll go see it in the movie theater. What else? They tried vitamins for a little while. Yes. I didn't think that was a bad idea. Put a little vitamin C in there. Parents might be more willing to throw up some money for the kid. But they said, no, we're not in the vitamin business. Let's just stick to the sugary pressed candy. No, the guy who said that was a guy named Scott Mcwiny. Scott Mcuinney was president. He started out, I think general Mills or something. Or General Foods. And he moved his way over to Pez in the 90s or the 80s? No, the 80s, because that quote was from 1984. He was president of Pez for a while, and he, much to his chagrin, got into a war, basically an economic war, with the guy who is known as the Pez Outlaw. Yeah. You dug this up. This is really interesting. The article what was it called? It was a terrible title. Like Michigan farmer makes $4 million in pez dispensers in three years or something. It's a terrible title. It should have been called the Pez Outlaw. Yeah. But it was in Playboy, and it was pretty good. Long form reporting. Yeah. Basically what happened was in the dude named Steve Gleeu, G-L-E-W found out that, hey, over in Canada, they're selling different dispensers that you can't get here in the United States. So let me go over there, let me buy some of these and resell them to collectors. And it worked. And all of a sudden, the light bulb went off. And he said, I think I can actually make money getting Pez dispensers from other countries. And he found a hookup, that mysterious woman who approached him from the Eastern Bloc, wherever she was from. Yes. And he ended up he and his son Joshua started making trips to Central Europe, oftentimes right along the border of, like, Wartorn, Croatia, and found these factories where Pez is being made, and found very bribable factory workers who would take, like, molds and make new Pez dispensers to his liking. And then he would sell them as basically Pez freaks or one offs or something and for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But he would spend a quarter or maybe a dollar on each. Crazy. And he supposedly made quite a bit of money, he claims. 4 million. Yeah, I believe they made the number of trips that they were making. I think that he did. His downfall was that he overextended himself. He took out a massive loan and basically hired a factory to make a bunch of misfit. Pez dispensers Reed was his downfall, and Mark Mcwinney took them on and started releasing basically pez's own version of these counterfeit weirdo dispensers at a lower price and drove the dude out of business. This could be a little documentary. Easy. Also, that reminds me, have you ever seen the jelly belly documentary? No. Oh, it's so sad. But it's so good. What's it called? I don't remember. Just look up jelly belly documentary and weird owls in it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, then I definitely won't see it. No, you really should, man. It's a great documentary. It's very sad. And that one and the showbiz pizza one documentary great too. Yeah. I used to love showbiz. You'll love this documentary. I like showbiz more than Chuck E. Cheese, even. There's a huge backstory to it that you were unaware of. Can I read you this one excerpt? Yeah. This is from the story about the pez outlaw. A 1993 toy convention changed Steve's life forever. As he tells it, a mysterious woman opened her jacket and showed him a silver gloupez, a holy grail for Pez collectors. She whispered to him in broken English, there are many more where I come from. That's still great. Yeah, it is. Can you believe that? Yeah. Eventually I get the feel she was like, two guys and overcoats and sunglasses came and hurried her away. Yeah. He said, what's your name? Or two centimetes came out of the woodwork and pulled her down to hell. Ivanka. Yes. It's a pretty good article. Look up stupid title. Michigan farmer, pez playboy. And it'll bring it up. I think long form had it at one point. Speaking of Ivanka, should I talk about Donald Trump? Probably not. All right. I was surprised when I found out I found mention of, like, pez dispensers being nostalgic. I was like, definitely not for me. Then I went to pez.com and clicked on collectors corner giggles for the rest of the world. They have pictures of, like, every single one they've released over the years, year by year. And I definitely felt nostalgic. And I don't even think of Pez as factoring in largely into my childhood at all. Same here. But I was a little nostalgic looking at these. It's cute. So go to pez.com and check out the collector's corner, and I think you will waste a lot of time there. Agreed. And I think that's it because Chuck just grabbed the listener mail email, which is usually a signal for me to shut up because he's mean to me after the mics aren't recording any load, please. And if you want to know more about Pez, type that word in the search bar athowstofworks.com and it's time for listener mail. You guys are right. Screw college. Remember when we had a little soapbox moment? Was this from the animator? Yeah. I thought, this is good. Hi, guys. I want to shoot you a quick email to thank you for mentioning the idea that you don't need to go to college for some professions on the how publishes work episode. It really struck a chord with me. I'm an animator and I desperately wish it would be treated as a trade, which it is, and not as a high art form that requires a fancy $100,000 degree. Most of what I learned, I actually learned on the job. Got almost nothing for my college classes, while the contacts I made in college were very valuable down the road. And nothing is quite as nice as moving out and being on your own in art school. It came with a hefty price. It is now ten years later. I've been working steadily this whole time, and I'm still paying off my college student loans and I make a good amount of money. That's just sad. And I know so many people are in the same position, but without steady work. And she says that she worked at Adult Swim for a while too, by the way. Oh, yeah. There's a stigma about not going to college, and I think it's part of the reason so many people are being crushed by student loan debt now. It's a very American stigma too. It's not like that all around the world. I know. Stupid Americans. I think there's probably a lot of these kinds of jobs that don't need college degrees out there, like podcaster, and it might be cool to hear a podcast on that sometime. I'm not sure what you call it. Maybe how not going to college but landing a nice job and making a living anyway and sticking it to your parents works. Maybe just do one on student loans or something. Anyway, thanks for keeping me company while I animate. Keep it up. You guys are top notch. And that is Margie. Thanks, Margie. That was a great email. Agreed. We appreciate that. And that's not the GV college altogether. Sometimes it's very useful. Yeah. It's just not the end all, be all for everyone on the planet to have to go to college. No, it's true. It's true. And I think that there hopefully is a large awakening going on because a lot of people say that the current bubble, if you're looking around for the next bubble student loan. Yeah, we should do something about that sometime. Let's do it. And actually, Margie gave us the URL for her blog. It's Margibordner blogspot.com. I imagine you can go check out her stuff there, wouldn't you think? Yes, sir. Nice. So if you want to get in touch with Chuck or me or both of us or even Noel, you can tweet to us at Xyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast the housesupportks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyknow.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder, and Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
How Schizophrenia Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-schizophrenia-works | Up to 24 million people worldwide have schizophrenia. Despite the vast amounts of research, the disorder remains mysterious. In this episode, Josh and Chuck delve into the nature of schizophrenia, from the history of the disorder to the latest research. | Up to 24 million people worldwide have schizophrenia. Despite the vast amounts of research, the disorder remains mysterious. In this episode, Josh and Chuck delve into the nature of schizophrenia, from the history of the disorder to the latest research. | Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:12:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=16, tm_min=12, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=235, tm_isdst=0) | 40741482 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. 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So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W. Chuckers, how are you doing? I'm great. I'm going to see Bob Dylan tonight. People are going to be like, how many times is Bob Dylan playing Atlanta? Have you ever seen David Bowie? That's good. I have not. Yes, you are, Chuck. I know you're very excited. I am. I've seen him a few times, but it's always good. Really? Yeah. Too short, though. He buzzes through like 15 songs, he's out of there. Is he short? Well, he's also short, but yeah. Is he really? I was just kidding. No, he's short. I guess those bell bottom long pants that he wore in the 60s on his album made him look kind of tall. Yeah. All right, so enough about Bob Dylan. For the second time, not a big Dylan fan myself, let's talk about schizophrenia today. Okay. So I was looking for an intro for this, and there's plenty of stuff, but it's all pretty research heavy, AstraZeneca was marketing. Saraquel off label and just settled. Let's see what else. Jared Loffner is being medicated against as well. The guy who shot Gabriel Giffords. Okay. Really? Yes. He's been diagnosed with schizophrenic. Interesting. Finally. And then there was a homeless man in Los Angeles who was beaten to death by the police yesterday or today. Awful. And all of this is kind of I realized there wasn't any one thing that I was like, well, here's the intro. But I realized all of it together gives a pretty good overview of schizophrenia as it stands right now, which is it's misunderstood it's heavily prescribed underfunded research, that is. Yeah. And there's a lot of people out there who aren't necessarily getting help, who need it. Yeah. In fact, I got a stat if you want to go ahead and go there. You got a bunch of stats, you said, for this, right? I do. If you want to talk about people getting help and needing help and not getting it. 6% of schizophrenics are homeless, 6% are in jail or prison, 10% in nursing homes, 25% with a family member, 28% are independently living, 20% supervised housing. And it makes sense, Chuck, too, that this makes sense because, first of all, you have all of this crazy stuff going on to you. That's your reality. So you're having trouble dealing with reality as it stands. Secondly, a lot of times schizophrenia comes on during times when you learn how to hold down a job or take care of yourself or do whatever. So you might never learn how to do this because you're dealing with your schizophrenia. Here's the shocking one, okay? At any given moment, there are more people with untreated severe psychiatric illnesses living on the streets than there are receiving care. Well, they outweigh the people that are actually getting help. That is shocking but not surprising, somehow. Agreed. Wow. You said what was that last one? Severe psychiatric illnesses. So that's an umbrella term, obviously. Right. And schizophrenia falls under, that for sure. But prior to the beginning of the 20th century, it was pretty much thought of as generalized illness. Mental illness was mental illness. And maybe there is a symptom. Your symptoms were different, but really you were mentally ill, which was a huge step up from the spirit possession that it had previously been ascribed to or probably millions of years. Yeah. So it's a fairly recently classified mental illness. It wasn't until 1893 that a German psychiatrist named Emil Craplen classified schizophrenia as a mental illness, and he misclassified it as a form of dementia and early type of dementia. And then in 1911, a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugen Blooter came up with the name schizophrenia. That's right, Josh. And he got that word from the Greek words for split in mind, which contributes somewhat to the misconception that it is a split personality disorder. But what he meant was there's a disconnect with reality. Right. The mind splits from reality, which today that's how you still perceive schizophrenia. But rather than split, we use the word break. There's a psychotic break. Yeah. We should go ahead and just since that is a common misconception, it is entirely different than split personality disorder, which they call disassociative identity disorder. Now. And if you know the show United States of Terror, have you seen that? No, I know what you're talking about with Tony Collette. She has split personality disorder on that show. And that's the one that you always seen in the movies where you have multiple personalities and they don't know about each other and one dominates the other. And that was all about Eve was about I never saw that. Civil. Civil, yeah, for sure. But it's not schizophrenia. They have nothing to do with each other, other than they're both types of mental illness. Right. And Hollywood is fascinated by them. That's right. That's a pretty good example of medicine is starting to get a hold of what schizophrenia is, what mental illnesses in general and then the public at large still just being completely under educated about it. So let's educate people about it. Yeah. I want to say, too, that this is like a lot of conditions and disorders that develop later in life. To me, that's one of the scariest things that can happen. Like, you're cruising along at 27, 28 years old, and you think, I'm all good. And you can develop schizophrenia, like, boom, in a matter of weeks sometimes, yeah. It can either come on gradually or very suddenly in an acute manner. And like you said, later in life, with men, schizophrenia usually develops in the late teens or early 20s is when it starts, or in women, it's the mid 20s or the early 30s. So yeah, by the time I was 30, I certainly didn't think I was going to become mentally ill. No, you thought, I know my demons, I can write them down in a list, I can quit them anytime I want. And that's what they are. They're self imposed demons. Right. It wasn't something that was beyond my control that happened to my mind. Right. And yeah, that's how schizophrenia hits you later in life. And it can happen all at once or gradually. And this is not to scare the crap out of you if you're in your teens or 20s, because there's only about a 1% chance that you'll get schizophrenia. It depends. If you're part of the general population, there's a 1% chance. But as we'll see yeah, there are risk factors that increase your chances of having schizophrenia. And now we're not trying to scare you, but I guess kind of the newest forms of treatment or newest thoughts about treating schizophrenia is to make people aware of it so that they will be able to recognize early on. And apparently early treatment leads to a better success rate. I think we'll talk about that across the board. But Chuck, there's two kinds of symptoms of schizophrenia, and there are positive and negative. And it's not like positive symptom means you hallucinate bunnies, where negative symptom means you hallucinate like a hell demon. Instead, positive symptom is like an exaggeration of normal behavior. So, like, I see you, I hear things, but I don't see you with horns, and I don't hear Kermit here talking to me. Right. So a positive symptom is an exaggerated behavior. Negative symptom is the absence of normal behavior. Like, you lack affect or the ability to experience any emotion, or you basically are just generally apathetic. Right. Yeah. So those are positive symptoms and negative symptoms. Yes. And certain negative symptoms are cognitive that deal a lot with attention span and memory, lack of memory, inability to plan anything or organize anything. Right. And then another form of negative, I should say, is called abolition. Basically, I think, Creper, the guy who first classified schizophrenia, call it the annihilation of the will, where you're just so withdrawn. You no longer engage in goal directed behavior. From brushing your teeth to paying your bills to doing anything. You're just totally withdrawn. Wow. So that's not the form of schizophrenia you usually hear about, but apparently it's fairly common. Really? Yeah. To get diagnosed, Josh, you have to exhibit a certain number of these symptoms over at least six months without stopping. Right. Yeah. If you have is it schizophreniform is like a shorter it's schizophrenia, but it lasts less than six months. Yeah, that's schizophrenia form. Right, good point. But according to the DSM, and we should say, like, this is based on clinical observations or whatever, but this is the DSM saying six months. You may have schizophrenia and you just haven't reached the six month period yet, but you're still schizophrenic. But to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist or psychologist who is a member of the APA, you have to have X number of symptoms for six months or more. Yeah. And they have to do that because it's like same as the cops when they say you can't file a missing person's report unless they've been gone for 24 hours. It's not like that, but it's sort of like that now. There's like a law, I think, in Michigan called Kaylee's Law or something that they're introducing where if you're a parent and you don't report your kid missing after 24 hours, it's a felony. Oh, really? Yes. What kind of parent wouldn't do that? The parent. Casey Anthony. Yeah. Made the kid go away. Allegedly. Allegedly. No, nothing in general. Schizophrenia, apparently, is how it's pronounced. Can take a few forms. One you've probably heard about most is paranoid schizophrenia, which is when you have the full on delusions and hallucinations. And then there's disorganized. That is disorganized thinking your behavior is probably incoherent. It's also called hepafrenic. Really? And you probably don't exhibit a lot of emotion. Yeah, well, usually there's a negative symptom coupled with disorganized behavior. Okay. So it's almost like two separate things, I think. You can be hepafrenic without being negative. Got you. There's catatonic. That means you move around and talk excessively. Yeah, that was a surprise to me. I always thought catatonic state, where you're just like too but it also says they may become still an uncommunicated. Right. So it can be one or the other. Yeah, but I guess it has to do with motion or movement or lack of catatonic. Undifferentiated means that it's just sort of the umbrella term for when you have a mix of symptoms and they don't want to classify you as one specific kind. And then residual is if you have a history of schizophrenia, but you have a long extended period of time with no negative I'm sorry. With negative but no positive symptoms, they'll classify as residual, which I guess that's better than paranoid schizophrenia in a way. I don't think any foreign schizophrenia is bad. Right. It would be horrible. It is a horrible disease. It is. That's like the Curb Your Enthusiasm. When Larry asked someone had good hodgkins from the Party of Five episode is what he was referencing. When Charlie got sick, he had, quote, unquote, good Hodgkins. And they were like they were so offended. There's no good Hodgekins. Yeah, but one's better than the other. Right. And they were just like, you're such a jerk. Never seen in like that. Yeah, pretty much. And then we mentioned schizophrenia form, which is an abbreviated version of schizophrenia. And then this one has to be just horrible schizoaffective disorder. It's any kind of schizophrenia coupled with the mood disorder. Like depression. Yeah, right. That's awful. We should probably say there's delusions and there's hallucinations mixed in together, often with schizophrenic symptoms, and they're often confused. But a delusion is a false belief, and hallucination is a false sensation. Like, hey, I'm Jesus Christ. That would be a delusion. Right. Or, hey, there's Jesus Christ on top of that subway car. That would be hallucination. Yeah. And you can extend that to anything. It doesn't have to be Jesus or a subway car. You're right. But just studying hallucinations and delusions are really interesting, in my opinion. Agreed. The most common hallucination is auditory among schizophrenics. And the most common auditory hallucination is our voices. Yeah. They hear voices that can come from anywhere. From this kermit the Frog could start talking to me, or it could come from thin air, or it could come from the electrical outlet in the wall. Right. And the voices say usually it's like one word, a couple of words. There's an implication of a word. Sometimes it's indistinct mumbling. On occasion, very rare occasions will the voice ramble on coherently where the patient understands long sentences, but also maybe commenting on what the person is doing is very common. Yeah. Usually it's not a voice that they recognize. Although that can happen as well. Yeah, right. And then sometimes there's more than one voice and even more disconcertingly, the voices will argue about the patient. Yeah. Wow. Well, there's a guy on Marta that I see, and a lot of people that you see that are walking down the street screaming out, out loud. There's probably a pretty good chance that they might be paranoid schizophrenic and they are yelling at the voice in their head. That reminds me of the stand up bit I saw when I was a kid in the 80s. This guy was like this comedian said he was walking down the street and he walked past this guy he was talking to himself, and he just mumbling and sounded so angry. And the comedian goes, I thought, man, that guy is really crazy. He's talking to himself. And then I thought, wait, who am I talking to? Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, I talk to myself all day long. I have arguments in my head, but of course, it's not the same thing. No. You don't have two voices arguing over what you're doing at that moment and what's best for you, or whether you should hurt somebody or hurt yourself. Not making light of that. And the reason that a frightening percentage of schizophrenics kill themselves is a lot of times because the voice in their head may command them to do so. Right? There's such a thing as commanding hallucinations, which is sometimes they could be suggestive, like, maybe we should go outside for a while. Or they could be like, go outside. And it's not always scary. Like they point out sometimes it's, hey, you need to shave again, right, and you'll go shave again. Yeah. It can be innocuous, but it can lead to violence, or it can urge violence. Apparently, the vast majority of people who suffer dangerous command hallucinations are able to press them. Right. But it's a struggle, and this is going on in this person's head. Yeah. And I wondered about this too, before I got to that point in the article that you sent me. Rarely do you hear, like, really great things. Like, you're doing great today and you should go. You get that flower and smell it. It's interesting that it usually takes a dark turn. Yes, it is. And they don't know why. No, they don't. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right, from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. There's also hallucinations of touch haptic hallucinations, which sounds pretty awful. Things are crawling on you. Things are inside of you, trying to get out. Your bowels are shriveling, you're being jolted by electricity is a very common one. Yeah. And then delusions, obviously, or any false belief there's some that you are. Jesus Christ. That's a delusion. Right, right. But there was one subcategory that caught my attention that I wasn't aware of. It's called delusion of reference. Yeah, tell me about that. Well, it's basically like every single thing that goes on in life is full of meaning. Right. So, like in this brown university sheet I sent you, there's like a waiter leaving a crumb on the table. That's purposeful. It's an insult to the patient. Like the bus boy or the waiter did that on purpose as an insult. Or the street lights coming on. All of a sudden there's a signal for everybody to swarm on you and finally take you away or kill you or whatever. Right. Like everything in life has meaning, and it's fueling this paranoia. Your mind is turning against you. It's pretty awful. Yeah. Have we said it's awful? Yeah. Okay. Yes, it is quite awful. But people live with this. Yeah. I mean, we painted a dark picture because it is a dark disorder, but the majority of people, in fact, time, after ten years, if you want to know, after ten years of diagnosis with schizophrenia, 25% completely recover, 25% are much improved and relatively independent, and 25% are improved but require a pretty extensive support network. So that's 75% of people after diagnosis, after a decade are dealing with it fairly well. It's very hopeful. That's not bad. 15% are unimproved, and 10%, unfortunately, are dead, probably by suicide. Yeah. Well, 10% at least, of schizophrenics commit suicide, which is incredibly high because in the general population of the United States, 1% of people commit suicide. So 10% to .01%. Yeah. And that's people who are successful. They think it could be attempts could be as high as 55% people that try to kill themselves. Imagine sometimes the voices say to do it, and sometimes it's just a fine piece. Yeah. I was wondering what the breakdown between those two is as well. And then violence is often attendant with schizophrenics, at least in the public mind. Right, yeah. But schizophrenic are dangerous, apparently. Studies have shown I remember reading about this when we talked about latent inhibition, that if you are typically violent when the symptoms set in your early 20s or whatever right. You're going to possibly be a violent schizophrenic. If you're not a very violent person, it's just not part of your personality before the symptoms set in, then you're not going to be a violent schizophrenic unless you abuse drugs or alcohol, which apparently vastly increases the chances that you may be a violent schizophrenic. Yeah. And even then, I think the violence is generally either self inflicted or it takes place inside the home, like against your family, which is not good. But point is, if you're walking down the street and sadly you see the homeless man screaming out loud, you don't necessarily need to be afraid that he's about to attack you in a violent manner. Right. That's probably not going to happen. No. Chuck, let's say you do want to talk to that schizophrenic homeless man over there, but you don't want to make things worse for him, but you don't want to ignore him. He's another human being. The National Institute of Mental Health have suggestions, I guess, for talking to schizophrenics and specifically with their families who have to deal with delusions and hallucinations all the time, specifically delusions. Apparently, you don't contest what they're saying. Yeah. You don't want to say you're not Jesus Christ. What are you talking about? Yeah. You don't definitely don't say that. No. You say, I respect your right to believe different things, and I hope you'll respect my right to believe different things, but I politely disagree. Yeah. And what you also don't want to do is agree and say, I know, honey, you are Jesus Christ. Right. You're okay, you're Jesus, and it's fine. Yes. A lot of people probably take that tack in the family. Well, yeah. First, I mean, at the very least, because it's just easier after a while, it's like, yes. Or you get so frustrated, you're like, no, you're not, and you want to shake the person. Right. But yeah, apparently and I wonder how hard it is to say, well, I respectfully disagree with you. Yeah, I bet it's hard. And if it does go over as well as it seems like it suggested it should right. All right. Josh, I think this was really interesting, the recovery in the Third World part. Yeah. Apparently, the World Health Organization did a study in the 1960s and found that the recovery rate for schizophrenia in developing nations is higher by a full third than it is in the industrialized world. And then they did a follow up study even to correct possible selection biases, and they confirmed the original finding. And I thought that was really interesting. And there's a lot of hypotheses, but one of them is that, A, there might not be a stigma like in the industrialized world, and they're just more readily accepted. And the other is that they might be able to have a job that they can do successfully and digging the trench for the farm or whatever right. Here in the west, we're very competitive. Yeah. It's hard to get a job that Schizophrenic can maybe successfully complete. Right. And, I mean, the rest of us are paranoid enough as it is about losing our jobs. If you are clinically paranoid schizophrenic, then it's probably going to be very difficult to keep your job true or do it in a way that will help you keep your job. That's very true. But, Josh, there have been some successful stories of people that are afflicted with schizophrenia. Some were successful, and some, Sid Barrett, was successful, but I don't know if you call him a success story. He ended up in a mental institution for the rest of his life. Yeah. Sid Barrett, founding member of Pink Floyd. Schizophrenic. And they believe that massive amounts of drugs that he used made it worse, way worse. He is the crazy diamond. Yeah. Shine on you. Crazy diamond. I love that song. That's a good one. All four parts of it, right? And there's like, part, I think, up to part four. Is it? Yeah. John Nash. Yeah. From the movie A Beautiful Mind. The Ron Howard film with Russell Crowe and John Nash, the Nobel winner. The one who helped figure out that cable companies would do better if they cooperated with one another. That's right. And that movie did a lot for putting this on the map in a compassionate way. Jack CarrollI, did you know that one? That was debatable. Okay. He was in the Navy, and they discharged him honorably after a little less than a year. And the report, they said he had schizoid tendencies, but other people have said that he faked that stuff to get out of the Navy and just wanted to not take orders and drink himself to death, which is what he did. And Pop benny's, do you know how he died? No. He woke up and was just, like, coughing blood and bleeding from his mouth and basically was like, I got to go to the hospital. Took him to the hospital and his liver was so shot that his blood wouldn't clot. And they just were giving him transfusion one after the other, and he just basically bled to death. Holy cow. From drinking. Holy cow. And he was drinking at the time, he was drinking whiskey and whiskey and malt liquor. When he started blood started coming out of his mouth. I wonder how it tastes. Would you shake or stir that? I don't think he mixed them. I think it was like whiskey with a beer back and a garnish with a drop of blood. So, kids, there's a lesson for you. There's one more person who is indisputably schizophrenic, or was. His name is Wesley Willis. Who's that? He is a musician who had such songs as well, really? The only title I can say is rock and Roll McDonald's. I've never heard of him. You have had to have heard of Wesley Willis. Really? Okay, let me play you a little Wesley Willis right here. McDonald's is a place to rock. It is a restaurant where they buy food, be it is a good place to listen to the music. People flocked here to get down to the rock music that's Wesley will. Okay. And he was very much schizophrenic. He wrote about it a lot. He talked about it in a lot of his songs. And he said he'd just be going along, having a nice time, riding the bus. Yeah. I believe he lived in Chicago. And then all of a sudden, his hell demons would take him on. One of his torture hell rides, which meant he was going on a little bit of an exacerbation of his schizophrenia symptoms. Wow. But he's a great guy, great music, very prolific. And if you liked that, you should go watch Daddy Rock and Roll as a documentary, though. Yeah, it's really good. I'll check that out. Yeah. Lionel Aldridge is the last name on our list. And he was a Green Bay packer and he was homeless, unfortunately, after he was diagnosed for a while and then later was able to climb out from that wreckage and go around and talk about mental illness. And he was playing in the 70s, think it was late 60s or 70s. Think about it, man. That's a big deal to go around and talk publicly about mental illness at that time. And it still is now. But I mean, like, back then, that's hats off to him. Yeah. He was the guy that I included in the presentation that you did by yourself. Okay. That you're like he was this guy. All right. I understand now. Yeah. It's all coming together. So, Chuck, what causes this? Well, it seems like there are environmental factors and there are genetic factors. They have isolated what they believe are some genes, the disc one, the Dsbandin, the Nuragulin and the G seven two jeans. Okay. And they think there might be up to a dozen more genes that could impact this. Okay. So the basis of that is that they can't just look at your genes and say you're going to be schizophrenic. Right. It's possible that's because we just haven't isolated all the genes and don't know the right combination yet. Right. Or it's possible that it's from other causes. One of which, one of the theories that's out there right now is that it's the result of an inutero exposure to either a flu or the dread toxoplasmus remember toxoplasmosis I do that. Hijacks rat brains that found in cat urine. That's why if you have a cat and you're pregnant, you don't be cleaning up that litter box. Right. And I think that one of the reasons, I guess one of the pieces of evidence that supports this is called the birth month effect. And the birth month effect is if you were born in winter months or early spring months, you are at a higher risk for becoming schizophrenic later in life. And they think that those are flu months. Yeah. And another aspect of it is apparently the brains of schizophrenics show inflamed white blood cells, which is a sign of an infection. And they think that possibly all of us are carrying around a retrovirus encoded in our genes that lies dormant like Ms, that under the right circumstances, like early exposure to an infection, can trigger its release or trigger its activation. And it takes 18 to 20 to 30 years to come on. Now you see why people that are pregnant are worried a lot. It's amazing that we've gotten anywhere. I know. Yeah. So what else? Well, they did have some new findings. I got this today from the Internet. They have a New South Wales study from Thomas Weikert. He has identified the brain mechanism that derails decision making in people. So basically, the part of the brain is called the ventral strategum. I'm sorry, stratum. And it lights up. They put people in the MRI lights up in response to rewards and healthy people, and it's linked to your decision making, but completely unresponsive among schizophrenics. So they don't know the difference between expected and unexpected rewards, and so they don't have the opportunity to make a good decision to begin with. And it's a nice finding. It doesn't get us any closer. Well, maybe it does. You never know. They say with proper funding that they predicted 2013, they could have a cure for this. Well, yeah, but they don't get proper funding now. But they're looking into stem cells, right? They're looking into figuring out if it is an infection and if so, like, combating that. And we've also long had antipsychotics. One of the things, strangely enough, that helped develop antipsychotics, or better antipsychotics, is PCP. Yeah. Apparently, researchers figured out that phenylcyclide PCP, the drug angel dust, produced such similar symptoms to schizophrenia that they started investigating and found that it had to do with the neurotransmitter glutamate. Right, right. And dopamine. Right. Yes. Well, it has to do with both, but the emphasis before on antipsychotics was strictly dopamine. Okay. And all it did was keep dopamine in the synapses longer by blocking its re uptake by receptors. That's what antipsychotics do. Yeah. And then in the 80s, after the PCP stuff, they figured out that glutamate was involved. They came up with atypical antipsychotics. And these focus somewhat on dopamine, but more on things like glutamate, and it's re uptake. And these things have produced better results with fewer side effects. So they're figuring out how to treat it. Right. The problem is there's all sorts of side effects, even with Atypical antipsychotics, like weight gain, drowsiness, nervousness, muscle spasms. Yeah. Bulging eyes, apparently, is one. Oh, really? And I guess most of the stuff can be treated by lowering the dosage, but they're bothersome enough that a lot of people just go off their meds. Right. And it doesn't help. ECT electroconvulsive therapy is another thing that they still do. It's not something a relic from the 50s. It's changed a lot and how they do it. And they're not sure still how it exactly works. They stopped using car batteries. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office, then? You could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer. That includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. But about 100,000 Americans each year still receive ECT. That is an option. And obviously, the group therapy and family therapy help just the dealing with that aspect of the family. Yeah. So we encourage you to seek help soon as possible. Yeah. And apparently families can help in very little ways. They're encouraged to set small goals, apparently, especially if you have lost your drive or your will as a result of your schizophrenia or you're disorganized. Right. It can just be compounded by all the when your life is disorganized. Sure. It seems just completely unwieldy. Yeah. Like, where do I start? Right. Now, if that's a symptom of your schizophrenia, it's just that much worse. Right. So if you can help a schizophrenic get back on track by setting small goals and building up their confidence again, apparently that has a measurable effect in their recovery. One of the leading edges of schizophrenia treatment right now is based on this thing called the prodrome, which is the period between the onset of symptoms where you think, maybe I am Jesus Christ, and the time when that seems like your reality. So it's this point where you're starting to have the ideas, but they still seem bizarre or weird or why am I having these ideas? So if you apparently seek out treatment for schizophrenia, when you start to have these ideas in the prodrome, the success rate of treatment is through the roof. Like, yes. This British doctor in the late 80s set up shop in these two towns outside of London, and he set to work finding every potential early case of schizophrenia he could, and he started treating people with therapy and low doses of antipsychotics. And in four years, those two towns had a 10th of the prevalence of schizophrenia of the rest of the country. Wow. Yeah. So apparently, like, this drone research, there's, like, clinics that are opening up and entire departments and universities are dedicated to this prodrome period where you can be like, Come back. This is reality. Right. Wow. Yeah. And they're successful, as they have been so far. Well, Josh, I got one more stat. If you live in a city of 3 million people, then over 21,000 people in your city are suffering from schizophrenia. So keep that in mind. Yes. Don't make fun of people. Don't obviously get scared or violent in a reactive way. I don't know that I'm going to say that you should go over and talk to them. Like, you might want to just be compassionate, and hopefully they're getting help. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Go to schizophrenia.com. You can find all kinds of good information. And if you hadn't already checked out Wesley Willis, check him out. He was a great guy. Check out the daddy. Rock and roll. And also, I would say, in addition to how Schizophrenia works, required reading for this one is an article called Which Way Madness Lies by Rachel Aviv. It was in the December 2010 issue of Harper's. And I have a link. I'll tweet it. I'll tweet the link. How about that? That sounds great. If you want more about schizophrenia, there's plenty of it. There's an article and then some on the site. Just type schizophrenia, which again means split mine into the search bar@howstuffworks.com. And that brings up what? Checklist. And now yes, josh specifically corrections. Oh, wow. I forgot about those. Yeah. Well, we'll correct ourselves on Facebook and stuff, but they mounted up, so we might go for it. Okay. How wildfires work? Oh, man, I don't have this guy's name. A couple of people sent this in. The flashpoint of paper is not Fahrenheit 451. I said books. The flashpoint of books is not Fahrenheit 451. It is Fahrenheit 851 Celsius 450. And Ray Bradbury apparently changed the title because Fahrenheit 451 sounds a lot better than Celsius 450, apparently. What was 481? No, Celsius 450 is the flashpoint or Fahrenheit 851. That sounds as good as 451, I think. Yeah. Okay. But I assume that as well. Man. I wish I had his name. You know who you are. And it was a very nice correction. Those are the ones we like to read. Then we got a correction on who was the first murderer. Apparently, David says, and even sent in a copy of 1491 by Charles Mann. Where he sent an email. No, he sent a scanned copy of the page. Okay. In 1491, he says, Charles Mann says, although Billington was in fact hanged, at least two other Europeans were executed before him. One was convicted for the much more interesting offense of killing his pregnant wife and eating her. How about that? He said I was on page 55 of 1491. Yes, there it is. That is crazy. Okay. But still, Billington is a very noteworthy figure. Obviously sees a whole chapter on them. Sure. And then we got some first of all, some people wrote in about wildfires in Georgia when I said, oh, Georgia and I have wildfires. South Georgia does. And there's actually one going on right now in the Oki. Phonoke. So I misspoke for sure, because I was just talking about the North Georgia mountains, which are very lush and green, but South Georgia can get quite dry and there are wildfires in Georgia. I did not know that. That is true. And then finally, we got an email from an actual Hindu named Kush Kush. And Kush says, you guys missed a few things. Hinduism, typically I'm sorry, technically only has one god, not a pantheon. It's complicated to explain, especially in the non Hindus. But the general idea is there is one universal soul or god that encompasses everything called the Brahman. Okay, I've heard of that. Not the Broham. And every living thing has a part of that in us called the Atmos. The different gods are just different forms of the one Brahman. Also, you didn't properly explain the laws of Karma. The law of Karma has three parts in Hinduism. One, the performer of an action will get the result. Two, the results of the action will come right at the right time. And three, good actions spring good results, bad actions spring bad results. And fourth, the gods are technically subject to karma if you also expand the definition of Karma to include the law of Karma. But he says it was a good podcast. Overall, you guys really hit it on the head, except for these few points. Yeah, I hit it on the head for that. No, just for that one part. Well, and finally, he pointed out, and a few other people pointed out, that I was wrong in correcting you with Jainism and Jainism. Thank you. But I'm going to play you something right now. Okay. Jainism okay. That was from Dictionary.com. Well, that voice is obviously wrong. Well, maybe so. This is from Marian Webster. If it's the same voice, it doesn't count twice. Giantism oh, did you hear that? It's a different voice. Did that one come through? Matt? Yeah. Okay. And then finally, this is Google Definitions. And this is my favorite of all, actually going on Joy Museum. Wow. So, I don't know, because I had, like, three other people said, no, man, three other robots. No, three other real people said, no, it's Jainism. And then I went on YouTube and people said, Jainism. So, I don't know. Well, I like that it's both. We're both right. Yes. Or we're both wrong. Yeah, maybe it's genius. Well, we love corrections so much that I managed to forget that we or are corrected a lot, or we used to read them. I never forget that we're corrected. But let's do this again soon. Agreed. Go through all 350 episodes, find everything you can that's wrong with them, and then let us know. Okay. Okay. Or you can just correct the most recent ones. Whatever we got wrong in this one, which I'm sure is substantial, you can go on to Facebook if you want. You can tweet to us SYSK podcast, or you can send us a plain old fashioned email at stuff. Podcast@howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join Housetoporks staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. 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41e5ae12-53a3-11e8-bdec-03a32f436d20 | What is the Civil Air Patrol? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-the-civil-air-patrol | The Civil Air Patrol is a civilian group of pilots and plane enthusiasts who do a lot of things, namely help out in search and rescue missions. But their history is a bit more colorful. Listen in today! | The Civil Air Patrol is a civilian group of pilots and plane enthusiasts who do a lot of things, namely help out in search and rescue missions. But their history is a bit more colorful. Listen in today! | Thu, 27 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=178, tm_isdst=0) | 42814147 | audio/mpeg | "Stuff you should know. Tour 2019, starting in Chicago, July 24. Yeah. And then Toronto the next night. We're going to be at the Harris Theater and then the Danforth. And you can go get tickets. Get them. Get them now because they are going fast. That's right. Then August 29 in Boston at the Wilbur, august 30 in Portland, Maine. The State Theater. The Plaza live in Orlando on October 9 the Civic Theater in New Orleans on October 10. And then our beloved Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York, october 2324 and 25. Yes. Head on over, Sysclive.com. It has everything you need. And we will see you guys live in person. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. We're flying high. What? For this episode of Stuff you should know. Civil Air Patrol. I've got a different version of it. Okay. Civil Air Patrol airport. Civil Air Patrol. Do you remember how I used to put that in your head? Yeah, it's like the good old days when used to earworm me. I think that's the greatest earworm of all. It's pretty good. It's in my head now. Good. Civil Air. I like that version. So we're talking about the Civil Air Patrol, and we're going to just say what it is right out of the gate. Okay, go ahead. Let's talk first about what I ate for breakfast. Okay. What did you have? Did you have bacon? No, I didn't eat breakfast. Okay. Civil Air Patrol is a nonprofit group. It's a civilian group of plane enthusiasts, but they're much more than that. They have sort of a quasi military hierarchy. They are under the control of the US. Air Force, and what they do a lot these days is things like search and rescue. We talked a little bit about them in our SAR episodes, but they have a very cool, kind of rich and colorful history. And I'm trying to get John Roderick of the indie rock band the Long Winters, my pal. And from the podcast well, he does a lot of podcasts. Which one should we say? Friendly Fire. Sure. His War Movie podcast. He was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, and I texted him and said, I'd love to get a quote from you on your experience. And he says, Heck, yeah. And then he never said anything. So if it comes in, we'll read it. If not, just know that John was a teenage member of the Civil Air Patrol. Nice. Which you still can be. Yeah, you definitely still can be. It's still around. From what I saw, something like 60,000 strong today. Not bad. No, not bad at all. And I get the impression it's a little bit like the Eagle Scouts of the Air Force, under 18 people. Yeah. The cadet program, it sounded very much like sort of boy scouts meets ROTC. Yeah. Because there's a lot of emphasis on public service and being like an upstanding person and just not stealing things. I think there's a big emphasis on that. Yeah. But also you get the feeling there's a little bit of, like, you want to go in the Air Force, right, son? Right. Well, I think that is kind of either if it's not a stated part of it, it's still like a definite function of the Civil Air Patrol is it feeds into the actual Air Force cadet program. And you can actually benefit from being in the Civil Air Patrol if you do plan to go into the Air Force. Apparently you can enter the Air Force at a higher pay grade if you have worked up to a certain rank in the Civil Air Patrol. So if you're interested in being a good citizen, if you like to fly, if you want to be in the Air Force, you could do a lot worse than joining the Civil Air Patrol, tell you that. Yes. If you want to be a part of what they say is about 100 saves a year out in the wilderness, or if you just want to be a part of an organization that had a very cool origin, which we'll talk about right now. Okay, let's early on in aviation history, in the 1920s and 30s, still in its infancy, but it was big enough to where people could own a plane and they could buy their own personal plane and get their pilot's license. Yes. Which is that's really fast, if you think about it. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in? Yes. A couple of decades later. People were like, I want to own a plane and fly it. That's how everybody talk, that mid Atlantic accent. That's right. Hey, Chuck, by the way, I want to shout out what I have come to think is one of the top three facts of stuff you should know of all time, that the Brits originally sounded like Americans and that the Brits lost their American accent rather than the other way around. Is that true? Yeah. Don't you remember in our accent podcast, when did they sound like Americans? It started up to about the 20s or thirty s. And then the BBC came along on the radio and they made a conscious decision to sound like Oxford types who had basically affected an accent in order to separate themselves and sound classier. So you're saying with the BBC adopted, if that was audio recording from, then a guy from central London would sound like me right now. Basically, yeah. So they're getting it wrong in all those movies, too, then. Yes, but these are also the same movies where, like, Nazis sound like British people on the BBC. So it's all kinds of messed up. All right. I love that you just bring out a random fact from an old show. It's the fact of stuff you should know all time history, but let's go back in time. Let's hop in the way back machine and go back to the Great War, the Second World War. Okay. When there were people in this country that loved their flying civilians, and they saw the beginning of the war in the late 1930s when European fascists basically said, nine, no more civilian flying. It's all shut down. And so the aviators over here, civilian aviators, were like, Whoa, that's not cool. We, like, flying our planes. Maybe we should get organized and see if we can actually add value to the military as civilians, because that was back when all Americans wanted to pitch in a little bit to help out the war effort. Right. One guy in particular, guy named Gill Rob Wilson, but he was not the only one. There's another dude named Milton Knight, and both are credited with founding basically civilian Air Force auxiliary programs. Right. To say, hey, military, we're not military. It's cool, but there's other stuff we can do to help you guys out. And let's also not forget that if we can use our collective cloud to popularize flying and aviation and just get more Americans interested in it and showing that, hey, you can actually learn to fly, come hang out with us, and we'll show you how. We'll be generating a pool of pretrained pilots who can transfer over to the military if the US. Ends up going into World War II. Yeah, almost like a reserve unit, even though it is not that. No, it's an auxiliary unit, which means it's on the side. It's in addition to it's not like a reserve unit that can be called up to active duty military, like the reserves. It's a civilian volunteer force. Right. So Gilrob Wilson was working on this, and kind of concurrently, there were some state based aviation groups for civilian civil defense units that were kind of cropping up here and there on the East Coast. And so he kind of saw the writing on the wall and wanted to make things official. So he developed a plan in 10 00 19 41 for the Civil Air Patrol. Got support, very importantly, got support from a gentleman named Fiorrello La Guardia. You don't put any mustard on LaGuardia? No, it's just a cruddy airport. Okay. Actually is. I like LaGuardia. It's coming along, but it's still kind of cruddy. It's fine. None of the New York airports are great. Have you ever seen the pictures of the abandoned TWA terminal at LaGuardia? Oh, no. From the jet age, the 60s is it awesome? It's amazing. It's like a time capsule frozen in time. And I think they converted it into a hotel recently, but somebody did a really good photo spread, like back in 2012 or whatever. Just look up TWA terminal. Maybe it's JFK and not LaGuardia. I think it is JFK either way, it's still worth checking out. I'll check it out. Okay. So LaGuardia, he was the director of the Office of Civilian Defense at the time. Of course, the airport was named after him. He was mayor of New York City at one point. He was an aviator in World War I. Was really a big deal to get him on board. And they designed their little logo, which is a blue circle with propeller, three propellers, and a white triangle. And initially they were handled by because this was pre Air Force before the Air Force was officially established. After World War II. It was part of the US. Army Air Corps. Was the US. Army Air Corps, which I think we made that distinction in the Tuskegee Airmen, I think. So if I remember correctly, So everyone kind of gets on board, and LaGuardia signs the Civil Air Corps, as it was known originally into existence on December 1. And as you will note, that date is very relevant because just six days later is when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, and all of a sudden, we could use this help. Yeah. And I mean, remember, this is like a surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. So it was pretty prescient of Gilrob Wilson and Fiorella LaGuardia to get this thing organized and together, because within a week, they were like, okay, we probably can use you guys. The problem is, the Air Corps initially was like, what are we going to do with these civilians? Super gung ho civilians, too, I imagine. Right, exactly. Which is, like, even worse to have to deal with and just regular old civilians who don't know what they're doing. Yeah. In some cases, it turned out that it was actually the Civil Air Patrol was really helpful because one of the really overlooked things about World War II is that German Uboats, like a variation of a submarine, but they just couldn't stay under quite as long. Yeah, they did little dives. They wreaked absolute havoc on the United States coast during world War II. Basically within a month of Pearl Harbor. Four to six weeks after Pearl Harbor. The first US. Freighter, the city of Atlanta, was sunk by a U boat off the coast of North Carolina. And that was the first of, I think, 397 ships that were either sunk or damaged by Uboats in six months off the coast of America. Yeah. So at this point, the Civil Air Patrol has one wing, is what they called it, per state. I have no idea how many states there were. I think it was 48. Just kidding. And each one of those wings was divided into quadrants, and they were operating out of civilian airports, mostly. But then in 1942, they started opening up some dedicated civil air patrol bases in certain states around the country. So all of a sudden, in 19, 42, 40,000 people enrolled in the Civil Air Patrol, and these German you boats are doing damage off the coast, and all of a sudden they were like, well, listen, we weren't sure quite what to do with you guys. You've been helping us out, you've been delivering some things and even some personnel at times and munitions. But we think we don't have the resources in our, what will soon be called the Air Force to just patrol up and down the East Coast all the time. So that's where you're going to really be valuable to us. And that was really the first big kind of important use of the Civil Air Patrol in World War II. Yeah, and it was effective too, because with Uboats, part of the doctrine of Uboat warfare, sub commander, was that if you saw a plane overhead, you dove sure to get away from that plane because they were very vulnerable from an aerial attack. So just seeing a Civil Air Patrol plane overhead meant that the sub had to break off from pursuit of whatever tanker, freighter, troop transport. It was about to sink and dive and evade that plane. Just even an unarmed Civil Air Patrol plane, because they didn't know they were unarmed at the time, I don't think. Exactly. So this actually started working out pretty well. But there was one incident in particular off the coast of right at Cape Canaveral. From what I understand, you boat got caught on a sandbar oh, man. And was just laying there exposed, trying to get free for about 30 minutes in a Civil Air Patrol plane was circling. It had spotted it, had called in for reinforcements, I think for an aerial strike from the Air Corps for the sitting duck of U boat. And before the air strike could get there to blow the Uboat up, it got itself free and made its escape, got away. And this was enough. It was a frustrating enough, as you can imagine. That pilot was just like, I want a bomb so bad. Well, in very short order, the Air Corps commander what is his name? Henry HAP. Arnold Haparnold said, give him those bombs. And the Civil Air Patrol not in any way a military organization, a civilian auxiliary group was given death charges and bombs to drop on U boats from that point on for the rest of World War II. Yeah, so here's the deal with that. They had to bomb from very high up. They had to use improvised bomb sites because they didn't just have this stuff lying around, and they needed this stuff for the real planes, for the military. So they weren't like, here's the best bomb sites we have. Really? No, like, I think the Civil Air Patrol probably likes to claim that they actually bombed you boats, but there aren't any official on record bombings that were carried out by Civil Air Patrol that like, sank you boats. Right. You talk to Germany like, never happened, didn't affect us. They said nine Civil Air Patrol is like, no, it's more like Yah, right? So it is in dispute. In particular, one sub that some civil air patrol guy dropped death charges over in new Jersey, and they said a geyser of oil and water erupted from the water, which would indicate that they had sunk this uboat. But like you're saying, the Germans don't have any record of anything like that. No gym. They probably didn't. At the very least, though, they did harass the German u boats. Sure. And whether it was directly because of civil air patrol patrols over the coastline or not, by July, about six months after the first attack, german uboats pulled off of American coastal waters and stopped attacking. So it probably wasn't entirely coincidence. It probably wasn't entirely because of the civil air patrol, but they almost certainly played a prominent role in Germany's discontinuation of their sub attacks in American waters. Yeah. So here's what we'll do. We'll do a stat cliffhanger, okay? We'll take a little break and come back with a little bit of statistical evidence to support your claim. Sir brad for this. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. All right, so you said they made a difference, and the numbers kind of back it up. First of all, they were only supposed to do this for 90 days. While they kind of got the real plan together for the military, they ended up doing this coastal patrol for 18 months. So that alone kind of says it was working. Yeah, or at the very least, they weren't quick enough to get there. The real plan going. Right. But here's the stats. 173 subs spotted and ostensibly radioed in. They weren't just spotted and then forgotten about right there. Like, I don't feel like calling it in this time. 82 depth charge bomb attacks against those subs. Pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. And again, let's say they're not actually bombing them out of the water. It's got to be disconcerting to have civilians up there dropping bombs on you. Sure. It's like the North Avenue regulars, but in the air, there were mines out there. They found 17 floating mines and rescued 363 people and 91 ships that had trouble reported, which I don't think we mentioned. Like, America likes to think that, like, oh, well, yeah, the fighting didn't happen over here in the United States, but if you lived on the east coast, on the water, chances are you might have pulled a service person out of the water from one of these bombings. Yeah, like, it happened. There were people in the water that needed rescue, and the Civil Air Patrol was there. I read an account of a family that lived on the coast off of Hatteras, apparently Cape Hatteras. The waters off Hatteras were called torpedo Junction. This happened so frequently, but the windows would rattle in your house when a torpedo struck, like a tanker or something 8 miles away off the coast. You just do not get raised with that in history. It's just not talked about. But it was a pretty big for six months, it was a big problem for the United States. Yes. And there was a lot of bravery involved because these little planes, they were stretching these pilots and their experience and these planes and their mechanical capabilities to the utmost degree to fly these things that far offshore to do these patrols. And they still did it. They flew about 500,000 hours during the war combined, and they were not getting rich doing it. They were reimbursed for fuel, but they were paid $8 a day, which even back then was not a lot of money. No, I calculated about $125 today. It's not bad, actually. Yeah. Come to think of it, you're not doing anything else, I'll take it. Dropping bombs on Nazis, it's kind of fun. And getting $125 for it. Right. And in the end, 30 pilots in the Civil Air Patrol died flying in accidents. And that's in addition to the ones on the coastal patrol that's just total I think there were 26 on the actual coastal patrol that died. I thought it was like 65. This is 26 deaths, and they lost 90 planes. Got you. So this is a really big deal. It was saying, like, you and you the guy who owns the TV rich pear shop, and you the guy who owns the barber shop next door. Get in these planes and start dropping bombs on these you boats. That was a big deal to do to civilians. And in 2014, Obama posthumously, in a lot of cases, awarded the medal of Honor, the highest citizen honor that anybody in the US. Can get to. Everyone who was in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II. All 200000 people. And you know what fun fact that you're going to love that barber dropped his scissors and ran out of the barber shop to go get in his plane halfway through a haircut. And that's how the Mullet was born. Nice. Was it Floyd? It was. Andy Griffith was the first one with the mullet. And I bet you didn't know that The Mullet was born in the mid 1940s. I suspected as much. Business in the front, war in the rear, right? Exactly. Man. When was the first moment created, do you know? I remember very distinctly the first time I heard that term. Okay. I was on set of a TV commercial, and this was many years after The Mullet. But when I was in high school, it wasn't called The Mullet. It was just sort of the cool hairstyle for a little while. It's called the Burnout. But I remember when I heard The Mullet, I was on set and one of my friends said said I, who is this guy? Who's Lee? And he said, I don't know why this stuck with me. He said, he is that wedge of grossness over there with the Mullet head. I can see that sticking with you. That's pretty good. Yeah. Lee knows who he is. Poor Lee. What else did the Civil air Patrol do, though? They did some other weird things. Yeah. The thing during World War II that they're definitely remembered for was the bombing authorities and spotting you boats. But they did plenty of other stuff. Basically, they did anything the Air Corps needed of them, which is things like, we need to get this commander from St. Louis to Louisiana. Can you give them a ride? St. Louis to Baton Rouge. They did that pretty much constantly. They ferried supplies around. They ferried people around. That was a huge part of the war effort here at home by the Cap. Here's a cool thing that they did that also sounds frightening. They would tow what's called target gliders for anti aircraft guns. So you're a plane, you're in your little single engine plane. You're civilian. You were pulling behind you a glider that big guns on the ground are taking target practice at. Yeah. Hopefully with a really long toe line. I wonder how long that could be, though. I don't know. But it almost seems mean spirited, that assignment. I know who did that fall to the guy who drove the driving range golf ball pickup. Volkswagen. Yes. He'd be prepared for that kind of stuff. That's exactly who did it, I'll bet you're right. So that was a huge one. Apparently an equal amount to the danger of being shot out of the sky accidentally in that assignment was also accidentally looking into the searchlights that they use in these training exercises, because at least one pilot was blinded by them and crashed from being, I guess, disoriented afterward. Here's one final mission in Texas, the Civil Air Patrol was charged with culling the wolf population. So apparently it would reduce pressure on the cattle herds that these wolves were killing. And they needed this beef to feed soldiers and citizens. So they said get up there in your planes and start shooting at wolfs. Yes, and at first when I was reading that I thought they were saying they needed the wolf meat to feed the troops. I was like, what? Then I understood what it was saying. No, but yeah, they would shoot the wolves with handguns out of their planes. That's right. I think it said wolfs instead of wolves. Woofs woofer. So World War II comes and goes. Civil air patrol proves its metal, and the army air corps is dissolved and basically turned into the air force. Air Force came after World War II and from what I understand kind of a bit of like hot potato afterward to where no one really wanted the Civil Air Patrol. Right, that sounds like it because one of these a law that was basically passed HR. 57 44, which is really significant to you if you're in the Civil Air Patrol, it basically said, no, the Civil Air Patrol isn't going anywhere. We're going to establish its existence under law but we are never ever going to arm them again. That's just not going to happen. Let's just not speak of this anymore. Let's pretend it never happened. But no one's ever going to drop a bomb again with the Civil Air Patrol. And so it doesn't seem like they were particularly sought after, but they ended up falling under the command of the Air Force after it was established and bounced around a little places within the Air Force and then finally landed in the Air Combat Division. Yeah, post war they really made their name and continue to make their name with Search and rescue. If you're lost in the woods or if there are natural disasters or big weather events, then the Civil Air Patrol is likely to be involved. There was a big earthquake in Alaska in 1964 where the Alaskan Civil Air Patrol and this was where Roderick was in the Civil Air Patrol in Alaska. Yes, that's where he's from. But this was 64. So he would have been just a little kid then. Sure, if not even alive yet, actually. So I don't think he was in that one. He may have just been a gleam. But their Civil Air Patrol's hangar and planes were all destroyed. So volunteers got it together, got eleven private planes started flying supplies in there and these are good pilots and these aircraft did things that military aircraft couldn't do a lot of times. Well that's where the role of the Civil Air Patrol and Search and Rescue really kind of became obvious almost out of the gate because they were doing search and air rescues during World War II as well. Just the fact that their planes weren't fighter jets was a huge advantage for them in Search and Rescue because you want to fly lower, you want to fly slower when you're looking for somebody. So the fact that you have these group of tens of thousands of civilians who are either flying flight instructors, learning to fly, have their own planes partially funded by taxpayers for even more planes. That's a really great resource to be able to tap into when something happens in disaster strikes and you want to look for people, you just say, hey, can you guys go search for these people or go fly around this floodplain, see if there's anybody on any rooftops, and then radio it in? That was a huge role, and probably the most prominent role that civil air patrol still holds today is in search and rescue. Yeah. And they don't just fly around and radio it down, although they certainly do that. They are very active in all manner in all parts of the search. Many of them cross train and, like, horseback riding and crosscountry skiing. CrossFit, CrossFit, of course. So they can kind of do it all. Now they have these what's called cell phone forensic teams, and they can analyze cell phone tower pings and topo maps, and it's become a much more sophisticated sort of search and rescue, largely because of the civil air patrol. Right. But ironically, some of the talents and expertise they've developed in this search and rescue area, like, have nothing to do with planes. And so they might assist in a search and rescue without ever taking to the air in some cases. Sure. But they still had their cool uniform. Sure. And they still march when they're told to. You. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, we're going to take another break and talk a little bit more about the evolution of the cap. Hi, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So, like I said, Chuck, they were shuffled around after world war two, and then they're still under and kind of linked to the air force, but they are definitely civilian like all civilian. You can get into the air Force. And they do have this kind of quasi military structure. They have ranks and things like that, but the ranks that they have are strictly limited to the civil air patrol. I think the highest you can become in the civil air patrol is the major general. That would not translate over to the air Force. Like, you wouldn't be able to move to the air Force and be like, I'm a major general. They'd be like, no, let's reset things, shall we, up to Latrine private? Right. But like I said, if you start to work your way up in the civil air patrol, you can transfer over to the air Force with some credit. It's not like it's just a complete waste of time if you wanted to go into square force. But in, I think, 1975, they got their first non military commander, first civilian commander. And that really kind of set the tone, from what I understand, for this kind of division between the military air force and the civilian volunteer civil air patrol that really kind of forever divided that line, saying you guys can have your ranks and you guys march all you want and call each other seren salute, but you're civilian and auxiliary. Yeah, and like you said, they're under the air force still. And ironically, the specific division of the air force they're under the direction of now is the Air combat Command. Right. Even though they cannot be used in combat. You're not going to get paid even $8 a day anymore. It is full volunteer at this point. In fact, you have to pay dues, membership dues every year, and you have to pay for your own uniform. And if you really want to go large, you can just buy fake epileps and medals. I'm sure you can. You probably get made fun of a yellow or whatever. It sounds like I'm making fun of civil air patrols, and I'm certainly not because well, they definitely are great, and the idea and the whole purposes is pretty great. But from reading about people who had been in it and when they were asked online, what was your experience? I get the impression that there is an element of blowhardiness among some people in the civil air patrol, whereas some are there to learn to fly and for the love of flying, or because they do want to go into the air force, there are people there who might abuse their rank or status in the civil air patrol that you schmucks. There are schmucks there, from what I understand here or there, although it doesn't seem to be systematic schmucks everywhere. So like I said at the beginning, they are non profit and there are a few people to get paid a salary. Obviously, when you get to the administration, the national level, you're going to have to pay some people to run this thing. Sure, the air force does pay expenses if they are asked to perform missions. Well, plus also if you're on a mission and something happens to you, you are at that moment covered by the military's life insurance. So your family is well cared for after that. Yeah, that's a very good point. Actually. The member dues do pay for some planes for some equipment, some fuel hanger, space maintenance, stuff like that. Right now, there are about 530 single engine planes in the Civil Air Patrol in the United States. A lot of these are those. And I'm getting more and more into planes lately. The more we've talked about these planes you're getting so old here. I must be, because I looked at Cessna 172 and I was like, how many does that seat? How much does that cost? Oh, really? Wow. Well, no, I can't afford to buy a plane. But I'm saying, like, having that thought, you've got threshold. Like, planes are cool, let's go to a museum to see a plane. How much would it cost for me to buy this plane and fly it myself? That's the transition. And the transition too, is the thoughts of, like, you know, when Emily and I are retired and Ruby lives somewhere, it sure would be nice to just hop in the Cessna and fly out and see her. Sure. That is like the oldest of old man talk. But then I saw there like, $200,000. I was like, okay, maybe not you're like, maybe I can buy one of them houses with the fly up driveways. Like John Travolta. Yes. I mean, dude, he has his own passenger airliner. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, he's also rather wealthy. That's true. So there are more than 4000 planes, though, used in any given year. So I guess that's the official fleet that the Civil Air Patrol runs. Right. But if you are a member of the Civil Air Patrol and you have your own plane, they'll be like, can you bring your plane along? We need to use it for the search and rescue. Right. And they don't just do SAR stuff. They work also with the forestry service and the DEA. They look out for forest fires, they conduct land surveys. They started to do more and more flies over farms in Kentucky, if you know what I'm saying, to see what they're growing. Yeah, they started in 1985, I think. The Customs and Border Patrol said, hey, how would you guys like to look for marijuana plants to prevent marijuana cigarettes from being smoked by they were all over that. And yeah, they jumped on it. I read an article. This is so civil Air patrol. The idea of getting to prevent drugs from hitting the street. Whoever was interviewed, I didn't catch you. It was but an official at the Civil Air Patrol in the higher up in the national organization, major General probably said something like they helped get a billion dollars worth of drugs. Sure. Which is, of course, like the manufacturers suggest a retail price of drugs off of the street in 2017 and that they were on track to hit about the same number in 2018. It's a lot of marijuana cigarettes. Yeah, I can't help. I probably shouldn't even just say this. I got to hear it. We can edit it out later. Who is the Sandra ground guy in Florida? Oh, man. George Zimmerman. Yeah. Some of this sounds a little bit like that, like, hey, I'm not a copper in the military, but I'm going to play like I am. I want to bust drug dealers. Well, that actually made me wonder. Do they patrol the southern border? I think they do. I couldn't see anything that said they did. Well, it said they did. They patrolled the southern border in World War II looking for saboteurs entering. Got you. That's what triggered I was like, well, wait a minute. That plus busting pot growers. Do they look for people crossing the border illegally? And I didn't see anything about them being used for that. That might be an off book use. It could be, yeah. They don't report that. But it was hilarious. The guy interviewed maybe the major general who was talking about how they got a billion dollars. They helped with getting a billion dollars of drugs off the streets. Right. They were saying, we don't talk about that very much. We don't release press releases because we don't want to basically step on the DEA's operations or anything like that. But trust us, that's how much we get off of the streets. It was pretty cute. They also work in just general aerospace and flying education and advocacy. They do lectures and seminars. They put together training manuals online, just trying to advance aviation and the knowledge and love of aviation. And Chuck, I also saw in another article some other stuff that they do, which is pretty interesting, that is much more tied to the military. So you remember they're under the combat division. Yeah. Well, the combat division puts them to pretty good use sometimes. Like, if you are flying a drone, under FAA regulations, that drone has to be escorted by a human in a plane over regular airspace, non military airspace. And so to get out of the United States, a drone usually has to fly over non military airspace. And so one of the things that the Civilian Air Patrol does is they escort drones, which means that that's something that the military doesn't have to do. And for just one base with the drone escorts they provided, this commander figured that they saved the military something like 400 grand a year by doing this gratus, basically. Wow. They also survey military training routes, so they basically fly over the routes that test pilots are going to fly to make sure that somebody hasn't put up power lines since the last time they used them. They simulate flyers that have accidentally entered restricted airspace for intercept training, which has got to be kind of neat. And they're actually learning to fly drones themselves now, too, which is probably a pretty in demand skill if you're somebody going into the Air Force these days. I think it's adorable that they saved the military $400,000 a year. Well, that was just one base too. But yeah, he had enough self awareness that he was saying like I think he called it budget dust. Sure. But he said it still counts. Budget dust. I love that. Half a million bucks is budget dust. Yeah, it is. Then they have their cadet program. We mentioned earlier about cadets. This is if you are under the age of 18, you can still be in their cadet program once you are over 18. You don't have to do this until you're 21, but you can, at 18 turn into what's called a senior, which I thought was interesting that a senior could be like 19. Right? I found out why, because that seems kind of weird, doesn't it? What they're called seniors. Well, if you enter and you're over 18, you have to be you have to be considered a senior. Yeah. But if you enter the civilian air patrol before you're 18, you can wait to become a senior till you're 21. And the reason why is because you can get hammered. When you get that rank right, you just keep putting it off. It's called delayed gratification. You can get your training to get your pilot's license through the civilian air patrol for basically like half price of what you would pay a flight school. And it's such a great deal that flight schools complain to the government and say this is unfair competition. So there's a rule with the civilian air patrol that if you enter the civilian air patrol over the age of 18, you are automatically considered a senior and you do not qualify for instruction to get your pilot's license. If you start before then and you start getting your pilot's license, you can delay being considered a senior until you're 21. So you have an extra couple of years to complete your training to get your pilot's license at half price. That's the reason why you can delay being a senior until you're 21. Hey, sounds like quite a deal. Yeah, it is. Half price. Everybody loves half price. And as we mentioned earlier, just to kind of put a cap on it, the cadets, it is a bit like Boy Scouts meets ROTC. They get to actually get in planes. If you're a kid, you got to be twelve years old. But if you are interested in flying and getting your license or going into the Air Force, you can train and you can get yourself up in the ranking system through the years and you can get seat time and planes and get flying experience. Learn to fly drones. That's a big one. Yeah. So I think it's like a pretty cool program for kids to get into. Yeah, and if drug dealers just make you so mad you can't even see straight, it's another thing you can do. That's right. Get rid of them. You got anything else? Nothing else. John. Rodney never responded, so I'm just going to go with his one statement, which was, I'm a proud veteran of the Civil Air Patrol. Well, thanks for almost nothing, John. Rodder. Great story. If you want to know more about the Civil Air Patrol, well, then go join the Civil Air Patrol. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for listener mail. This is from a fellow Toledo and Josh. Yes. Hey, guys. I'm a Spanish teacher and a second language acquisition nerd. In a recent episode, you guys mentioned that you're not fluent in the second language until you dream in that language. Chuck, I remember I said I had heard that before. As romantic and poetic as this sounds, it's totally made up, which is what I figured. Also, later in the episode, you mentioned that someone who learns a second language as an adult will never reach the fluency of a native speaker. This is true, sort of. It depends on your definition of fluency, though. Speakers of English as a second language who have been in an English speaking country for years or even decades, will still have an accent, make mistakes in word order, or have trouble with the vocabulary. In the end, I argue that fluency is overrated and what we should focus on is proficiency. Being hyper focused on becoming fluent in quote, leads people to be paralyzed when speaking, and they'll spend years studying a language, but never be confident in their abilities to ever use it. Side note even though this dream thing is a myth, I totally still celebrate with my students when they come in and tell me about having dreams in Spanish. Even if it's not true, it's still fun when kids feel confident and I'd lead them to believe it is true. Looking forward to future podcast, guys. Lisa in Toledo, Ohio. Hi, Josh. Go Rockets. Hi, Lisa. Go Rockets. And go Mud Hens. And go Falcons. What are the Rockets? Toledo Rockets. The University of Toledo. Okay. Yeah, because Toledo is so well known for its space program, I don't know why they're called the Rockets, now that I think about it. I'm a shame. Who knows? Well, thanks a lot, Lisa. And if you want to be cool like Lisa or like me and say you're from Toledo, whether you are or not, it's fine. We probably won't check up on it. You can get in touch with us myriad ways. You can go onto our website stuffyoushouldnow.com, and check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit radio app app apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
443e07c2-53a3-11e8-bdec-53380440d0a3 | Porcupines: Little Stabby Cutie Pies | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/porcupines-little-stabby-cutie-pies | We love animals. A lot. Especially underrated ones like the darling porcupine. Listen in today to learn all about these stabby little boogers.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | We love animals. A lot. Especially underrated ones like the darling porcupine. Listen in today to learn all about these stabby little boogers.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 15 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=289, tm_isdst=0) | 38094977 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And that's the stuff you should know about Porcupine Pines, which this is a great idea, Chuck. Good job. You know, the porcupine, when you take away all those quills, is just a cute little guinea pig. Basically a giant one. Yes, a cute big guinea pig. Speaking of cute porcupines, dude, do you remember Teddy Bear the porcupine kind of went a little viral a few years ago. No, you have to watch Teddy Bear the porcupine, specifically teddy Bear the porcupine doesn't like to share on YouTube. And it is this porcupine eating corn on the cob and making all these sounds like Cousin It. And it is one of the cutest things I've ever seen in my entire life. Yeah. We want to shout out Live Science, Smithsonian, Mental Floss, the San Diego Zoo, and a couple of other websites that I coupled together this wonderful bid on one of our wonderful animal friends in the world. We'd love to do these shows. It just made me think, have you seen the octopus documentary thing yet? No, I haven't. I've been kind of popping up in my periphery, but I don't really know what it is. Is it just about octopi? Well, it's called my octopus teacher. I haven't seen it yet, but I just know that the deal is this guy kind of gets to know one octopus, and that's a nice story. And Zeus is all I know. That's neat. We'll have to watch that. Yeah. Okay. I can't wait. And I mentioned that because we've long said that the octopus is our favorite animal, but I feel like almost every time we've done one on an animal, it's on something that we love. And, boy, do I love the quill pig. I do, too. Yeah. Apparently, that's what their Latin name means, quill Pig. I love that. That's great. That is fantastic. And it turns out, Chuck, that there are basically two groups that porcupines get lumped into. There's a bunch of different genius, right? And species. But they basically fall under two categories. It's Old World, which is Europe, Africa, Asia and the New World, which is North, south and Central America. And if you saw a porcupine in South America and you saw one in the Himalayas, you probably would be like, that's porcupine, too. They're not radically different, like some Old World and New World's animals are. Yeah, but something I saw that was interesting was that they evolved separately. What one of those what is it called? Coevolutions or whatever. No, I didn't see that. That is crazy. I saw that, and I only saw it in one place. I think that might have been a personal hypothesis of somebody who got themselves the website. I saw it somewhere, though. And then the two, actually, the Old World and the new World have less in common than they do individually with some other rodents in their area. Yeah. So I'm actually not surprised to hear that. But the one thing that they do have in common across the board is that they have quills and that they use their quills defensively. Now, what their quills look like, how they use their quills. There's a lot of other distinctions and differences between Old World and New Worlds, but they all have quilts. They're all porcupines. That seems to be the thing that binds them. It's the tie that binds that family. Yeah. And it's easy to take the porcupine for granted, I think, and just say, yeah, the little animal with all those quills. But when you take a step back and look at it and think about the evolution of the porcupine, like I said, it sort of would be a very large, sort of cute, little fluffy guinea pig, but it probably got eaten a lot. They said nuts to this. Nature steps in. It's like, all right, how about this? What if we were just animal pincushions, such that if you came anywhere near us, you would be stabbed repeatedly if you tried to eat us? It's one of the most amazing evolutionary adaptations I've ever seen. Yeah. And I mean, they can really use those things, too. There's a longstanding myth that they can shoot them, which is not true, but apparently even Aristotle fell for that one. What a dummy. But they can use them in some pretty interesting ways. And you hit the nail on the head when you said step back if you see a porcupine. That is good advice. You should probably step back, because depending on the species or whether it's Old World or New World, those quotes can mess you up pretty good. Yeah. But also get nearby and take a look like they're not going to come after you. The porcupine is a very kind hearted animal, and those are 100% for defense. A porcupine is never going to charge you and leap at your belly to put quills all in your stomach. So take a little look, admire it for what it is. I think to talk about porcupines, a lot of this is talking about the Old World versus the Rush version. Yeah. The big differences that I saw, and there's lots of differences between different species within each of these groups. But the Old World versus New World has some big differences between them. And one of them is that Old World are typically terrestrial porcupines. They spend most of their lives on the ground. They live in burrows or caves or rock dens. And New World porcupines, they live on the ground, too. They live in burrows, but they're also very capable of climbing trees, and they'll spend a significant amount of time and sometimes nest in trees. And there are some species that spend virtually their whole lives in trees, almost like sloths. Yeah. Quill wise, the New World porcupines quills are going to be shorter and smaller in general. I think they're about four inches 10. Old World dudes and ladies, they can get very long. They can have quills up to 20 inches long. They can be marked with black and white bands. And what they can do is these Old World guys can puff them up so they stand up and are more intimidating and look also, it's weird because it's like multifold like four or five different things they do. By doing this, they look larger. Right. So that's always something that vulnerable animals try to do in the wild. They look like a skunk a little bit because of the black and white marking down their back. They actually have a defensive musk, kind of like a skunk, but just not nearly as bad. Yeah. So they try to imitate a skunk a little bit. They look bigger, they rattle. They can shake those things and rattle them, which is another great adaptation to say, like, get away from me and don't try and eat me. And supposedly that works pretty well, too. Yeah, totally. And then if all else fails, they are stabby. They are stabby. So sometimes the Old World ones will actually charge backwards toward a predator if they're feeling like they want to stay in the ground. And that's usually when they're caught out in the open. If they have a place to hide, they'll stick their head in that place to hide and then puff out their quills and make themselves hard to get at. But if they're out in the open, they may decide that they're going to fight off this predator and they'll charge backward. And one other adaptation I saw, which I thought was awesome, they'll have the predator chase it and then they'll stop all of a sudden and the predator will run into them in their quilts for real. And then you hear the sound effect. Yeah, exactly. And then it's too late. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because those quills, even though they puff them out, they are pointy generally in the reverse direction. Right. Which is why they have to back up into something to quill them. Or like you said, bury them. Just throw on that parking brake real quick. And all of a sudden, that fox has got a face full of quill. Right. So that Old World contains a couple of species that are called crested porcupines. And they basically look like if the quills were like an umbrella, it opens at the back of their head yeah. And just kind of sticks out like that. And like you said, it makes them look a lot bigger. They're a lot more dangerous. The big difference with quills between the Old World and the New World, in addition to being shorter, is Old World porcupines are covered in quilts. That's all they have. I don't know if we said or not, but quills are just modified hair. They're made of keratin. They're just like hair. They're just way stabbier than hair that you and I have. Well, it's like hair meets fingernails, basically. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And old world porcupines, that's all they have, are quills. New world porcupines have quills that are also mixed in with fur, like an undercoat, longer hairs, and their quills kind of stand up and are used for defense. It's not all that they have. And the other thing about their quills is that they have little barbs and new world porcupines. Barbs make their new world quills way more dangerous than old world quills. Yeah, it's like a little fish hook, basically, and instead of just poking right into you, it'll actually snag in your flesh and makes it, like you said, way tougher to get out. A much harder time removing a new world quill than an old world quill. Right, but those New World guys are because their quills start further back. You get the feeling, I wouldn't recommend this, but if you just go very gently and just say, hey, little guy, don't do that. I just want to give you a scratch under the chin, and I think you might enjoy it. And I'm going to move very slowly. Just don't turn around, and you'll have a really good time. I'd like to include a disclaimer here. Don't do it. You guys should not listen to Chuck right now. He's doling on some really terrible advice. Yeah. Because those quills start farther back. They got that cute little head and face, and it just makes you want to give them a scratch. Yeah, no, totally. Like, if you watch Teddy teddy bear videos teddy bear? The porcupine, you will want to go get one as a pet. There's another one I saw called Diva. She's a baby porcupine. She's adorable. Yeah, you totally want to do that. And I'm sure there are ways to handle them, but I also saw one of those new guys on a late night talk show, and he had, I think, an African crested porcupine on his lap. And that thing was not at all worried or scared or in any sort of defense mode. And that dude was in pain just letting this thing sit on his lap, because, I don't know, you said they look like guinea pigs, and I said, Overgrown guinea pigs. Some of these things can get really big. There's a cape porcupine. I think it's the biggest one. They get up to, like, \u00a365, \u00a365. It's like a large dog. Yeah. With quills, though, with the quills puffed up? No, they're \u00a365 year round. And then imagine a 65 pound dog with those quills. That's dangerous. Yes. What I meant I know they don't actually weigh more when they puff up, but when they puff those quills out, they can look two to three times their size. Right? Yeah. I imagine that thing looks enormous. And actually, I don't do this much, but I'm watching that thing eat that corn on the cob right now. Isn't that adorable? Yeah. I have to have the sound down, so I'm going to go back and watch it. You have to hear the sound like the sound doesn't but even without the sound, he's just awfully cute. Yeah, they kind of look like beavers a little bit, too. And they are related as fellow rodents here. I think we should take a break. I'm getting kind of worked up here. And we'll come back and talk more about these cute little stabby suckers right after this. Okay, Charles, we're back. And we've been talking mostly about quills. Yeah. So one more thing about quills, and there's going to be more than one more thing about quills, let's be honest. But we said they couldn't shoot them. What they can do these things do fall out, just like hair, and they grow just like fingernails and will eventually fall. So when they shake, if they have loose quills, they can fly off, but they're still not, like, shooting, like Aristotle said, like deadly needles arts. No, but they can be problematic. These things can puncture the side walls of tires. I was reading the blog of some tire company, kal Tires, I think, up in the Yukon, and they said that it can be a problem. Like if you run over one, like on some roads. Yes. If you're out in the middle of nowhere and you run over a porcupine quill, you're probably going to get a flat. That's how tough those things are. Well, that's sad. What, for your tire now? For the afternoon? Well, no, you're not running over are you still watching teddy bear videos? No. I thought you said if you run over a porcupine, it can porcupine quill. Oh, well being what is it, just a loose quill on the road? Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Like just a loose quill laying on the road. If you run over, it goes into your sidewall, you're probably going to get a flat tire. That's how tough those things are. Okay, I thought you meant if you actually run over a porcupine and you have a bunch of quills, that would probably do it, too, especially if the porcupine was in a defensive procedure. But the porcupine doesn't have to die in this case for you to get a flat tire. So regardless of that sadness, there is sadness in that. Despite this great adaptation and this great defense mechanism, they still can be hunted. Lions can still hunt them. Human people. There's the bush meat trade for the old world porcupines. You know what that means? And there are owls, wolverines, pythons. There's something called a fisher that looks sort of like a weasel bear, fox or something. Did you look that thing up? Yeah, I think it's related to otters and weasels. Okay. But it had a little sort of a bare face. It was interesting they apparently stink, too. Well, they stink in more ways than one, because they learned to flip these porcupines over where they have that soft belly meat and no quills as a way to attack them, which really makes me mad. Yeah. I don't like fishers for that reason, either. I've never heard of them until recently. Until we started researching this. I hadn't either. I don't like them. No. I just don't like them. Eat something else. Yeah. Leave the porcupines alone, because they're actually pretty nice. Yeah. And they don't eat what do they eat? They eat vegetables and fruits and berries and nuts and roots. Yeah. So they eat all those things. They'll also eat crops, which is porcupines are considered a nuisance, especially if you're a farmer or even a gardener in the suburbs, because they will eat your root vegetables. They will eat corn. Love corn, apparently. But also, they have another thing, too, where they need sodium in their diet. They need a pretty even ratio of one to one of potassium to sodium for their electrical conductivity in their body to work. But they don't get much sodium in their diet. Plants have lots of potassium, not much sodium. So they have to go find it elsewhere. And it turns out we humans have a lot of stuff that has sodium in it. Apparently, plywood glue contains a lot of sodium, so they love eating wood structures we build out of plywood. The salt that we put on the roads gets kicked up on the underside of our car. So you might find a porcupine chewing on the tires or the hoses or belts or wires under your car. Yeah, because the humans sweat so much salt when they're working that they'll go like if you have some wooden pruners in your shed, they'll go in there and they'll start eating the handle of your pruners because it just has a residual human salt left over on it. Right. You just walk in, you're like, Are you nuts? What is wrong with you? You porcupine just set up a salt lake for those fellas. Yeah, well, they'll find anywhere they can find a natural salt, they'll definitely eat that, too. But yes, anything that has human sweat on, even trace amounts of human sweat, they'll go bonkers. Like, they eat ores, paddles, that kind of stuff. But, yes, typically they eat leaves, stems. They eat chutes and leaves. They also though, and this is another reason why they're considered a nuisance. They eat the bark off the tree, so they're considered generalist. They'll eat just about any kind of vegetation, which is actually and they're also super adaptable, which is why you'll find porcupines almost anywhere there's vegetation, but that's what they eat in spring, summer, fall, and then in winter, they don't hibernate, which actually makes them kind of unusual as well. But they go from being generalists to what's known as faculty specialists, meaning their diet becomes very limited to just one or two types of trees, and not just one or two types of trees. During the winter, they may just feed on the inner bark of one tree. And that can be problematic because the inner bark is where nutrients in water moves from the roots to the rest of the tree. And if that porcupine eats all the way around, it what's called girdleing a tree. It can kill or seriously damage that tree. Yes. If you have a problem, if you live in the woods and stuff and you see a tree, it could be a beaver, but either way, you kind of handle it the same. You can wrap, like, chicken wire around it, around the bottom or some sort of aluminum or something sheeting to keep the beaver and or porcupine from non on that thing. Yeah. And I would guess you'd want to wear work gloves because the salt from the sweat in your hands is just going to attract them to that chicken wire. Yeah, they're nocturnal, so they're mainly doing this stuff at night. They're patrolling around. They're defending their areas that they feed. I saw both. I saw that they're territorial. I saw that they're also not territorial. Yeah, it probably depends with so many different species, because they will travel outside their home range if they want to get a mate or if they need that salt. They're fairly solo flyers, although sometimes you'll see a couple of them, they may be mated, they may be siblings. I don't think we mentioned that the Old World porcupines are actually really good swimmers. Both of them are, from what I understand. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And New World will actually go swim out to gather aquatic plants. They swim more than the Old World does, but they just swim to collect plants, and then they bring it back to the shore to eat. Yeah, and they'll sleep in trees. Sometimes the climbers will, but it seems like they make use of other animals dens when they're not around and they have left, like, they'll go to an artwork den that has been abandoned or a hole, and they will change it around, maybe knock down some walls, open up that floor plan. You put an island in the kitchen. Yeah, of course. You got to have the big island. Sure. And then they'll just adapt it to their needs because obviously they're a little puffier than the artwork. Yeah. And in doing so, Chuck, a question that I kept running up against was, what role did porcupines play in the ecosystem? And they think that one of the big roles they play is by basically disturbing stuff. They disturb the soil when they're digging and burrowing and everything. Oh, interesting. And they found that through that, they propagate way more seeds than would otherwise be propagated if they weren't around. So forests are much more diverse with them in it than without them because of all of their scratching and moving and all that stuff. Yeah. And it seems like for rodents, they live a long time. They can live in the I mean, I sort of saw a wild range anywhere from I did to three to five years in the wild to ten years in the wild. I saw one that lived to be 18. I saw the record was 25, which I think was second only to a beaver. As far as the rodent record, I think there was a 28 year old beaver once. I saw one in Brazil. Can live up to 27 years in captivity. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's long lived, but yeah, I saw three to five years too. I guess it just depends on the species. Yes. And the other thing about their feeding habits is they eat seasonally. Right. They're little hipsters, they eat seasonally and locally. So depending on what's there, I think in the winter, they'll eat more evergreen needles and sort of the inner bark of the trees and stuff like that. Right. And then when those sweet berries come around, or when that corn crop is coming in, just look out. Then they turn back into generalist. That's right. So I feel like we cannot go any further, can't dance around the fact that porcupines populate and when they do copulate, they produce offspring and we should talk about that. Yeah. Should we break or should we do this and then break? I feel like we're going to need to take a break after this. OK, so porcupines have stabbed quills that point backwards. That's right. And if you know how a rodent and a mammal like this would have sex, it is from a male approaching the female from the rear, right where those things are pointing. And so you think, how do they do this? What happens is, the males, they're going to vy for the female. Like so many animals, they have these sort of noisy battles and they whine and they stomp when they win and stomp their tail and try to impress the lady, puff their quills out. And if the lady says, all right, I think you might be a good match for me, what does he do? He sprays urine all over her. That's right. And she goes, that was wonderful. Let's go, big boy. Yeah. I'm going to lay down my quills and move the tail to the side. It's business time. Right, yeah. Because the tail is barbed. I don't think we said that either. No. Like all the quilts are barbed, right. Well, no, I think the actual tail is barbed. Oh, good Lord. As well. Which can help with the climbing and stuff. Right. So I think it would take being sprayed with your end, you would want to reach that level of commitment to make sure that you could trust that that barbed tail is going to be kept to the side. Are we in? Right. And then yes, that definitely says yes, you're in. You're in. Get it? Yes. I told you we would need a break. Let's take one, shall we? All right. And we'll talk about porcupines right after this. So, Chuck, the porcupines have populated. They were successful, and the female has now just stated for 205 to 217 days. And what did you say were just born Porcupets. Like PTEs? Yeah. Not pets is in something you keep, but yeah, little porcupts. Like the 50 singing group girl version of the porcupine. Randy porcupine and the porcupines. Right, exactly. Yeah. And here's where it got a little confusing, because that's all different stuff depending on where I looked. And again, it may be according to species, I saw that they rarely have more than one at a time. I also saw that sometimes they have up to four, but let's just say between one and four per litter, and they stay with their mommies for a little longer than what I found. It says, I think, from the San Diego Zoo, just a few months, but I also saw anywhere from twelve to 24 months, and they at least need that mother's milk for like six months. And I think it really depends on the species. Like, I saw the largest ones, the Cape porcupine, they actually stay in family units of a mom and a dad and one to two kids. Interesting, because the dad's usually out of there with the porcupines, right? Yeah. Especially with North American porcupines. I feel like a lot because we're in America, a lot of the info we got was for North American porcupines, and people just called it porcupines, which required a lot more digging. But I feel like with North American porcupines, it's like, hey, good luck with the kids. And then the mom has the kid and it's like, hey, I'm weaning you. Good luck with the rest of your life. And then they live this kind of solitary, happy existence, digging around and eating tree bark. Yeah. And if you think the porcupine is soft and cute, as you would imagine, you are correct. Those needle like quills start to stiffen up very quickly, but it kind of starts three or four days later. And then I imagine it takes a little while to reach full kind of hard quill version. Yeah. And I saw conflicting information, too. I saw that they were born precocious, where they had a full set of teeth, their eyes were open, and then it just took a few hours for their quills to harden into, like, adult quillage that would even take two. Chuck yes. Adult quillage. Thank you for that. Yeah. Close for a long time. Yeah. So don't know. It's possible. It's different species. It's also possible San Diego Zoo just got a bunch of stuff wrong. Well, that's always possible. Great zoo. I've been there. I know we did an episode on Zoos and whether or not they were ethical. So you can go make up your own mind about that. And that where Jack Hannah hailed from, was in he a San Diego zoo guy. I feel like that's probably true. Let's just say it is. I got something else on these quills. They have an anti wait a minute, I thought we were done with quills. You said. No, never done with quills. Okay. They have an antiseptic quality, apparently, in case of self savage. That's awesome. I hadn't seen that, actually. And I think we should say, too, just one more thing about quills. I'm breaking my own rules here because they're like modified hair. They grow back when they're shed. They're constantly shedding and growing quills. Yeah. And like I said, you should not approach one in the wild. But they may carry rabies, but other than that, they don't really carry any other diseases, which, I mean, yeah, if you wanted to love porcupines anymore, there you go. Like you could snuggle one and you don't have to worry about any diseases. Yes, but don't eat them like they do in some parts of the world. They are in pretty good shape, but they have been exterminated in certain parts of Africa because they do eat root crops. So they're a nuisance pest. So they get rid of them. People can collect you like that. They can collect the quills for ornamentation. And I think there's a couple of them that are listed as vulnerable, and very sadly, of course, because their habitat is being lost. Yes, but globally, porcupines are under considered of least concern, which itself is concerning because they are considered pests in a lot of places. So they're eradicated. I think it was the Maryland DNR, the Do Not Resuscitate Agency said that on their site that porcupines used to be in the southeastern United States, but they were eradicated. I didn't know that, and I've never heard that, and I couldn't find it anywhere else. But I don't know why the DNR would make that up. I'm trying to think if I've ever seen one in the wild. They do not live in the Southeast, but the Maryland DNR is saying, like, I've traveled all over the world. I'm not saying in my backyard. Oh, I got you. Well, we were talking about the Southeast. You can imagine why I fell for that one. No, I'm just trying to think of I've seen one, like camping out west or anything. I don't know if I've ever seen one. I never have. I would think you would definitely remember seeing a porcupine in real life. Probably Armadillos. Everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. And, you know, they carry Hanson's disease. They don't get close to them. Porcupines don't carry any communicable diseases that humans are concerned about except RAVs. Yeah, they can be rabid, but all mammals can be rabid. So should we talk about what happens if you just Google porcupine and dog? You're going to get a lot of very sad pictures of curious dogs who stuck their snout where they shouldn't and. Are barbed all over the nose and snout. Not good. No. And there's a lot of things that you want to do and don't want to do if that happens to your dog, because it's actually really bad if that happens. So if your dog if you ever see a porcupine on a hike with your dog, get your dog away from that porcupine. Not just for the porcupine sake. Like if a porcupine goes into a defensive posture, it's scared to death. Yeah, it might seem all tough and angry. It's scared. That's why it's doing that. But also it could really mess your dog up. So for at least your dog's sake, get your dog away from the porcupine. And if you fail to do that quickly enough, and your dog does take some quills in its face, in its neck, wherever those things can, because especially in the New World porcupine that their quill have barbecues, they can migrate further and further inward. They're not going to work themselves out, they're going to actually work themselves in. So you want to take your dog to a vet. Like, your dog gets quilled, you get in the car, you go to the vet. That's the order of how everything happens. You don't stop and get a double cheeseburger. You don't go home and read the paper first. You go straight to the vet because your dog is going to need to go under general anesthesia to have those things removed. That's how bad of a jam it is. Yes. I'm actually going to amend that with your permission. Because the first thing you should do, and hopefully you're with someone else, really, it would be great if you have two people in on this. One to drive and one to keep your dog from messing with their face. Yeah, that's a big one. Because if there's quill poking in a dog's face, they're going to paw at it, they're going to try and rub their nose on the ground. That is bad because those quills are just going to go further and further in. So you really need to do your best to hold onto your dog, hold their head up and keep their paws away from their face. And like you said, go straight to that vet because don't try and remove them yourself. You're only going to make it worse. And that's like guaranteed. There's also supposedly a myth that if you clip the porcupine quill, it deflates it and makes it easier to come out. They're not inflated with air. No. So clipping it's not going to deflate anything. Is that air saddle? Yeah. And it actually can make the quill shatter because imagine a really hard claw or something like that being clipped with some scissors. It's going to shatter some. And if enough of the piece shatters far enough down, it can reach the skin level. And then if it works its way in, all of a sudden, you just made it. That much harder to get out because you just added a new barb, which is that shattered jagged edge that used to be intact before you cut it like a knucklehead. Yeah. I could see the instinct, if you don't know what's going on, to be to clip them, because if they're really long and sticking out of their face, it looks terrible. Or to try and just yank them out, but do not do yeah, don't do either one of those things. Another big reason why is the risk of infection is really big. They have multiple stab wounds, essentially, and like you said, the only solution is general anesthesia. It's not surgery, but it's not surgery. No. Some of these may not ever be able to come out. And your pet is going to have a lifetime of being monitored to make sure they don't migrate toward a joint or an organ or the back of their eye. Who knows? Depending on where they got stabbed with the quilt. So I think it was the ASPCA that said, the best way to deal with this is to prevent it from ever happening. Just don't let your dog anywhere near a porcupine. It's just not worth the risk. You're going to scare the porcupine, too. Yeah. And if you live in porcupine country, don't ever let your dog out of the house. No. As a matter of fact, just keep it wrapped in bubble wrap at all times. Toilet train them. Yeah. Or just change the bubble wrap. Let them pee in the bubble wrap. Yeah. Just get tons and tons of bubble wrap and then don't throw it away. Don't recycle it. Put it in a huge pile at the end of each season in your front yard and melt it with a blowtorch. Yeah, that's great. Maybe mix it with acetone first. Yes. I've got two more porcupine facts, if you will indulge me. Let's hear it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. In the in the UK was a swinging time for porcupines, apparently, because there was a population of Himalayan porcupines crested, I believe, in South Devon in the wild, because they'd escaped from the zoo sometime in the lived on the lamb for a decade. And the same thing happened in Staffordshire with a kind of crested porcupine where they had a wild population because they escaped from the zoo, too. Is that near stoke on Trent? I don't know. Well, let's ask Tom. All right, if that's near Stoke on Trent. All right. You got anything else again, I got nothing else. Okay, well, that's it for porcupines. Everybody go watch teddy bear videos. You're going to love them. And since I said teddy bear, it's time for listener mail. Man, I can't wait to turn up the volume on this. It's going to knock your socks right off. Teddy bear is probably on Instagram, I would imagine, but I do follow that groundhog on Instagram. Chunk, I think I know who you're talking about? Yeah, chunk the groundhog. It's good stuff. Yeah. All right, so here we go. This is from Don, the black cowboy. Did you see this one? Oh, yeah. This is great. It's fantastic. We did a short stuff on black cowboys in history and how they have long been overlooked. So for some weird reason, you don't listen to short stuff. You should. Yeah, we never kind of promote that, but it's just like, stuff you should know. But it's shorter. Yeah. What's your problem? Listen. Hey, guys. My name is Don, and I'm a 25 year old black cowboy from Texas. I along with my brother and also a second generation amateur farrier as well. My father taught us after learning the trade growing up on our family farm, then later going into horseshoeing as a side career. When I saw your episode about blacksmithing, I was eager to hear if you mentioned failures in it and thought I might finally write in. Then when you came out with a black cowboy episode, all of my friends shared the episode with me, so I knew I had to write. As a kid, our family did trail rides, rodeos, and horse races nearly every weekend. Since leaving my hometown for college and beyond, I've often been the first introduction to black cowboysfarmers. For most people, there's a large community of black cowboys and farmers still surviving, regardless of the systemic issues we face whenever it's safe. Again, I'd like to invite anyone hearing this out to our annual trail ride Easter weekend to get a chance to experience the lifestyle. Isn't that cool? Dude, I want to do this. So he sent a flyer, too, and it looks super interesting. It does. It looks awesome. Yeah. So they hold it over Easter weekend, and you just basically go live the cowboy life for a weekend. I love it. And it's like $10 or something like that, too. Yeah, it's not like some city slicker scam. No, don doesn't stick it to you. Don't give it to you straight. That's right. Straight shooter. He says, love. The podcast really helped keep me company these last few years in the Peace Corps. So Don is my new most interesting man in the world. I think he is one of the more well rounded stuff you should know, listeners we've heard from in a while. Yeah. And he says, PS. Yes, I did ride my horse to school. That's amazing. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Don. Hats off to you. Ten gallon hat, even literally. Thank you for the invite. We may see you one of these Easter weekends on your trail ride, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to the stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com stuff you should know. It's to production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
43a0aa36-53a3-11e8-bdec-0f2e22fc1b36 | The War on Fat: The Seven Countries Study | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-war-on-fat-the-seven-countries-study | The Seven Countries Study was a fairly impressive, long-term study on the effects of fat in our diet, among other things. But it was very flawed and launched the misguided "War on fat." Learn all about today, then make up your own mind. | The Seven Countries Study was a fairly impressive, long-term study on the effects of fat in our diet, among other things. But it was very flawed and launched the misguided "War on fat." Learn all about today, then make up your own mind. | Tue, 16 Jun 2020 12:16:38 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=12, tm_min=16, tm_sec=38, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=168, tm_isdst=0) | 45762861 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA member. FDIC hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends. And we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall. The first ever Stuff You Should Know book. Chuck that's right. What's the cool, super cool title we came up with? It's stuff you should know. Colon an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. And it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing. And the look of the book, it's exactly what we hoped it would be. And we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't. And you don't have to wait. Actually, well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre order the book right now, everywhere. You get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for preordering, which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. And Jerry's here somewhere. And this makes Stuff You Should Know the heart healthy addition that I've been wanting to do for a very long time. Chuck yeah. And this was one that was put together by our buddy Dave Ruse, but back in February. And I lost it. And thankfully, you said, hey, by the way, we got that seven countries things just sitting there gathering dust. Yes. I said, Chuck, don't lose it. Here. I lost it, and then I found it. I was lost, but now I'm found. Right. And fat is good for your body. The end. I know, but that's such a a revolutionary statement these days, radical, even, basically, to say fat is good for your body. The end. Especially. Well, not even our age, but anyone in America, in the somebody in our cohort you mean? Yeah, I love that word. I do, too. So the reason why it's kind of radical to say that fat is good for you is because everybody our age, Chuck, knows that fat is horrible for you. And even if you kind of know that fat is not as bad as we used to think, you probably still don't realize how much better it is for you than it actually is. There's still some part of you that demonizes it. Then during the, you couldn't get fat if you shook it out of a pig. It was nowhere to be found in the United States. We had low fat everything. Remember we had, like, potato chips where they took out the fat and replaced it with a diarrhea, created agents. Right. What was called the olen. Olen, yeah, we did those, but I think they were like leis olay. Weren't they called olay chips? They should have been called ovay. Yeah. We were doing all sorts of things. And one of the worst things we did, too, even worse than adding olean or replacing fat with olean, was to take out fat and replace it with high fructose corn syrup. Because one of the things that fat does is give food flavor. And we take fat out of food, you still want it to have flavor. And if you're a food processor, one cheap, easy way to put flavor back into it is to put high fructose corn syrup into it. And so they think that all of this war on fat that took place in the is actually at least partially, if not fully responsible for the outbreak of chronic diseases that we're seeing now, including obesity and diabetes. That is just epidemic right now in the United States. Yeah. It was so ingrained in us that even after doing this podcast episode and knowing what we now know, it's still, like you say things like, boy, that steak. You just feel it, like, clogging up your arteries as that fat just gets wedged in there. You just get these mental images of fat just, like, breaking off of food and sticking to your blood vessels, right? Yeah. Like, this is really unhealthy, or this is super indulgent or something like that. And that just may not necessarily be the case, but, yeah, we had a number done on us, basically, and we're still crawling out from under it. And what's the most magnificently, amazing thing is that basically all of this the war on fat, the low fat trend, possibly the diabetes and the obesity that resulted from taking out fats and replacing it with sugar, all of this stuff came from one study that was conducted starting back in the 50s that some people are like, this study isn't even legitimate methodologically. Yeah. So that is the seven country study. And the creator of the seven country study was someone named Dr. Ansel Keys, who was married and published we'll just let this speak for itself. They published a number of high volume selling books about the Mediterranean Diet, these cookbooks, and sometimes the very first one was only, what, like, two years after they started doing this study. So they've been accused of cherry picking their data and promoting correlation as causation. And as a result of all this, the United States very famously came out with a food pyramid that we was drilled into our heads in school and said, fat is cholesterol and that is heart disease and eating fatty things will kill you. Yes. Like, IPSO facto, the problem is that it was all based on those recommendations, that food pyramid was all based on the study and not any kind of, like, clinical data. It was just basically a study that was set up and designed to support a hypothesis, not really test the hypothesis so much as support this hypothesis by Dr. Ansel Keys that saturated fats rose cholesterol levels in your blood and that increased cholesterol levels in your blood would kill you through heart disease. Dr. Keys has been very much demonized over the years, as people have figured out, like, no, fats aren't bad for you, and actually you need them. But there's also been, like, an effort to reform him, too. And in his defense, he wasn't just some psycho narcissist doctor. From what I could tell, he invented Krations. Krations are called that after him. Keys oh, no. Yeah, that kept a lot of GIS alive. In World War II. He was a major part of the Minnesota starvation Experiment, where volunteers, conscious objectors in World War II, volunteered to be starved so that the scientists could figure out how to ReFED people without killing them, which became very useful when we liberated the POW camps in Germany and some of the occupied areas. So he was like a good okay, I don't know enough about him to say he was a good person, but I don't think he was, like, an evil person by any stretch of the imagination. And also the reason that he started conducting the study in the first place was because there was an epidemic of middle aged men in particular in America who are just dying left and right of heart disease. And he wanted to figure out what the problem was. He also started the Kpop phenomenon. So catchy and great. I don't know any Kpop. I know the kids love it, though. They do. They're nuts for it. That one B 52s band or something like that. I can't remember their name. No idea. But if they're called the B 52s, then they should be sued because that's been taken. That's right. So Dr. Ansel quizzes is an American from Minnesota. A physiologist. And in the 40s, when the Don Drapers although that was a little later, but the Don Drapers of the world were falling over dead from smoking cigarettes all the time and eating steak for lunch and martinis for lunch, he said, you know what? I'm going to figure this out and see what's going on, and I'm going to identify some risk factors why men in this country are developing heart disease and men around the world is what it ended up being. But it started in Minnesota, where he did a little pilot study. And while he was doing that, he got a message from a colleague in Italy who said, in southern Italy, we got to know heart to disease. Everybody's a healthy. And he said, really? And he also said, Southern Italy is really nice. You should come visit. And so he went there in the 1950s, and I bet I mean, southern Italy is still great, but a bit in the early 1950s, it was just idyllic. Yeah. And he went down there and he started these informal studies comparing business executives with the working class men of southern Italy, measuring serum cholesterol levels, talking about what you're eating, getting the data on heart disease and heart attacks there from the hospitals. And he started to form this hypothesis that, you know what? Middle aged dudes that have higher serum cholesterol levels are more likely to die or at least suffer from a heart attack. Yes. And that was like the beginning, and that was his hypothesis. And it's a pretty sound hypothesis, especially based on some of the data that he'd seen, because around this time, after he was intrigued by his friend in southern Italy and his trip to southern Italy, which, by the way, he fell in love with southern Italy so much, he shopped there and I believe lived out his life till age 101. Wow. Yeah. Well, that proves it. It basically does, because I believe he did adhere pretty strictly to the Mediterranean diet he espoused. He was no hypocrite, but he started poking around and getting his hands on whatever day that he could for things like fat intake in the diet and incidences of heart disease and heart attacks wherever he could get it in the world. And he compiled data from 22 different countries, and he said, wow, this is really kind of all over the place. I'll just select six of these countries that really prove my point. And he created what's known as the six country graph, which a lot of people confuse with the seven country study, but it predated the seven country study. But it was this thing that was kind of like the transition period between first forming this hypothesis and beginning the 7th country study. The 6th country graph was kind of like the connective tissue between the two, and it also told him where to look to really find the biggest disparities that might support or undermine his hypothesis. And so he got to work looking around and contacting people around the world and said, hey, I have zero funding to offer you. I know that World War Two just ended, and everybody is basically trying to rebuild their economy and their nation, and Europe is kind of war torn and shattered, and Japan has bombs dropped on it. But do you want to start studying whether eating steak is bad for you and going to kill you? And actually, astoundingly some countries said, yes. Yeah. So the countries ended up being Italy, Spain, South Africa, Japan, Finland, the US. And, I guess was it Greece? Was the last one. Did that count? Okay, yeah, Greece did. Greece counts. Well, I mean, I know Greece counts. Greece is the word. Sure. So it was time in the mid 1950s, he had the interested countries and the interested parties. So in 1958, he developed these select populations, and you kind of teased it earlier, calling us cohorts, these populations of men they refer to as cohorts in the study. So when you hear say cohort, it's not like one guy. It's a population of guys. Right. So the seven countries, they would monitor for 25 years and ideally lead to what? Risk factors would lead to heart disease? And that was his goal, is, I'm going to find out what these risk factors are, provide some evidence, and then say, here's what you should be eating. Basically, yes, that's exactly what he did. Like you said, within two years of starting this study, which was supposed to last 25 and actually did last 25, and some of the people who were the original participants were studied for more than 40 years. But within two years, he turned around and published that cookbook. That's how certain he was of his hypothesis being correct. Yeah. We don't want to poop in the Mediterranean diet. No, I think the idea I'm sure the Mediterranean diet can be quite healthy. The idea, though, is you shouldn't just be like, I'm going to eat low fat, because that's what happened in America. Everyone didn't say, hey, we'll just eat Mediterranean. They said, we'll just eat junk food full of sugar and high fructose corn syrup. It doesn't have fat in it. And that was the other thing, too, is he is very frequently unfairly accused of demonizing fat. He didn't do that. He said, you need to be eating olive oil by the gallon full, just inject it daily, basically. He didn't say that. It's kind of paraphrasing. Sure. But he didn't leave out things like fats from fish or from olive oil. It was saturated fat in particular that he was convinced was the culprit for heart disease and deaths from heart disease. Right. And eat a lot of grains, eat a lot of pasta, eat a lot of fruit, eat a lot of bread, a lot of vegetables. Sure. Vegetables are good for you. Yeah, that's true. Right? Yeah. And also, I think one of the other things I was so radical about the Mediterranean diet, even now, you're like, oh, that sounds kind of exotic. This is the 50s that this guy first introduced the Mediterranean diet. But one of the other things that was radical about it. And I should say I didn't give credit to his wife Margaret, who co wrote the first book with them, at least the first one, if not more. They wrote it together. But the thing that was radical about it was that he said, hey, those fruits and vegetables and all that, make those the main. Like, make the meat your side dish. Like, flip it over and you're going to live a lot longer than you are just by eating a big steak and some cream spinach on the side. Hey, I got no problem with it. And there is definitely a case to be made about eating what you like and living shorter. It's tough to argue with in some cases. Hey, what do we do when we occasionally on the road? We'll go to a steakhouse together. We split a cream spinach every time. Sure. I mean, how can you go to a steakhouse and not eat cream spinach? It's the best. It makes you strong. Right. Bye. Bye. Yeah, my forearms just are freakishly bulging. Should we take a break? Yes. All right. Go work out those forearms and we'll talk about the Cohorts right after this. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and light hearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of True Crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You called IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes. And you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own sleeves. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com It automation. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to the shock stuff you should know. Okay, so we're going to say it again. Cohorts. Cohorts. It's a study population that bear some sort of similarity to one another. Sort of. There were 16 in the Seven countries study, and all 16 cohorts totalled 12,763 participants. So it's a pretty good study. 16 different groups of people, more than 12,000 total in seven different countries. It's fairly impressive and ambitious study for the time. For sure. It was. And I think there were at least two in every country except for the US. Which had one cohort. And he never said, we have to be fair. He never said, you know what? This represents all men in these countries and sort of all men around the world. They never pretended like that was the case, but they had to start somewhere. And we're not pooping the whole study. It was very robust. And if you carry out a study in seven countries with all of these men over 25 years, they weren't slouches or anything like that. No, but the very fact that he went around and said, oh, these people eat a Mediterranean diet, I'm going to include them. These people eat what I consider the opposite of Mediterranean diet. I'm going to include them rather than saying, like, we'll just pick these countries at random and start studying them and see if their cholesterol intake is low, and then if so, if that correlates with the lower heart disease, he didn't do that. And that is definitely worth criticizing, for sure. So let's, I guess, talk about some of these cohorts and who they were. Former Yugoslavia, he studied a couple of small towns, one that had the Western European diet and one that was on the Mediterranean diet, largely. Finland was really interesting, I think, out of all these, because he compared two villages in eastern and western Finland, because East Finlanders were recording a lot more heart attacks. In fact, supposedly like the highest record on planet Earth at the time. Yes, and for good reason, too, you would think, because they would eat things like, so great. It makes me hungry. Yeah, it kind of does, actually. They would eat a fish soup that was just loaded with butter for breakfast. Yeah. They would eat what's called the logger's lunch, which was described by one of the researchers as are you ready? Yeah. Large hunks of meat suspended and congealed fat, enveloped in a dark bread loaf, fully permeated by fat. I'm so sorry to our vegan and vegetarian listeners, because you're probably turning it off right about now. Yeah, we should have spoiled or trigger warning, this one. Yeah, too late. Which, by the way, I have to say, I have been really doing my best to eat far less meat. Not for health purposes, for ethical reasons, really. But I got to say, that does sound kind of good to me as well. If you put this in front of me and say, here's your chance to eat Eastern Finland loggers lunch, I would take you up on it, I think. Yeah, I cut down on meat, too. Yeah, I eat some. I don't eat a lot. Of red meat. I don't eat a ton of pork anymore. Foul, especially pork for me. I don't always eat meat, but when I do, I try not to. So you've got your high fat diets in Finland, and then he said, all right, like you kind of mentioned earlier, I need to choose some opposite, in my view, opposite countries of what they eat. So where do you go? You go to Japan, of course, where they ate a lot of fish, and he went to even a tiny little fishing village where they ate almost all fish. And then again in Greece, in the Greek islands, and in southern Italy also, where they were obviously eating the Mediterranean diet. Right. So he takes all these different cohorts, takes all of their different diets and starts just kind of looking at all sorts of factors. That was one of the other reasons you said it was a very robust study. One of the other reasons that it was robust is because they looked at all sorts of stuff. It wasn't just their diet. They looked at things like what they drank and what they smoked and how much they smoked and all this kind of stuff. It was a big, long study. And again, they followed these guys for at least 25 years. And some of the stuff that they found were basically this. And this is the two points that the seven countries study told the world. And they just so happen to be the two points that Ansel Keys fully expected the seven countries to studies to tell the world. And it was that if you have a high serum cholesterol, like a high concentration of cholesterol in your blood, then there's a greater chance that you are going to die from cardiovascular disease. Right. In eastern Finland, where those loggers were eating fat breads, that's a great name for a restaurant, fat Bread. Sure. Oh, yeah. Wow. If restaurants are still around in a few months, then we should open one called Fat Bread. So those fat bread eating loggers, they had average serum cholesterol levels of more than 260, and there were more than four heart attack deaths per every 100 middle aged men five years after the study started. Right. Okay. So chuck. I looked it up. They had an average of 260. The window of normal or acceptable or you don't have like, viscous blood is 125 to 200. These guys were averaging 260. That's a lot. It is a lot. So the opposite of that was the former Yugoslavian place, Dalmatia, where they had the Mediterranean diet and their men had an average serum cholesterol level of 185 and had one death per 100 men over that same period. And Dalmatia is where the Dalmatian dog they think is from. I kind of assume that, but you never know. It was worth saying. Anyway, this is a show about facts and trivia. That's right. Have you ever been to Croatia? No. It is spectacular, man. It's on the Adriatic, and it is incredibly gorgeous. You mean I went on a cruise once that went through there, and I've just wanted to go back ever since. Was it one of those river cruises? No, again, it's on the Adriatic was a cruise all the way around Italy from one side of the down, past the boot and then up the other. It was quite lovely. Yeah. We're not like cruise people or anything like that, but we went with Shandan, the champagne maker had a cruise that we're like, oh, okay, this is the one we're going to take. And it turned out to be really great because we're not like Italy fans. You have nothing against Italy, but we're never like, we got to go to Italy. Right. We're never cruise fans. And then after we got off of those, we're like, I want to go on another cruise, and I want to go back to Italy. And would it kill you to give me some more shandon? Did you just drink tons of champagne? Yes. That's wonderful. So the other thing that it said was the other conclusion was diets higher in saturated fats will correlate to more heart attacks. And the data did show a big correlation between saturated fat and the regular traditional diet and the heart attacks. And I think Crete, where saturated fat is equal between eight and 9% of daily calories, the average number of heart attack deaths per 100 was basically zero over that five years. And in the US. Where we only had the one cohort, and I think we said they were railroad workers, right? Yeah. In Minnesota. Minnesota railroad workers, they had 17% saturated fats in their diet, and they had more than three deaths per 100 during that five year period. Right. So all this stuff just totally backs up what Ansel Keys was saying. Right. And later studies that basically took the seven countries, studied cohorts and drilled down into them a little more. There were two particular ones, the Zoofin study from the Netherlands and the Hail project. Both of them looked at just continued following people beyond the 25 years. So, like, the Hail study was dedicated to looking at healthy aging, that kind of thing. And they turned up some other stuff that you now basically take as gospel as well. Like, if you follow a Mediterranean diet, your risk of heart attack drops precipitously, I think 39% lower risk. If you eat fish, it lowers your risk of dying from a heart attack. Like, even just eating fish once or twice a week can drop your risk of a fatal heart attack by 50%. These were things that came along not from the 7th country study, but from that thing being continued on by supplementary study. Yeah. And two of the big ones that people like myself and my wife like to spout is that you drink the two glasses of wine a day. You're actually healthier than not drinking at all. And if you eat that one square of dark chocolate at A, you're actually healthier as well. If you eat more than that and drink more than that, then it goes the opposite way. But that two glasses of wine and one square of chocolate is people really like to tout. That one who like to drink wine and eat chocolate. It's what they call a sweet spot. Yeah. So seriously, think about it though. If you drink less than two glasses of wine a day, you're likelier to die of heart disease than if you drink too. I mean, that's what they're saying in the study at least, right? And I mean, like, I haven't seen anything that says, no, that's not true, that's BS. But everybody makes that case that you said to or that makes that point that once you go beyond to, not only does it have the opposite effect, it gets really bad really fast. Yeah. And what you can't do also is be like, well, I haven't had any drinks for three nights, so I'll have five glasses of wine tonight. And that averages out to super healthy. Yeah. They say binge drinking is way worse for you, but then they also say that Ben shrinking is way better for you. We have no handle on what drinking does to you. I just know that drinking makes me feel like as the next day. Yeah, I mean, the older you get, you definitely have to pick and choose. Dude, two beers. Can I don't want to say wreck me the next day, but I am not loving life the next day necessarily. Two beers, dude. Yes. My whole deal is sleep. I haven't had anything to drink for four nights, and that was after a pretty big couple of nights in a row for various reasons. And I sleep so much better. I wake up feeling so much better, it's irrefutable. What I do try to do now, though, in my old age is really drink a ton of water while I'm drinking. Oh, that's smart. And I now take these. I don't know if I should buzz market the brand, but I take a little supplement advil. It's basically like a super vitamin that supposedly will help curb a hangover. Have you noticed that it actually has an effect? And if it does have an effect, do you think it's just power suggestion or does it really work? No, I think so, but it's not gobbledygook I mean, it's B twelve and things that we know can probably help with a hangover. Yeah. Have you ever gotten a B twelve shot? I haven't. Oh, man. A lot of times they miss or it doesn't work or it's watered down or something like that. It's really hard to get a good B twelve shop when it works, brother, you can tell the difference and you feel like a million bucks. Really? You're not high, but you're like high. On life? Kind of. But you're not high. I guess actually, it's a really fair way to put it. How long does that last? Like, basically all day. You just feel great. You want to talk to strangers. You're totally large and in charge, you're getting stuff done. You never feel overwhelmed, like you have a sense of humor. It just takes all the best parts of your personality and bulks them up. Not in any kind of speedy, manic way, but you just feel like you're running on all cylinders and you just wish to God that you were always like that. I hate you. So that's why you're not. That's what you get at one of those hangover next day places, right? Like an IV and a b twelve shot. Yeah. You could go to like a medical clinic or a med spa or something like that. And they usually have it. Some chiropractors have them. Have to do that. Yeah, I think you have to have some sort of medical degree to inject it or whatever. But I've always kind of been on the hunt to have B Twelve prescribed to me so I can inject it myself. Yeah, sure. So I guess if there's any doctor listeners out there, hit me up because I need a prescription to be twelve, please. Oh, man. Where were we? I think we're about to take a break. Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the criticisms right after this. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah, and with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberattack slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. If you want to know, just listen up to your stuff. You should know. So I think we're we kind of made it clear that there are some people out there, communists, pinkos, who hate the Seven Countries study can't stand it, and they have a lot of very valid points. Yeah. I think one of the biggest criticisms is that it was a very correlative relationship right. And not a causal relationship. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the biggest one. That and the fact that it's called an ecological study, which is a study that at the time who is this? Dr. Henry Blackburn. He was one of the original officers. Said it was state of the art for the time, but he's like an ecologic study, and correlation is pretty weak if you're talking about trying to find a causal inference. Yeah. Because the thing is, you're taking all of these people from all around the world, and you're examining them to see you're trying to find out what's the underlying cause of their common affliction heart attacks or what accounts for the absence of that affliction against heart attacks. But the problem is there are so many differences between somebody who is on a Mediterranean diet and lives in Crete and somebody who eats the loggers lunch in Finland besides just what they eat. There's so many other factors, so many different things involved, that even if you can find a correlation like ansel Keys did between saturated fats and heart attacks, it doesn't mean that there's actually not something else at play. And that's the biggest criticism of the study, that most people widely level against it. Yeah. And it's also an epidemiological study which follows the population to something, you know, not so good for you over a length of time. But if you want to do that right. As you said, they have to be the same age, the same sex, they have to do the same job, they have to be the same ethnicity, they have to be in the same place, and the only difference can be what they're eating, basically. Right. And I get what he was doing. He was trying to compare this type of diet to that type of diet in different places around the world, but it was just flawed. That's an adventure. That's not a study. Right, exactly. That's a travel eating show, basically. It sort of is. But it was almost like he was trying to cram a dozen studies into one rather than break it out appropriately into each different study. Like, I'm going to study these people and use this as the control. His study lacked a control group or a control variable. Right. And that's another big thing that's leveled against it as a big flaw and makes you wonder, okay, is that correlation between saturated fat and heart disease even real? Yeah. I mean, even when they tried to kind of drill down to an apples to apples like in Finland, that was one place where they had all right, at least we're all in the same country, so that's a good place to start. Let's see here. The two finished cohorts. I still love saying that they consumed relatively similar levels of saturated fat. So in the west, they had 19%, in the east, they had 22%. Not a huge difference. That's so much, though. What, 3%? Yeah. The railroad workers in 1950s Minnesota were eating 13% of their diet was saturated fat. Oh, so much fat. Yeah. 22% was in that finished cohort. Yes. Close to a quarter of your diet was saturated fat. It's crazy, but the average number of heart attack deaths in the east was twice as high. Weird. Versus, I think, four deaths per 100 men versus two in the west. Yeah. So that means there's something else going on. Yeah, exactly. Because their fat intake was similar. But what would account for double the increase? So who knows? And the answer is they don't know. We don't know. We don't know. What would account for that. There's a lot of other people who have looked at this and said, okay, there's still, like, a lot to be said of this data. There's a lot you can extract from it. And some people have come along the way and said, hey, you can run this stuff through statistical analysis. Apparently they did another, and they did when they originally looked at the data back in the 50s or 60s or seventy s. And they did it again for the 25th anniversary of the study. And one of the things that turned up was that sugar actually seemed to correlate more strongly. Sugar intake in the diet seemed to correlate more strongly with heart disease, and even saturated fats did. It was almost roughly the same. But the thing is, the sugar bump, when you factored in saturated fats, the sugar bump disappeared. And so they said, oh, well, it's just an anomaly. It's really the saturated fats, from what I could tell, if you had a saturated fat bump and you factored in sugar, that would disappear as well. So some people have come to think, like, if it's not sugar, maybe it's a combination of sugar and saturated fats. That's actually the real problem. Not saturated fats on its own, but that it's not even necessarily sugar on its own, but this combination of the two. And that's led a lot of people, including one big critic of the seven countries study, to say it's processed food. That's what kills people is processed food. This combination of bad fats and sugar, that is really proving to be deadly. Yeah. And I think that's just so clear now that real food is far, in a way, better for you than processed food. Right. Like, you just can't refute that. No, you can't. I mean, even if you just base it, we always make fun of anecdotal data, but if you just base it on how your body feels after you eat certain kinds of food and then after you eat processed food. The problem is we don't know how to feed 7 billion people on this planet without processing food. Where's Norman Borlog? Yeah. I don't know. He's dead in the coal ground. God doesn't care about anything now. So it hasn't been refuted? Not necessarily. It hasn't been completely refuted to where they say, just throw this thing in the trash, and hopefully we've gotten this point across, is the damage that it did in the United States was we went all in on it, right? And they said, fat is the killer, and if you just avoid fat and eat these processed low fat foods, you're going to be just fine. Yes. And you can't really lay that at an Tokyo's feet. That was the Department of Health and Human Services. Oh, for sure. Yeah. They just took these findings and ran with them. They were like, well, we don't have any clinical data yet. And they're like, I can't hear you, I can't hear you. I'm already at the printers getting these posters of the food pyramid guide printed up. And that was definitely a huge problem that created this larger problem, because it led to this demonization of all fats. That food pyramid that showed the little bit at the top was like, fats and sweets and stuff like that. It didn't say just this kind of fat or keep away from that kind of fat. It was fats. You Americans are too fat and dumb to understand that there's different kinds of fats, so just stay away from fats altogether. And that's really what led to this, because there are plenty of fats that are actually good for your heart, like things like fats found in fish, fats found in olive oil, avocados, and then even potentially yeah, avocados are about as good as it gets. And then potentially chuck the kinds of saturated fat that people tend to associate with a steak as being bad for you. That's not necessarily true either. And again, it seems to be like we talked about in the peanut butter episode, those chemically processed or industrially processed fats that change things, that make peanut butter shelf stable and way more delicious, those are the fats that are actually really bad for you. Those are the ones that you should avoid or eat in moderation. And that kind of nuance is needed to actually have a healthy diet, because we learned from this experiment that you can't just cut fats out altogether. We need a lot of those fats to survive and be healthy. Yeah. And the evidence as far as because you would think this started in the 1980s in America, so surely we all got a lot healthier, right, because of the food pyramid and all the low fat food. We cut fat anyway. You can slice it. We cut fat over two decades. Plus people still think fat is the demon in a lot of circles, and America is as sick as we've ever been. Type two diabetes has increased oh, man, this is crazy. 166% from 1980 to 2012. I don't know about 2012 till now. I would guess more of the same. Yeah. I doubt if it reverse course. We have beaten down heart disease some, but we've also stopped smoking a lot more, and we've got better emergency room care and better drugs like statins and stuff like that. Right. But it's still cardiovascular disease still kills people more than anything else in the US. Yeah. Despite those advances in medical treatment, it's still killing people more than anything else. And, like, even exercising hasn't helped. We exercise basically more than ever, but still. A third of the country is obese. A third of the United States is obese. And all of this think about this. All those things have happened while we cut fat, essentially, out of our diet. So that just goes to show you that didn't work. That's not going to help, that we have to rethink this whole thing for sure. Yeah. And again, we're not poopooing the Mediterranean diet. There's also the flip side of this stuff with keto, the Atkins diet, Paleo, stuff like that. I think we've tried to we're not going to tell anyone how to eat, and we're not dietitians, but we've tried to preach over the past couple of years, eat real foods, eat balanced diets, try moderation as best you can. Moderation and reasonable calorie restriction. And exercise. Yeah. Portion control, too. It sucks when you first do it. It sucks to get used to. But once you get used to it, it's easy to maintain. It is. It's also easy to go back on when you're like, I'm going to eat this whole box of Hamburger Helper tonight. I know, but how does that make you feel? It makes you feel like garbage. Yeah. Ultimately, emotionally, and even if it's hitting a reward center, and trust me, there are so many reasons that people don't eat the right things and eat too much of the wrong things. Emotional reasons and psychological reasons, all of that stuff is valid. But even if it's hitting that reward center, it will probably also make you feel awful emotionally and physically. It's true. And also just to say, we're definitely on our high horses right now, but we're no better than anybody else. No, I'm still \u00a360 overweight. You mean I split a whole roll of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls last night. Yeah, I know. Tough to turn those down. I can't even get that stuff. But it's just the well, no, Chuck. And you're right. Having it in your house is problem one. Not having it in your house actually is helpful. It's crazy. It's weird, but it actually works. Especially during a quarantine when you can't just pop up or you don't feel like you should pop up to the store and get that Ben and jerry's. Right, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Because then you're pacing around your kitchen until it's time to go to bed. But you didn't eat anything. Get that I tried the other night. What that? Peanut butter and whipped cream. Oh. What do you think? That's delicious. I'm sorry. I still haven't eaten a peanut butter and mayo sandwich yet. No, it's really good. Emily, she makes good homemade whipped cream. And it was oh, yeah, it was delish. Yeah. It's hard to turn down now. I want some, but, you know, have a little bit of that one night, then I won't have any for a little while. Yes. And even I think what I was going to say earlier is walking around with this information is good and helpful and like, you're never going to always adhere to it. Probably wouldn't be that fun of a life to always adhere to it, but just knowing it and kind of using it as like, a general compass or guide will make you healthier and will make you feel better. And maybe at some point along the line, if you already have this info, you're going to get a kick in the pants, buy something. You're going to hit, like, a period of growth, and that might be part of it. You might lose some weight. You might get over a chronic disease. All sorts of things might happen because you know what to eat or how to start thinking about your food. It's just good to keep in your back pocket. At least it is. And in the end, it doesn't matter anyway, because it all has to do with the health of your grandfather. Right? Yeah. Hey, one other thing I want to say is that critic, Dr. Zoe Harcombe, she pointed out that actually the strongest correlation that the seven countries study turned up was the latitude of where the person lived. Yeah. Sunshine. Right? Yes. Which is really strange until she points out, and I'm not sure how much she was pointing this out to basically undermine the seven countries study. Partially that, but it does make sense in a way, too. She's saying, well, we synthesize vitamin D in our skin from cholesterol in the skin when it's exposed to sunshine. And vitamin D has a lot of protective qualities for the immune system, so maybe that has to do with it. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. Yeah. Well, that's it for nutrition. We'll probably never talk about it again. That's not true at all. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this Jackhammers. Why did you do that? I don't know. Why not? People asked on Twitter, they were like, I thought you guys hated this. And I said, yeah, I think Chuck's got some weird self loathing going on trolling, and I just got caught up. Unfairly. Yeah. So we have often long made fun of our jackhammers episode, and I rereleased it as a Stuff You Should Know select just to be cheeky. And this is about that, because Chris from Massachusetts really appreciated it. Hey, guys, just finished listening to Stuff You Should Know select on jackhammers. And I know you called it the most boring worst one, but I actually enjoyed it. I'm a mechanical engineer and in college took a class on vibrations, which led to conducting research on noise. On the noise that a jackhammer makes. We did that show for this guy. The noise or the ring that you hear when a jackhammer strikes is the resonant frequency of the jackhammer mole point after being struck by the inner pile driver. I don't think we said any of that stuff. No, I was working with my professor on developing an inner damper to reduce that noise produced for the man. God bless you, buddy. For the same reasons that you named in your podcast, some of the concepts he developed were quite amazing. You could take one of the moles he designed and drop it on a concrete floor, and instead of a loud ringing you expect to hear, it would land with a soft thud. Unfortunately, the concept has never quite panned out, as we call them. Loyal. Right? Exactly. But your podcast reminded me of the many nights spent in the lab collecting positive data and the painful ringing that you mentioned in the show. Thanks for the countless amazing episodes. My girlfriend and I have gotten many hours of entertainment from your show and truly appreciate all the great content and laughs. Chris from Massachusetts. Chris, thank you for getting in touch. And thank you for your attempted contribution to the world. Had it paid off, that really would have been something. But thank you for even trying. And if you want to be like Chris and let us know that you're an unsung hero, we want to hear about that. And if you know an unsung hero, let us know about that person, too. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed halo holistics made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive Health. Find us at chewy. Amazonandhalopets.com." | |
43ff5658-53a3-11e8-bdec-874084ba1192 | How Sneezing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sneezing-works | Unless you have an arcane disorder from a lesion on a very specific spot on our medulla, the chances are you sneeze. Turns out most animals do it, even lizards! Learn the whys and hows of this most interesting involuntary reflex. | Unless you have an arcane disorder from a lesion on a very specific spot on our medulla, the chances are you sneeze. Turns out most animals do it, even lizards! Learn the whys and hows of this most interesting involuntary reflex. | Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=238, tm_isdst=0) | 47019642 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its us and we're here to talk to you about get this, our book. We have a Stuffy Should Know book coming out this November and you're going to love it and you can preorder it now. That's right. It's called stuff you should know. An incomplete of mostly interesting things. And it's been a lot of fun to work on and we're really, I mean, genuinely excited about how this thing has come together. Yes, it's 26 chunky, hairy chapters that are just going to knock your socks clean off. And yes, Chuck, we are indeed proud of this book. It is truly indubitably. The first Stuff You Should Know book, and it's coming out this November and you can order it now, preorder everywhere you get books, so do that and we thank you in advance. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. Jerry is a disembodied spirit, but she's still with us, haunting us, and we are now set up for achievement, which means this is Stuff You Should Know set up for achievement. Sounds like a very 80s Reagan era campaign. It does. Definitely does. Certainly not the kind of thing that would irritate you, whether it be in your nose or your brain or anywhere. Not the best segue. I'm surprised you didn't try and work sternutation in there somehow. I love that word. Were you familiar with that word before? I'm 49 years old. I don't think I'd ever heard sneezing being called strutation. Oh, man, I just remembered I'm 44 now, so you got me beat, but I'm in the same boat with you. Yeah, I never heard that. But that is what if you're a scientist? Well, if you're a scientist and you want to be a real stiff, you'll probably say sternutation. If you're a scientist that wants to be friends with people, you'll still probably say sneezing. It sounds super clinical, but it's actually really old. I think the first appearance of it is in a text from 1576. It sounds old to me. It sounds clinical, but there's also a couple of derivative words. Sternutative or sternutatory are things that make you sneeze. And Howard Stern. Baba Booie. Right. So we're talking sneezing, obviously, because we just discoursed on stern mutation. I'm adding an extra syllable there, aren't I? Stern mutation. That's the Josh Clark way. Why do I have to complicate things? We're talking about sneezing. And sneezing is a really sort of and I hate it when people call things like this elegant, so I'm going to refrain. But it's just a very efficient system that the human body has worked out to basically allow your nose and we'll get into all the ins and outs of how it all happens, but to allow your nose and your nasal passage in your brain to act as bouncers and just say, get out of my body fast. Cut off pal, like, real fast. You're cut off cigarette smoke, you're cut off Chanel Number Seven that nobody likes. Sure, yeah, that's a pretty good way to put it. It's ancient. Ancient reflex, too. I mean, basically all mammals at least sneeze. Some more than others. I didn't realize this, but apparently Iguanas sneeze the most because it's part of their digestion. Yeah. And then I don't know what it's technically called, but you know when dogs do what it's called? The reverse sneeze. Yeah. Momo has that bad. It's so scary. It is. When we finally got her checked out and they verified she doesn't have a collapse trachea, which is when it really is threatening. It's just something to do with her nasal passages. She's brachyocephalic never had a dog that has that. I mean, I've never had a dog that didn't do it occasionally, but nico, I feel like, goes and it's not often, but it can be prolonged for like, a minute, and it just seems like are you about to die? Yeah, it's terrible. It's really bad. I think you're just supposed to leave them alone, too, right? Just let them do it. No, we help her out. We'll rub her throat, just kind of stroke it. It seems to help. And then sometimes we'll just lightly plug her nostrils to kind of give her, like, a hitch to it. And that frequently cures it, too. Sometimes, though. Yes. She just has to work it out. But she gets it every time she gets excited, and she gets excited a lot, so it's sad for her. Yeah. But it's really not a sneeze, actually, because a sneeze is when you're trying to get something out of your nose. And that nose is a pretty amazing little system. It's an amazing filtration system. How it's designed with those narrow nasal passages. It's not like we have these big face holes. They're narrow for a very good reason, and that is to create turbulence inside your nasal passages. And you know that turbulence shoves all that air that you're inhaling to the sides of your nasal passages, the nasal mucosa, and that's got tiny little hairs called cilia. And the cilia mainly is sort of like a pre doorman just saying, yeah, your ID is good. Why don't we just move you to the back of the throat and we'll flush you out that way? But if it's too much, that's when you need to call in the big bouncer to initiate that sneeze response. Yeah. Sometimes they're just like, no, I'm staying here. I'm not leaving. You can't kick me out. Ate the back of the throat. Super drunk, right? Yeah. So I didn't realize that but it makes sense that we swallow a lot of the particles that we inhale through our nose, which is gross but effective, or pop it up. We poop it out eventually, right? Yeah. But yeah, if they get stuck in the nose, then they do something magical, almost as magical as soap. But when they're sticking to the sides and they're not going anywhere, it's clear they're not going anywhere. They actually, like, irritate, some specialized cells that are in that nasal mucosa, mast cells and irientophils, I think. But basically they're there to look out for little particles that decide they don't want to leave. And when those things get irritated, they release histamines, which trigger this reaction, like an allergic reaction, basically, where your nose is runny. And they also simultaneously start sending signals to your brain saying, hey, we got one. We need some help. Yeah, and I know we talked about this a little bit with the pollen episode, and I feel like we did another allergy centric one, but I can't remember. But the whole thing takes about a second for the single sneeze, and it's going to send that message, like you said, that chemical message, to the sneeze center of the brain, which is in the lateral medulla. And the lateral medulla gets, like, everything in the brain. It gets that signal and says, all I got to do is react fast whenever the body tells me to do something. And in this case, it's to jet out whatever's in the nose as fast as possible. Right. I was looking this up. If you want to get super clinical, if you're the kind of person who uses words like stern mutation instead of sneezing, there's actually something called an afferent phase and an efferent phase. And an afferent phase is when you get ready to sneeze. Like your nerves have been tickled and are triggered and are itching, and they're sending messages to your brain in your sneeze center. And then the afferent phase is when your sneeze center goes, okay, it's go time. And that's actually pretty interesting stuff. And the way that that happens is basically, from what I can tell, through a system of nerves, olfactory nerve, ethmoidal nerve, which is a terrible word, and then your trigeminal nerve, which is basically responsible for most of the sensation in your face and your ability to bite and chew. And when these nerves spring into action, they hit that message or the sneezing center in your brain, and your sneezing center sends it back over this kind of same switchboard of nerves in your face. And all this is happening in just a very short amount of time. Yeah, like I said, the whole thing takes place in less than a second. And in order for it to reach that snee center, it's got to be past a certain threshold of irritation, basically. Right? And once it does reach that irritable point of which there's no going back, he's had too much to drink. Everybody in the bar knows it. That's when it finally sends that impulse down through the head and neck to initiate that response. That involves a lot of muscle groups. When you sneeze, and especially with some people, it can be a pretty violent action for the body. Yeah. Like, if you stop and take stock of what you're doing right, then you might find that you're hunched over, one of your legs is in the air, like, your knees kind of pulled up, your face is all scrunched up, your neck is tight. There's a lot of muscles involved. And the reason why is because you're taking in a bunch of air, and then you're expelling a bunch of air with a lot of force to get that thing that won't leave out of your nose. Yeah. And I've seen professional athletes that have been sidelined from sneezing. If you've got a bad back or something, it can really hurt. Luckily, I don't have back problems, but occasionally I have, and a sneeze can really tweak it. That's when you know you're an old man territory, you have a sneeze and you're like, hold on, I can't get up. Yeah, I'm going to have to lay down this weekend. But your abdomen, your chest, your diaphragm, your vocal cords, you mentioned that you take that deep inhalation that's, like, right before you go, and that builds up a lot of pressure in your chest. And that happens because your vocal cords just initially clamped shut, right? Yeah. So you're sucking in a bunch of are holding it, and so the pressure is building in your thorax. And then when you release it, your vocal cord openings open up to allow the air out. But then also your diaphragm is pushing the air out really violently so that it's going out your mouth and your nose. I saw about 100 miles an hour is the speed that can hit. Yeah, easily around 100 miles an hour. That is crazy to think about your eyes close. But we can go ahead and dispel the old myth that you can pop your eyes out if you keep your eyes open during a sneeze, right? Yeah, not true. And apparently there are some people who do keep their eyes open when they sneeze, and they show quite clearly that your eyes don't pop out. That's just would be impossible. Plus, they usually close anyway. Just automatically. Yeah, it's a very small group of people who sneeze with their eyes open of people just it's part of the involuntary process of sneezing. I don't know if we said that or not. Sneezing is an involuntary reaction to an external stimuli in your nose. Yeah. You can try and trigger a sneeze, and we'll talk about certain things that can trigger a sneeze, but you definitely can't make yourself sneeze. Like, full stop. Yeah. No, I mean, there's definitely things you can do to make yourself sneeze, like you're saying, but there are things you can do to keep yourself from sneezing. Whether you want to or not is a different question because sneezing can feel pretty good if you don't throw your back out. Well, we'll talk about my sneeze pattern later. I know I talked about it before, but I find it fascinating. You accidentally tap out, drink your Oval Teen and Morse code to your Sneezes. Is that your thing? Very nice. Thanks. Should we take a break? Let's take a break, Chuck, and then we'll come back and talk more about sneezing. Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, man, before we get back into it too far, I realized I didn't give a shout out to the guy who gave me the idea for this episode, dr. Sneeze a lot. Yeah, dr. Todd g sneeze a lot. No. One of my neighbor friend Wesley was like, hey, man. He actually listens. And he's like, hey, man, have you guys ever done one on sneezing? I'm like, sure, of course we have. He's like, oh, because if you haven't, you really should. That's a great one. And when I went back and looked into my astounding, we had never done one on sneezing. Like, never. I just can't believe that that wasn't, like, one of the first ten. Yeah, that seems like it would be an early stuff. You should know for sure. And it kind of feels like one of those right now as we're doing it. My neighbors think I'm unemployed. It's great. Yeah. But hats off to Wes for coming up with that one. Thanks, Wes. Yeah. I'll leave Josh alone. He's the one that we got the loveyourmama.com stuff for, and he's, like, halfway done with our room spray. We need some more because we're using it so fast. And you're the pusher man. Yeah. I was like, first one is on me. Next are going to cost you. Yeah. I don't correct my neighbors. They think I'm down on my luck, so that's all good, in my opinion. No, that's definitely the way to go. He's very nosy, so he found out I had to finally just stop lying. Oh, that's good stuff. So we're back to sneezing. We're talking sneezing, and one of the things we mentioned was the sneezing center, which is this up until not too many years ago, a theoretical part of the brain that causes us to sneeze that coordinates this involuntary response, because your brain is not consciously saying, like, okay, now diaphragm expel the air. This is all, like we said, involuntary. That would be great if you had to say that every time you wanted to sneeze. Right? Expel air. So it makes sense that there would be a region that was responsible for this, because we'd already seen it in cats. Don't ask how we know where it is in cats, but in cats, it's in the medulla. And so it was hypothesized that it was in the lateral medulla in humans, too. And finally, I think around 2005, there's basically incontrovertible evidence that came in the form of this fisherman. I believe he might have been Spanish, who had the sneezing fit one day of about 20 really violent sneezes in a few minutes. And then all of a sudden he stopped sneezing and couldn't walk. Right. His gate was affected almost like he had a stroke. And apparently either he caused allegiance on his lateral medulla from the sneezing, or that violent sneezing was like an initial symptom of allesion. Kind of like, here's your last sneezes ever. And he went to the doctor and they started testing them, and they would do things like put capsaicin in his nose, like Red Hot Chili pepper in his nose, which makes everybody sneeze. It's like a universal sternitatory, right? Makes everyone sneeze. And it wouldn't make this guy sneeze, it would burn his nose and it would make his nose running, but it wouldn't make him sneeze on the other side. It would make him sneeze the other nostril, but not the right, I think. And so they found this lesion on his lateral medulla and they said, sneezing center. Welcome to our understanding. That's such a bad Red Hot Chili Peppers joke that I just sat onto that whole spiel. That's a very grown up of you. Should I say it? Sure. Whoever said we were grown up? I was just thinking the doctor would do the capsaicin and ask him how he feels, and he'd say, Well, I don't know, sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner. That's pretty good. Yeah. You know it's better than fight like a Brave. I don't know. I'm trying to think of chili pepper songs. What if the doctor came in wearing nothing but one of those reflector headbands in a sock and a penis? I saw that coming. That was it. That would be great. You know, you got the right doctor. Yeah, you do the party, doc. So, things that can make you sneeze. I know you kind of rattle off some jokes about perfume and smoke earlier. I wasn't joking. But those are all realities. The most common cause of sneeze is and the collective term is rhinitis. Rhinitis. And that is just your sort of standard inflammation and swelling of your mucous membrane when you got allergies, when pollen is in the air, when you have a cold. But there are all kinds of other things that can cause a sneeze, too, that are all different types of rhinitis. Yeah, speaking of rhinitis too, I ran across a term, the clinical term for a runny nose is rhinorea. Yeah. Isn't that grody? Like that makes it at least twelve or 15 times worse than runny nose. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. So there's occupational rhinitis, which is basically when stuff you're working around makes you sneeze or irritate your nose. Things like cleaning supplies or, you know, flower, I saw was a pretty common occupational rhinitis, sternitatory or sternitative, depending on your preference. Cigarette smoke. If you work in a place where they let you smoke, like maybe a cigarette factory. Although I heard that they don't allow smoking inside some cigarette factories now in North Carolina. Inn? That just the end all. Be all. You think they would allow you to do that while you're working? They used to up until very recently. Really? Oh yeah. I have the impression you could just pluck one off the line and light it up. Wow. I guess if you're a smoker, that's a big perk. It is. But then now there's like no smoking inside. Which leads you to the follow up question, why would it kill you? And they go, yeah, what very dangerous, dummy. Let me see. You've also got the hormonal rhinitis, which is women might experience that when they have high estrogen levels. Maybe if you're pregnant or you're on the pill or you're going through puberty, you might have some sort of run on sneezing episodes. Sure. There's drug induced dryingitis. There are certain drugs that have been identified. What did you say? The hip is kind, right? Yeah. Mushrooms will make you sneeze. Apparently. I'm guessing that I didn't see this anywhere, but this is an educated guess. Tell me if you think it sounds convincing. Those drugs probably stimulate your mast cells to release histamines and then that's just basically almost like a phantom allergen. Okay, that's what I'm going with. All right. But apparently NSAIDs beta blockers and some anti hypertensive drugs are the ones that are known drug induced rhinitis dermatitis. If you are of advanced age, you might have what's called geriatic rhinitis, which is when those sub mucosal glands atrophy. And that means your nose can get really irritated and you might sneeze a lot. Right. That is very sad to me, if you think about it, because there's not much that can be done. I'm sure you just put like maybe Vaseline or something in your nose. It's got to be the cure for that. But let's just say because it's like your little body is running down. We should have a cure for that. Yeah. Like our medicine is not far enough along, in my opinion, for this to be 2020. It's kind of a disappointing 2020, everybody. Am I right? So we've talked before, Chuck, multiple times about photic sneezing, which I am a Fody sneezer. And I don't remember if you are or not. I feel like I have, but it's not like roundly something that happens to me. I don't think so. Okay. I am a phobics, neither's more than I'm a native born Toledo. And even maybe they're tied. So how does it get you like any time you turn on a light? Very rarely light. It's almost always sunlight. And I think it's just because of the intensity of it. But yeah, if I walk out, say, like if I go see a movie in the middle of the day, slacker. I missed. And I come out and I come out and it's very sunny. Sure it is. Guaranteed three sneezes in a row. Is that the usual pattern. Yeah, usually. And I looked into that, like, why do we sneeze multiple times? Apparently, there's a very simple answer for it, and that's that your brain has determined that the irritant hasn't been ejected yet. But with photo Sneezing, it's almost like it's mistaken identity. Right? Yeah. I actually did see some other things, too, about the patterns, because that's always fascinated me, because I always sneeze in threes. Oh, yeah, okay. And I did see where some places said that just once isn't enough. So it's like a set up. Get it to the front of your nose and then a get out. But I also saw where it could be genetic, like, that you inherit a sneeze pattern. Oh, really? And that double Sneezers begin to double Sneezers. It makes sense because there are like photic Sneezing is one of a couple of ways that you can inherit a genetic sneezing trait. So that would make sense. Yeah, that's right. Photo. I'm sorry. Photic sneeze reflex is passed on by autosomal dominant inheritance. And I love this acronym because this is one of those reverse engineered ones that we like so much. Do you like this one? I like this one. I hated the other one. Yeah. Man with a Passion. Like, I wasn't even going to bring that one up, to be honest. Okay, we'll just pass it by and let everybody wonder for the rest of their lives. But Autosomal Dominant compelling. Helio ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome. ACU. It's a little rough. It is. I mean, there's a whole D, a whole dominant in there that's missing, but okay, fine, we'll go with that. But that is a term for Fody sneezing. That was coined at some point by someone. Obviously, that's your biggest pet peeve. Right. For acronyms is when they just sneak a word in there and don't use it for a letter. Yeah, it's lazy. Although I get where they're coming from. You don't want to be at Chew. It's like, why even do it? But you got to figure it out. I mean, just take dominant out. Just go with Autosomal. Yes. Who would know? I wouldn't have noticed. So you were saying was that it for the patterns? The Sneezing patterns. Yeah. I mean, they're just a couple of theories, either hereditary or that it just takes that much. But I just don't know if I buy that for myself because it's always three, and it's not like I have a weak sneeze. So it takes three. No, it feels ingrained somehow. Yeah. Like if you only do two, you notice. And does it feel incomplete? It does, but that almost never happens. Occasionally I'll do a four banger, but I don't know that I ever sneeze once or twice. It's almost always three. Yeah. And speaking of incomplete, if you experience the Afferent phase but the Efferrent phase isn't triggered, but it's enough to drive you nuts. There are things you can do, and one of those things that's recommended is to look at a bright light or don't look directly at the sun, but look toward the sun. And that should help jumpstart the effort in phase, the second part, where the actual sneeze takes place. Okay, that makes sense. But they think what's going on is that there's a crossover between the sneeze reflex arc and the pupillary light reflex arc, which basically is one nerve becoming so stimulated that it stimulates by proxy the other nerve, the sneeze nerve. So you're getting so overloaded with bright light when you see that sunlight that it accidentally jumps on over to your sneeze reflex as well and makes you sneeze. Are you getting all this light? Are you getting yeah. Get a load of this. I think they've landed on about between 23 and 25% generally of people have this photo sneeze reflex. Right. So that's pretty substantial. There are some other small identity groups of sneezers that are far smaller than that. Apparently there are people who there's four families. Not one in four people, four families, as far as anyone knows, who have something called snatiation, which is where if they eat too much and they feel overly full, it will trigger a sneezing attack. Yeah, I would call that rare. Yeah, for families, for sure. And we're just going to pass right on by, right, Chuck? Yes. Acronym. Getting back to the Phoenix sneezing, though, they think it also could be a holdover and an evolutionary advantage from when we were little babies, because little babies, they can't blow their nose. They don't know what that even is. No. So they can't pick their nose. They can't use any implement at all to clear out their nose except the sneeze. They rely on the sneeze to get that mucus out. Or of course, parents who will suck that stuff out through a little device, which is no fun, but necessary. Or you hold them on their side and you blow in their ear. Usually clears out the nose. But I should probably just go ahead and say, don't do that. That was a joke. You can whisper sweet nothings, sure, but don't do that. But babies are pretty sensitive to that photocolite reflex and they think that may be a reason that basically it's just sort of a holdover from when we were babies. It makes sense. It also makes sense to me that babies might have more active or kind of raw or nerve pathways. So maybe they're just more sensitive to that jump over that crossover, maybe plucking nose here. Does that ever happen to you? Every time. So it doesn't make me sneeze, but it makes my eyes water. Like I've just seen every long distance commercial from the 90s all at once. Yeah. And it's interesting because you talked earlier about the trigeminal nerves that are all through the face. I think it's just all related. Like you could pluck an eyebrow and it could make you sneeze. And your eyes are watering and that's part of your face, it's just all sort of one big nerve bundle that's all interrelated. And any of those could trigger either watering of eyes or definitely sneezing. Even if you, like, plucking hair out of your head, that could do it. That's never happened to me. But my nose hair and my eyebrow hair oh, man, my eyes will start watering. It's not a pleasant experience, for sure. I've never plucked an eyebrow hair. Every once in a while, I'll get one that's a big, fat, long goat hair. It just suddenly comes up overnight. No, I've seen I've got those, too. Okay, well, I pluck those. I just trim those. You know what? Maybe I should trim them. That's a good idea. But have you ever noticed, if you get one, there's almost invariably one on the other side, too? Like they come up in pairs. Does that happen to you? I have not noticed that. When you pull on one, does the other one get shorter? That was wonderful. That'd be great. Yeah. It's like pulling that spaghetti through your nose and out your mouth. Don't do that either. Can you do that? No, I've never tried to do so. I've never tried either. I don't want to. There's also a group of people who sneeze when they become sexually aroused. Yeah, that's the thing, apparently. Or if you orgasm, like after you orgasm, it could trigger a sneezing fit. Yeah, it's apparently a bigger group than you would expect. Some researcher went around the Internet chat rooms and said, hey, does anybody sneeze when they become aroused or when they have an orgasm? And she found 17 people who sneeze from sexual ideation and three who sneeze from orgasm. That is way more than I would expect from just going around on Internet chat rooms and asking people. Yeah. And also, we should point out, way not scientific. No, not at all. But yeah, anecdotally it's still impressive, but I read an explanation for this. It's a terrible explanation, but it's an explanation by the Journal of the association of Physicians of India. It's an Indian journal, coincidentally enough. They suggest that it's because the nose contains erectile tissue, which it does. Which erectile tissue is just tissue that can become larger, engorged by blood flow. And yes, you have erectile tissue and your genitalia, yes, you have it in your nose, but they're not in any way related as far as anyone's ever even thought, aside from the people in this journal. And that's the most bizarre thing you've ever heard. It's pretty bizarre. Like your nose is becoming aroused, is basically what they're saying. And so you sneeze. Yeah. Fantastic. There's also intractable sneezing or psychogenic. And that is something that's almost exclusive to young women, girls, adolescents, basically, going through puberty. And these are girls who may not suffer from allergies they're not sick with a cold or anything, but can go on these big sneezing. Binges for days and days at a time. Yes. And apparently the world oh, my goodness. The world record holder is a girl named Donna Griffiths. She was twelve when she started. She started in January 1981, and her sneezing fit ended 977 days later, in September of 1983. I remember hearing about this one as it went on. I was way too young for this, but had I been more aware, I would have felt very bad for this girl. Because as it went on, if she sneezed once in a day, it was considered part of the record. And I think that was kind of how it was towards the end. But that first year sounds like a bear. Yeah, no good. A million sneezes in the first 365 days, which is basically a sneeze a minute on average. Chuck, it's impossible to sneeze in your sleep. You cannot sneeze in your sleep. If you sneeze while you're sleeping, you wake up to sneeze. Your brain just isn't functioning correctly to sneeze while you're sleeping. So that means this girl was averaging a sneeze a minute just during waking hours. But sneezing minute over 24 hours compressed into, say, ten or 12 hours that she was awake that day. Or would she wake herself up sneezing? I don't know. If that's the case, then she had a really, really rough year because she was sneezing every minute and not getting any sleep. Yeah. I mean, it's disruptive no matter what. No one I mean, you can't hold on a job if you're sneezing every minute. Well, luckily she was twelve, and this is after child labor laws were passed. I'm hoping she didn't know that. Cigarette factory. That's right. She has nimble little fingers for sorting cigarettes. Perfect. Should we take another break? Yeah, I think so. All right, we'll talk about the travel and droplets right after this. Great band. Well, now we are on the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. All right. So this is pretty relevant now, and I know, and I think this was put together before. I feel like we've been sitting on this one. Was this before Coronavirus? No, I think it was during. Was it during? Okay. Yeah. And Dave helped us out. Dave RUCE helped us out with this one. Yeah. And I think we've all seen these videos by now with everything that's going on. But in 2016, a researcher from MIT named Lydia oh, boy. Goodness me. Rubia. Sure. Bariba. I'm going with Boru. Bibaiba. There's a couple of sounds in there that follow one another. It makes it very difficult. Yeah. Whenever you pack three vowels in a row, it's always sort of a dealer's choice. So she published some slowmo 2000 frame per second film images of people sneezing and what that looks like. That's where we get and other people have done this, too, and measured the sneeze. But that's one place where we get 100 mph stat. Oh, from that study? Yeah, and other places. I mean, that's pretty common knowledge now, but up to 25, 30ft, you can blow a sneeze. It can stay suspended in the air for a few minutes. And they likened it to if you would take a bucket of paint and just throw the paint out of the can into the air. Sort of is how a sneeze works. They call it sheets of fluids, and you got these big hunks of mucus and saliva that just sort of come out together and then break apart little by little until you get to the fine mist that sort of can hang in the air. Yeah. It starts as a clump and then turns into ropey filaments and then into increasingly smaller particles. And those really small particles, the aerosolized stuff, that's the scary stuff. I saw a Bristol study that said, and this wasn't necessarily coronavirus, but that contagious germs can stay in the air, suspended in the air for weeks, possibly. That would have to be a very hardy contagious virus or bacteria yeah. With like, a no air blow. Right, yeah. To just sit there. But the 27ft, which is kind of common knowledge these days in the era of coronavirus, that your sneeze can project those particles up to like, 27ft. There's little pockets of gas and turbulence that are in a room, even a room that seems still, but certainly one that has, like, the AC on or air flowing through it. And those little particles can hit rides on those pockets and travel. I saw it 200 times further than you expel them with just your sneeze. So, you know what prevents that? Covering yourself, your mouth and your nose when you sneeze and or wearing a mask. Yeah. This has nothing to do with coronavirus, but this is especially important. But they teach little kids, from the moment they can even understand things in preschool, to always sneeze into your elbow and cough into your elbow, because that's something that kids can you can't always get to a tissue. Right. Which is what they say is sort of the best thing to do. But that elbow is a pretty good system. I think it's really cute to see a little kid do that, too. Yeah. Because they're doing the right thing. It is adorable. I agree. But yeah, the ideal is to sneeze into a tissue, throw your tissue away and wash your hands thoroughly. That's what you're supposed to do after you sneeze. Every time. Every single time. Every single time. And I don't sneeze a lot. Emily sneezes a lot. Oh, yeah. Because she's got the allergies. Oh, yeah. She's got a lifelong persistent tickle in her nose. It's terrible. Does she have what's it called, that kind of sneezing, where it's psychogenic intractable sneezing? Well, no, because she's not 13, man. No, it's just allergy related. But lots of sneezing when it's really bad. It's pretty tough to be around. Not tough for me, but right. Yeah, it's really annoying. So I did look up to find out where we stood as far as knowledge on sneezing and contagion outdoors goes. And from what I can tell. There was some study that was done by some engineers that sprayed an aerosol can running. Walking and then on a bike. And the results showed that this stuff spreads really far and wide. But they didn't take into account a lot of different things. A lot of different factors. So that if you are outdoors, as long as somebody doesn't sneeze at you, basically in your face or in your direction within 20 or 30ft directly towards you, you're probably not going to catch enough of a viral load of something like Coronavirus to become sick from it. Especially if you're not in a crowded group. If you're just walking outside and somebody else is walking 15ft ahead of you and they're just breathing and they're on the other side of the street, you're probably going to be fine. Just because that stuff is going to dissipate so much because of all the factors, the environmental factors that exist outdoors rather as opposed to indoors. Indoors is a totally different ballgame. Outdoors, you're much safer. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been around a human that sneezed aside from my wife in four or five months. Right. Even when I've gone to the store and I'm on the lookout for that stuff. Yeah. And I think we all are, but I haven't even been in a store, like, on an aisle where someone's sneezed because I would and probably unreasonably freak out a little bit. Sure, I think you're allowed to yell at that person, but I haven't even seen anyone been around anyone that sneezed. Yeah. So that's been a comfort. Yes. You and I went to the store and came back and said somebody sneezed twice and the whole store just started looking around. Like, where that come from? Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. There's basically like a stampede or something to get away from that thing. It's a weird time to be alive. We're all going to be very weird, even after things go back to normal, I think. Yeah. I know I will be. So should we talk a little bit about culture and sort of what people say all around the world? I know here in America, it's sort of custom to say God bless you or bless you, and there's some different explanations, but one of them that seems to hold water, I think, dates back to the Middle Ages with the Black Plague, when Pope Gregory Seven basically said, hey, everyone, things are pretty bad. We should say God bless you if someone is sneezing because they might be dying. Yeah. Which is, from what I saw, a big departure from earlier Christian teachings, which taught people to just totally ignore sneezes or say God is dead, which I find very weird. Like, why would you teach people to ignore sneezes? I didn't get that. But I found this really awesome article called Romance and Tragedy of Sneezing by Dr. Wilson D. Wallace in Scientific Monthly from 1919. And he cited that the earlier Christians were like, Just ignore it. Just pretend it didn't happen. Yeah. I'm a bless you guy. I don't do the gazooontite or salute, which is Spanish to your health, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's also a toast. Yeah. I don't say that ever, really. Sometimes I'll say it when I toast, but I don't know. I don't remember what I do with anyone anymore. I forgot to deal with people. I always raise my glass and say, it's time to get toe up from the flow up. I say, may Jupiter bless you. Right. I saw another one from the Greeks, too. I love that one. Live Zeus, preserve you. I think you and I should bring back both of those. Okay. That's fantastic. Can't you imagine everyone in Greece just, like, being, like, don't sneeze, don't sneeze. Everyone's all twitchy and shaky from people yelling that at them. Yeah, it's weird, too, because it's a very kind thing to do to a stranger. This one, I guess, Dave, just as an academic, but they called it a micro infection, which is nice. It's just a little quick, nice thing to say to a stranger. And I'll always do it. We've done it during our live shows when someone sneezes. And not to be funny, it gets a laugh, but it's just sort of almost like an involuntary micro affection, I think, for most non monsters. For sure. Yeah. Where people just kind of have a brief connection. Right. They don't know each other, but now it's like, you're a human being. What is it now? Well, just bless you and please get very far away from me. Bless you over there. So there's also a very common understanding that people thought that a demon was trying to get in or your soul was trying to get out. And I kept seeing, like, other cultures or old ancient cultures, that kind of thing. The closest one I could find that seemed like that was in Persia. Zoroaster believed that your body was fighting off a fiend that had invaded, like, an invading demon or spirit, and that a sneeze was basically your body signaling that it had been victorious in fighting this fiend and getting this fiend out. And that deserved a prayer. And that if you ever heard somebody sneeze, you would say the same prayer with them. I couldn't find what prayer, though. Yeah, it seems to be a good luck thing in a lot of cultures throughout the years. According to the Talmud, it's a good omen if you sneeze when you're praying in China and Japan, if you sneeze, it means someone's sort of like your ears are burning, someone's talking about you. Yeah. And one sneeze means they're saying nice things. Two means they're spreading gossip. I don't know what they would think about me with my three means you die. Right. What would three mean? I don't know. Because there's only two ways people can talk about you. Right, exactly. They might be saying something like, Chuck has a beard. Okay. It's as neutral as it gets. Exactly. So there's folklore and then there's what we think is true, which is a kind of folklore, but it's actually just folklore, too. Urban legends is what we call them, or old wives tales. And we talked about one where that your eyes will pop out of your head if you sneeze with your eyes open. We debunked that one pretty clearly, I think. Don't, you can't do it. And then there's some other ones, too. There's one that Yummy told me about. I had no idea until she said this, but apparently some people believe that you basically die for a second while you're sneezing. Like your body just shuts down, including your heart, and that you're technically dead for that half second while the sneeze is going on. I've never heard it stops. I had never heard that before until a couple of days ago. And, yeah, I looked it up, and it's a thing. But no, that's not at all true. Like, your heart rhythm might actually change, and the volume of blood in your heart might decrease or increase because of the pressure of the air in your chest or the release of pressure, but the electrical activity remains the same. And that's the key to whether your heart is alive or not. Yeah. Your heart does not stop. No. That's like playground stuff. It is. I thought it was very cute. What about Sneezing after sex preventing pregnancy? Did you see this one? Well, I mean, what are you sneezing out of? Right? So, I mean, that's the idea that if you sneeze, you're expelling? Well, there's really no other way to put it. Semen. And that would keep you from getting pregnant. Wow. Seems a little ridiculous. Yeah, that's another playground thing, I guess. So what playground have you been hanging out with? Pretty advanced playground activity. You got anything else? Oh, I've got one more thing. Chuck, anything else? I got nothing else. In 2016 or 18, a man in Leicester in the UK ruptured his throat from trying to stifle his knees. The pressure was so great, it broke open his throat? Wow. Yeah. Internally, it didn't break through the skin, but his throat internally was ruptured because that's what I pictured, like a throat explosion. It just blew his head completely off. Like that guy in scanners. Well, I guess that's it for sneezing, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again to west for the idea. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail call. This Atlanta, Texas. Hey, guys. My name's Ben Lee, local Atlanta, Georgia, and my wife and I are huge, longtime fans in your recent episode on pirate radio, you all briefly brought up radio Atlanta, which was named after Atlanta, Texas, and you joked that no one knew that town exists, even the people that live there. And that's pretty much true. My family is originally from Atlanta, Texas. It's pretty small, just about 5000 residents. So it's totally understandable. I was born in Texarkana, Texas, not too far from there, which is basically famous for being in the smokey and the bandit movie. I thought that was the town that dreaded sundown, too, wasn't it? I don't know about that. I definitely remember from smoky and the bandit. Okay. Because they're driving that beer from Texarkana to Atlanta. And Benjamin here says, I don't know why they didn't do Atlanta to Atlanta. Wasted opportunity. It really is. It sounds like Benjamin moved from Atlanta to Atlanta, though, huh? Maybe. Kind of. I mean, he's in Atlanta, right? He teaches at Georgia State. That's pretty awesome. Hey, how's that to you for teaching these days, Benjamin? Yes. He says there's a lot of towns in Texas that are also Georgia names. There's an Athens, Texas at Douglasville, Columbus, dallas, Georgia and Texas. And he said there's even a Georgia Texas. Well, that's just confusing. And he said, thanks for all the great stuff. And that is from Benjamin Bowden Lee. Thanks a lot. Benjamin Bowden Lee. That's a good create email. We appreciate it. Any email that references smoking in the bandit, we're all right with. Well, if you want to email us about smoking in the bandit or anything else, we'd love to hear from you. You can send it to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you shouldn't is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462882395sysk-gum-seven-years.mp3 | Does Gum Stay in your Stomach for Seven Years? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/does-gum-stay-in-your-stomach-for-seven-years | Does gum really stay in your stomach for Seven Years? Josh and Chuck take on the parental myth of gum swollowing. | Does gum really stay in your stomach for Seven Years? Josh and Chuck take on the parental myth of gum swollowing. | Thu, 22 May 2008 18:28:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=18, tm_min=28, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=143, tm_isdst=0) | 5648132 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, staff writer. Here, here@housetuffworks.com. And with me for the first of what I only hope will be many times is my fellow staff writer staff writer extraordinaire, actually, charles Bryant. That's great. That's very kind, things. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. So, Chuck, I have a question for you. When you were a kid and you popped a piece of gum in your mouth, were you ever told that if you swallowed it that it would stay in you for seven years? I was. I was told that all the time, and I don't shoot them today for that reason. Wow, that's horrible. Because as it turns out, that's a lie perpetrated by adults on young children. Right. Which is terrible in and of itself. But you want to tell us what gum is? Well, yeah, I'm really not sure why they would say things like this, because gum is really kind of harmless. I don't know who started that whole lie, but gum is really just four different things, Josh. It's flavor, it's sweetener, it's softener, and it's the gum base. And the good news is that three of those things can be broken down by your body. Goodness. Yeah, and those things break down, actually, is when gum loses its flavor, which is when most people toss gum out. But I understand you actually swallow your gum. I love to swallow my gum. I haven't spit a piece of gum out since I was, like, two years old. So when I was researching this, I was really glad to find, you know, personally, that it isn't true. I bet that was pretty scary before that for you. You know that base you were talking about? The component in question right. Actually dates back to about 1860. A guy named General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Does that name ring a bell? I think I've heard of him, but he was the guy who captured the Alamo, actually slaughtered all the defenders inside. We're supposed to remember him? Well, no, you remember the guys who are defending it. Actually, that probably depends on whether you're from Mexico or the US. Right? Yeah. Two sides of the same coin. Right. But anyway, Santa Ana achieved later fame well, kind of fame by introducing chickle to a guy named Thomas Adams, and his name might also ring a bell. He made that awful gum. What is it? Right? The blackjack blackjack chewing on tar paper. It's awful. Black licorice gum. But Adams made a mint off of it, and he actually had a contract with Santa Ana to, I guess, share in the proceeds since Santa Ana introduced chickle to him. But chickle chickle is the gum base. Okay. Yeah. Chicley, actually. It basically took gum into the 19th century. Now the 21st century. So Thomas Adams actually didn't honor his contract. And by this time, Santa Ana, who was in exile and had lost a leg, was now left penniless and destitute in New York, thanks to Adams. Penniness. Penniless and Legless. Penniless and legless. Yeah. Not a good combination. But long story short, santa Ana introduced this component that mothers everywhere have lied to their children about not being digestible to gum. Right. So, I mean, if we have this base, if we have this item in question that can't be broken down, why doesn't it stick around? Well, it's basically like anything else you put in your mouth, Josh. It goes down your esophagus and into your stomach, and enzymes and acids kind of start bubbling up and they break everything down. So far, so good. Yes. And then what can't be broken down there gets broken down in the intestines. Your liver and pancreas going to help out the intestines there. And then what's left after that is just the gum base, and that moves into your colon, and it's pretty much a one way street from there. Yeah, you don't want to go the other way because it can be very bad. And actually, there have been a couple of occasions that support this old wives tale that gum stays in you for seven years. The Poor Kid, as we call him yeah, we've been calling him around the office, Poor Kid. And quite rightly, poor Kid was a four year old who had suffered intense constipation for half of his life. Two years. And it's no wonder why. No, actually, his parents, it turns out, had been potty training him, and anytime he was successful, they gave him a piece of gum. And apparently this kid was really successful. Right. He was good on the potty. Yeah, he was getting, like, five to seven pieces of gum a day and swallowing all of them. So I guess his parents were really focused on the potty training and not the fact that he wasn't spitting this gum out. Right. And what was the result? While Poor kids take into the doctor, the doctors finally, I guess, crack them open and they find, which is, I guess, described by the finest assemblage of words I've ever seen in my entire life, a taffy, like trail of fecal material in Poor Kid. Yeah. That is terrible. Right? Well, the good news is that they were able to suction all this out of his rectum and send him along his merry way. Right. Which I imagine was a life changing experience for Poor Kid. That was a good day. He does stand as a cautionary tale, though. Although he didn't crack the seven year mark. He was only four when this procedure was done, which is, I guess, a good thing for everybody, right. And the world will never know. It's like a tissue pop, right. How many licks? If you want to know any more gross stuff about gum and digestion gore, does gum really stay in you for seven years on Howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit Howstep works.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@howstepworks.com brought you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
How Ponzi Schemes Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ponzi-schemes-work | There's been a lot in the news about Ponzi schemes lately. How do they work? And who's Ponzi? Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to discover how an Italian immigrant created a classic con that's still fleecing investors today. | There's been a lot in the news about Ponzi schemes lately. How do they work? And who's Ponzi? Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to discover how an Italian immigrant created a classic con that's still fleecing investors today. | Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:50:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=15, tm_min=50, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=99, tm_isdst=0) | 25615120 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry it's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck. Say hi. Hi. Welcome, people. This is stuff you should know. Indeed. Chuck's got his little jug of vodka, I got my fresca, and we are ready to go. Right, Chuck? No, I don't lie. Chuck. Chuck, do you know how we have these web logs now? There's, like, a stuff you should know. Web log aka blog. Yes, sure. Yeah. You want to be a hit or whatever. I do know how we have that, because I write on it every day. I know. I was just starting a conversation. Chuckle. Yes. Remember that post I put up yesterday that you said, like, you read three times and still couldn't make heads or tails of? Yeah. I didn't get it. Well, there was a part of it kind of the crux of the whole thing. I don't know if that's the case or not, but anyway, there's an aspect of it, and it was about these two artists, and one of them just goes by the name Arakawa. Okay. Right. And his partner and I don't think just artistic partner, I think that they're life partners, maybe. Got you. Her name is Madeline Gins. Right. Okay. And they have been quite successful at creating this architecture that's intended to achieve immortality. Right. How so? Well, the way these two have done it is through surprising, disturbing architectural choices. Right. Okay. Basically, their theory is that if you create or if you live in an uncomfortable dwelling, discomfort or comfort leads to laziness and sedentariness, and then that's ultimately what kills you wholly unproven. But they design their architecture based on that theory, so they keep you uncomfortable. Right. And it's unfamiliar. I think I know this. I think we actually have an article on this. Like the floors are undulating. Undulating floors? Yeah, I've heard of that. They also like kind of moonscape floors, right angled like ceilings. It doesn't sound like a very pleasant place to live. Yeah. Pretty interesting. This one guy. And these things go for just to build them. They cost millions of dollars, but they have built several. Most of them are lost in Tokyo. And this one guy who lives in one with his family so that he's lost like, \u00a320 and doesn't have hay fever any longer, really? Since he moved in there. Yeah. But their whole firm is basically in jeopardy because they were heavily invested with one Bernard Madoff, who you may have heard of. Yes. This guy's reach extends everywhere. We're talking Kevin Bacon. Right. And there's a six degrees joke in there somewhere. Sure. I imagine Kira Sedgewick since Kevin Bacon is in there. Jacob Gabor, spielberg. Spielberg. And that's just like the tip of the iceberg. I mean, thousands and thousands of people were invested with this guy, and it turned out he was a Ponzi schemer. That's right. It's a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Chuck likes to say it like that in a tribute to the Italian immigrant, Mr. Charles Ponzi, who was running around in the want to talk a little bit about Mr. Ponzi? Yes. I didn't know this until I read the article. It's pretty interesting. And Ponzi is all over the news, so it's kind of cool to get some background. Yeah. And also we should probably say thanks to all the people who wrote in and requested that we do this podcast. This one's for you. Right. Bernie madeoff excuse me, himself wrote in. Yeah, he did. He's like, hey, can you tell everybody what I did? So, yeah. In the 1920s, Charles Ponsi, what he did was, at the time, if you want to send mail overseas, you would include what was called an international reply coupon. Well, if you wanted to reply. Right. It's basically sort of like when you get something from magazine and the postage just prepaid to return the card. Right. It's prepaid so that you get that back to say, hey, these people got that exactly right. So this is what you did back then. He had an idea. He said, hey, if I go over and buy these in a different country where they're cheaper, I can come back and sell them in the United States. Right. And he could do this because these things were internationally recognized. They were the same in any country. Exactly. But apparently they went for different prices in different countries. Right. It's not a bad business model. Right, right. I would say so. Things went pretty well at first. He got a lot of investors and made some pretty good money. But the return that he promised, which what was it again? It was a ridiculous promise. It was, I think, 50% return in 45 to 90 days. Right. So, yes, that should have been a red flag right there. We'll talk about that later. But yeah, that didn't go as well as he thought. But he kept getting investors, and he just kind of kept us all quiet. So what he would do is he would pay back some to the initial investors based on the money that the current investors were giving him and just kind of kept going in a cyclical way until he started taking a little money for himself. Yeah. And ended up having millions of bucks off this in the 1920s before it finally crumbled as a big scam. Well, the reason he was found out was because somebody apparently calculated that there would have had to have been about 160,000,000 of these things exist for him to be making the money he was making. And the problem is, there was only $27,000. Exactly. That's kind of what found him out. But what I got from this, what I got from reading about Ponzi schemes, is that Charles Ponzi didn't appear to be huckster from the outset, which is actually in a legitimate business that he was trying to run. Can I do it? I think sure. I think it was an act of desperation. Right. And we should probably talk about exactly how Ponzi schemes work. Right. They're pretty straightforward and simple, but I can't imagine that as they just get bigger and bigger, you start to eat a lot of roll AIDS. Right. I bet that was the original Ponzi scheme and I'm sure he was nervous as it was going. What kind of scheme? Ponsi scheme. Very nice, Chuck. Thanks. So, do you want to give some detailed explanation on how Ponzi schemes work? Yeah, it's actually pretty simple. What you do is you come up with an investment, a shell, sort of, and you get people to invest in whatever you're saying you're going to invest in. In this case, in the original Ponzi scheme, it was the reply coupons, but nowadays it's usually like a stock thing. So you get these folks to invest and you take their money and essentially use that first rung of people to attract other people to invest. And once you start getting other investors, you can pay back those initial folks and they can go on record and say, oh, yeah, I made a great return. That's exactly right. You get more investors, right, and more rungs. And it's sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul the entire time. Right, but you're pocketing like Ponzi did some for himself. Right. At a certain point, you can start skimming off the top, right, but it's not like you take the money and run proposition, it's a take of the money. Stick around and pay people off as much as you can. The problem is, people don't divest very easily when they get an unbelievable return on something. Right. They want to keep investing. Sure. So if you're like, no, you can't invest anymore, people are going to start to get suspicious. So you've got your first rung, you got your second wrong, and then so on and so on and so on. But to sustain it, you have to keep adding more and more rungs. But the more rungs you add, the more difficult it is to pay everybody back. Right. So it's inevitable that it collapses. But some people will know they're investing in a Ponzi scheme. Some of those first run people, yeah. From what I understand, people can actually make money off Ponzi scheme, get in early enough, and you're smart enough to get out while it gets good. Right. Because those are the people that are going to get paid first, so they can vouch and say, this is a really great deal. Right, exactly. Sure. Yeah. So that's pretty much a pound scheme. And if it sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme to you, you would be right. It's virtually the same structure. The one big difference is that in a pondy scheme, you're not asked to do anything. Right? You're just an investor. They just want your money. In a pyramid scheme, generally, you have to do something like you are buying in to sell something. Amway. No, sorry. Well, no, actually, on Amway site, they have, like, in the FAQ section, it's like, is Amway a pyramid scheme? Right. And they're like, we're a pyramid model. Schemes the wrong word to use. And actually, the pyramid model has worked for legitimate businesses. Amway. Mary Kay. Mary Kay. It can work and it doesn't necessarily have to be illegal. That's the other distinction between Ponzi schemes and pyramids models, is that Ponzi schemes are always fraud, completely false, because it's an investment, but the money's never invested. It's so simple. When I read this, I was just like, the beauty, isn't it? Simplicity. Just like, give me a bunch of money and I will keep it and get more people to give me money. I'll give you a little bit. And it's just amazing how that works. Can you imagine being such an edgy, savvy investor that you actually knowingly invest in Ponzi schemes? Yeah. Who does that? I don't know. I bet there's some names on the Madoff List. Yeah, I'll bet. But no, he did everything alone. We'll get to him in a minute. Allegedly. Not anymore. He confessed, buddy. Well, certain things are still alleged at this point. All right, well, we'll just go with you're such a COA dude. But I appreciate the o because that includes me. Okay, so Ponzi was the guy who came up with the scheme. He did it so well that they named it after him. But the earliest one we know about goes back to early 1880s in Boston with a woman named Sarah Howe. I don't think I know about this one. Okay, so she actually actively and purposely built a Ponzi scheme. Right. Although with it being 40 years before Charles Ponzi showed up, she probably didn't call it that to herself. What was her name? How. Sarah how. The how scheme. Yes. If she did have enough foresight to know that it would eventually be called upon the scheme, how would it sound in her head when she said, this is the kind of scheme that I'm carrying out? It's a Ponzi scheme. That's right, Chuck. Anyway, Ms. Hal basically put together a group of thousands of women investors and invested in Women's Liberty Bonds, I think is what they were called, that's supposedly what the investment was for. But no, it wasn't. She just basically carried out a Ponzi scheme, and she managed to rake in about half a million bucks before she was caught. And then another guy shortly after, about the turn of the century, his name was William Franklin Miller, and he also built investors for about another half a million. And this is substantial enough to be remembered 100 years plus later. But Ponzi was the first one, right? Ponzi was the first big one, I should say. Sure. And then you don't really hear about anybody in the world of Ponzi schemes. I mean, I'm sure you can, but nobody huge doing it right now. Right. Lou Perlman. Is that where you're going? I was going to go to the Balkans first, but let's do Mr. Perlman. Okay. Yeah. This is one of my favorites, just because his associations are kind of funny. Lou Perlman who I think you have to say his name like lou Perlman. I got that impression as well. And he kind of looks like that kind of guy, too. Yeah, he kind of funded the boy band craze in the know. You remember the Backstreet Boys because of the tattoo you have on your neck. Why? And NSYNC was the other one. I don't know if you have a tattoo of sync. Okay. I was covering all my bases. So he funded these bands, and it turned out in 2006 that he was running a big Ponzi scheme. He had been for like 20 years. Right. And a lot in sync. And the backstreet boys were kind of funded on this Poncy scheme. I don't think funded kind of at all. I think they were fully funded. Fully funded? Yeah. And this guy created the backstreet Boys and incentives and funded them with illegal money. So those yahoos kind of owe Ponzi with their careers. Yes, they do so well, their careers. Past tense. Sure. Timberlake's done well for himself. Was he in one of those who JT. I don't know who that is. Shut up. All right, back to Albania. Yes, albania. Basically, a whole bunch of people were working this big Ponzi scheme, which, from what I understand, also can extend the life of a Ponzi scheme. Lou Perlman is an unusual animal in that he could carry it out single handedly for 20 years. Right. But in Albania for a while, a group of Ponzi schemers had one set up that built these investors out of $2 billion before it collapsed, which is in Albania. That is 30% of their gross domestic product. That's huge. Yes. Like how to cripple the country, basically. Yeah. I think Albania is probably second world, so I think a hit like that is just ginormous. And that was a big problem when it happened. It was because when people found out, they started riding in the streets and fires broke out and people died. Yeah. So that's the old Albania Ponzi scheme. Right. And we should note that Lou Perlman, he went to jail or received a sentence of 25 years for counting $300 million. And apparently, every million he paid back, they cut a month off a sentence, which seems really fair. I think so. But Perlman, $300 million sounds like a lot. It ain't. It was. And then 2008 came along. The big daddy dude, this guy, Bernard Madoff. Right. One of the founders of Nasdaq. Yeah. Which is one reason why it works so well. Because he was beyond legit. He was beyond legit. Although one of the other reasons he was so successful was that he was smart. First of all, like Sarah, he used affinity fraud. And affinity fraud is where you're using the inclusiveness of a group against themselves. Right, right. So he used his membership in an uber wealthy, very exclusive Jewish country club down in Florida to prey on investors at first. Right. And the affinity fraud happens a lot, and usually it happens with religious groups. Somebody comes in, it's like, hey, I'm a Lutheran, too, and I've got this great investment. Since he's a Lutheran, he comes upstanding, you trust them, and then that's that. Right. But made off very much used affinity fraud, at least at first. And then news of his amazing returns got out. But as I was saying, the reason he was so successful is he didn't pull up Ponzi and say, I'll give you 50% return in 45 days. He offered reasonable I think 11% was the average returns over the long haul. Right. That was the kiosk. Very believable. Well, to an extent. Have you ever looked at our perspectives? The t row price prospectus. Yeah. Have you ever noticed, if you look at it, it's like one year, three years, five years, ten years, it'll be up at one year down, three years down, five years up. He was offering, like, a straight even kill 11% return. Right. You couldn't lose. Right. So that actually should have been a red flag, but it wasn't. Right. And in 2001, Barons, the financial rag, they published an article on him specifically saying his plan was saying, Madoff can't be offering these returns. Mathematically speaking, this isn't possible. No one listened. But chief among the people who weren't listening was the SEC. Yes. And they've been under a lot of fire lately because they did not listen. They did not investigate, even when it was kind of handed to them, like, hey, several times, actually. What's going on here? There were, like two or three formal complaints to them, and they never followed up. Well, one reason why and this is even another reason why he was successful is he was also running a legit business alongside it. So he could sort of defer when he needed to pay people back and things were getting tight. He could pull a little money out of his legit business and do that, and apparently did so promptly. If somebody wanted to withdraw yeah. They got a check like that, no questions asked. Like when Kevin Bacon was like, we're heading to Barbados and I need a million dollars because I'm going to buy a hut on the beach. Right. I'm trying to hide my wife from her shame for being in the Closer. Yeah. So, yeah, Made Off was very successful, to the tune of $20 to $50 billion. Yeah. He made off with I know. He's got the perfect name for it now. I'm sure been like, Wait, what's your last name? No, I'm not investing. Every headline has already used that, so it's probably stale by now. Yeah. Thanks for that, Chuck. Sure. So what can you do, Chuck? How do you stay out of a Ponzi scheme unless you're a very savvy investor who's totally unconscionable? Well, there's a few things you can look for. And it also should be noted that a Ponzi scheme is pretty much a one way street to collapse. There's really no way to pull it off in the long run unless I think a lot of people might start these and think, well, I can get out at a certain point, pay everyone back and make a lot of money. But, yes, it's not a good working model in the end. Well, apparently the point to a Ponzi scheme is to keep it going until they die. Yes. Which is considered a big success because you live like a billionaire. Right. And then at the end, you die or you off yourself. Yeah. Speaking of that, did you know that after he was found out, Made Off was spending 160 grand a month on personal security at a penthouse? Wow. Yeah. In Manhattan. Do you know how many bodyguards that buys you? That's like Delta Force money. Yeah. Some things you can look for. The obvious, of course, is if it sounds too good to be true. It is. That's the oldest adage in the book, and it's true across the board. So if someone's making you promises on big returns, then you should probably turn around and walk away. Right. Don't let anyone pressure you into doing that. Well, pressure, that's another point, too. It's usually going to be a high pressure pitch. Like, you have a very limited time window, maybe for as long as the person standing there, and you're made to feel like a jackass if you don't take them up on it. But, yeah, pressure is definitely one of the factors. And even one, like you said, that Made Off scam, where he would not promise huge returns. That might make it a little more believable, but everything, like you said, fluctuates. So even if it's a consistent, like, 5% growth for years, then that should be a red flag right there. And also you should ask questions and demand answers as well, because if you have a friend who has a friend that has this great investment and you cut them a check and it turns out to be a pond scheme. Well, TS for you, that was a stupid thing to do. So you should know what your money is being invested in. You should know who's investing it. And even if it's legitimate, you should be asking these questions. If it's through any of the major brokerages, find out how many fees there are. That's a good habit no matter what. Sure. And the other thing is, even if you're involved in a Ponzi scheme, even if you get sucked in, it should never break you and leave you bankrupt. Right. Excellent point, Chuck, because this is probably the important point. Well, now, I say diversification is the key to a good portfolio, and this is definitely true here. You should not invest all your money in one thing. You're just setting yourself up for bankruptcy. And whether it's a pond or scheme or not, if you do all real estate and you're just totally invested in real estate in 2007, you're in big trouble. I mean, even Donald Trump hit the lowest of the lows at one point. We all forget. I think he's lost a lot of his old edge that he used to have. He's made some bad decisions. Yes. Like the TV show. Sure. No one needs to see that guy. No. And if you do find yourself in a Ponzi scheme and you're not the type to take the law into your own hands with, like, a tire iron or anything like that, you could always contact the SEC. I don't know that they'll do anything and they probably won't, but it's worth a shot anyway, right? Right. Oh, and we should just as a sidebar here, I know that Madoff did confess, but the SEC is still coming under fire because he's claiming they acted alone and didn't have any help with this, which is really hard to believe just because paperwork alone for a scheme this size would be huge. And some people think out there that he probably had his family involved and then did everything he could to cover for them and take the hit right. Yet to come out. Well, also, even if they weren't involved, their salary came directly from the building of other people. Sure. Even if they somehow were just totally unaware of it, I don't know. It puts their own wealth in question. Right. So that's the Ponzi scheme. That was very good, Chuck. Thank you, Chuck. A lot of fun, I'll say that. Are we going to talk about our spoken word album? Yes. And then maybe we'll talk about blogs and then listen or mail. Yeah. Stick around for me. All right. So we do have a spoken word album, our first one. And it is about the economy and economics. Everyone knows that we are in the Second Great Depression and we just kind of decided to make a spoken word album about that. That's such a slightly off kilter description. It's more like a guide. Right. Possibly a guide to the economy. That's what it's called. But it's very big, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff in it, right? Yes. It's called The Stuff you Should Know super Stuffed Guide to the Economy. And it's got expert interviews. Josh and I get out of the studio, we go in around the world. Chicken Farm. Chicken Farm. Don't spoil it. And Jerry, our awesome producer, she did excellent sound design, and it's got more bells and whistles, and it's definitely a cut above the silliness we do here each week. Yeah. And you can find it by typing a superstuffed in the search bar at itunes. It's 399. Frankly, Chucking, I think it's worth it. I think. So if you want to get it, knock yourself out. Get it a couple of times if you like. Support us. Yeah, because it blows up your computer after 48 hours unless you keep downloading it fresh each time and paying for it over and over again. Not true at all. All right, so there was that plug. Now let's plug the blog. Yes, we've been plugging the blog. Now, I hope you guys aren't sick of it yet, but Josh and I blog a couple of times a day. He post once, I post once, and it's called Stuff You Should Know. You can find it on the right hand side of our homepage@houseupworks.com. And we just cherry pick interesting news items and kind of like what we do here, except it may not be enough to flesh out a full show. Yeah. And a couple of times we've posted on listener suggestions, like, why don't you guys do this? Absolutely. So, yeah, keep the ideas coming. We love them. We do. It keeps us from having to do any real research. It's true. And you know what that leads us to? Listener mail time. That's right. Okay, josh, this is an installment of stuff we should know. Stuff. We should have known. No, it's not, because sometimes it's additional things. Yes. This one is from Sarah, and Sarah wrote in about the word theory versus hypotheses. Sarah is a teacher, and we say all the time, someone's theory, and she says we've been misusing it. She says, in the Thinking Cap podcast, you repeatedly referenced theories about savantism and left hemisphere damage, and scientifically speaking, these are not theories, they're hypotheses. So her basic point is that a theory is not just an educated guess. It's something that a lot of detail and research has gone into to get to the point where you can call it a theory, like the theory of evolution, which is often dismissed as, oh, it's just a theory, but a theory has actually got a lot to it. So Sarah wanted to set the record straight, so we did that. Another little minor correction here. Josh said at one point we were the only country that uses the imperial system. I thought we got this out of the way with the bodies on Everest. We did. Not officially. US Burma, Liberia and Myanmar. Myanmar and Burma are the same place. Okay, there you have it. Ever since the junta, it's now Mia. Yeah. So Rich from Omaha, joshua from Euclair, Wisconsin, stefan from Newark, Delaware, and Jeanne or James, they all wrote in and told us that. And I have one more and I like this one. Stephanie wrote in and told us that on our Aphrodisiacs podcast, we're talking about phallic symbol and fallacies. And we were talking about an oyster. Apparently, there is a word for something that resembles the female genitalia. Yeah, I was interested to hear this because we kept saying female genitalia, and I wish that she had written in before then. And we knew that phallus only represented the male genitalia, but I did not realize there was one for female yonic. Yonic. And she said yoni is Sanskrit for the word womb, vulva in place of origin. And she said she just wanted to tell us this because for one of the first times in her life, she actually knew something. Yannick. So thank you, Stephanie. Yeah, thanks, Stephanie. Yannick getting it. I'm processing it right now. So Yannick Noah. Remember the famous tennis player? Yeah, I know his name was actually referenced to females and tell you odd. I wonder if you know that. I'm sure it's heard of. So if you want to point out that there are other words chuck and I are unfamiliar with, basically let me know that I shouldn't call my crackpot theories theories, but hypotheses instead. Or just say hi. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetopords.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. 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445704e8-53a3-11e8-bdec-e78af2fee871 | The Amazing Roberto Clemente | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-amazing-roberto-clemente | Roberto Clemente was what’s called a “complete” baseball player – he could hit, run and, man could he throw, so it’s no surprise he was made a Hall of Famer. But he was also a humanitarian, a civil rights icon, and a fiercely proud son of Puerto Rico. | Roberto Clemente was what’s called a “complete” baseball player – he could hit, run and, man could he throw, so it’s no surprise he was made a Hall of Famer. But he was also a humanitarian, a civil rights icon, and a fiercely proud son of Puerto Rico. | Tue, 03 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=308, tm_isdst=0) | 43704817 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there. And Jerry, too. I got to mention Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. I'm surprised you picked this topic. Why? I don't recognize you as a baseball guy. Oh, man. Probably the first thing I was ever truly into was baseball cards. Like, getting the newest addition of the Beckett's Price Guide was the highlights of my month. Whenever. Really? Yeah. For a few years, I was super into baseball cards. What's funny is still, I'd watch baseball here, there. But it was baseball cards in particular I really cared about. I honestly didn't really watch baseball. No, not really interesting. But I really loved baseball cards. I hate baseball, but I love baseball cards. It wasn't, like, complicating complex like that. It was just I didn't watch. I liked baseball cards more than I liked baseball itself. That's all. I got you. Were you a Roberto Clemente fan? He was playing his final years when I was being born, so I was not a fan, but I grew up obviously, a Braves fan. But in the mid 1970s, when I first started being a baseball fan, the Pittsburgh Pirates had a couple of really good teams, and he was not long gone before those years, so his aura was still sort of ever present when I first started watching baseball. And the Pirates, when they had those great, awful stovetop flat caps oh, I love those things. But, yeah, on their own, just as an article of fashion, they're horrid. But they were so unique and different, too. Yeah, they rank among the worst uniforms, but they're just very 70s. Yeah, they are super. Seventy s, I think is why I love them. I think they were a throwback to the old, old days. So that was the original is that right? Version. But yeah, I don't think they, like, invented those caps. I think some of the early baseball caps might have been flat like that. I might be wrong, though. I did not know that. I think the Astros had the best 70s uniform of all, though. They rank as one of the worst, too. Oh, you're crazy. You have terrible tastes in the 70s. I'm just talking about if you look up articles like worst Baseball Uniforms ever, those are the ones that are listed. Okay, well, then you're not crazy, but whoever's writing those articles is crazy. Yeah. I assume you're talking about the orange shooting star in stripes. Yeah, with, like, red and blue. It's very pretty. Okay, so anyway, we're not talking about fashion or uniforms or anything like that, although this is not at all surprising that we even started on this. We're talking about one particular player who wore that funny looking Pirates hat. Roberto Clemente. Who was he? He actually never wore that hat. Well, then what are we even doing that came along after him. What's the point of even doing this episode then, if he never wore that hat? Yeah, I'm just trying to keep Pittsburgh people from emailing us. No, I appreciate that, Chuck. I appreciate it. So we are talking about a Pittsburgh Pirate, Roberto Clemente, and I knew of him, I was aware of him. I know that he's one of the all time greats. I hadn't seen many plays of his, but you can't be into baseball and not know about Roberto Clemente, but I definitely didn't know nearly as much about him as I do now, thanks to this help from Rus, who apparently was raised a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. So he had plenty of good things to say about Roberto Clemente. Yeah. I think maybe we should tick off a few of these career stats just to give you an idea of who we're talking about here. Lifetime batting average of 317, which if you don't know anything about baseball and you think a success rate of 30% is terrible, it is in almost everything else in life. But in baseball, that means you're hall of Famer. That's how hard it is to hit a baseball. Right, I was going to say, it really goes to show how difficult hitting baseballs in the major leagues are. Yeah, you hit three out of ten and you're great. I think I've said that before on the show, but he got twelve Gold Gloves in the right field, led the league in batting, the National League, that is four different times. Two World Series championships. MVP, 1966 MVP, the World Series and 71 Rebedded 414, which is just crazy good, I think. 16 time All Star. Just really just an amazing career and obviously instant hall of Fame career. Yeah. And he was really well known for his arm. Like he would throw people out at home from right field, from the outfield. He could throw without a bounce. He could throw all the way in and beat a runner to third or to home, which is just amazing. And it's one of the things that really got people excited about him and watching him play. But if you look at just the stats, especially taken individually, he was a great player and one of the all time greats, but statistically speaking, it doesn't necessarily show up like there's plenty of people who have better stats. But one of the things that made Roberto Clemente such an amazing baseball player, as he was one of the true, what are called complete players, or a five tool player, where he could run, he could throw, he could bat, he could field, and I keep forgetting what the fifth one is, but he could sell Cracker Jacks in the stand like nobody's business as well. You got an actual baseball guy on the other end of the call here, you know. Who, me? Oh, okay. Well, Mr. Baseball Guy, if it's not selling crackerjacks, what's the fifth tool. Use me at your disposal. It's hit for power and hit for average. So there's two hittings. Well, whoever knows that. Nobody knows that you can't just use the same thing twice and call it five tools. Well, now you can, because a lot of players can have a big boomstick, but they bet like 230. But if you can hit for average and hit for power, it's a big, big deal. And if you can make the most exciting play in baseball to me, which is a right field to third base assist, then there's nothing more thrilling to me. It's really amazing to see, for sure. It definitely is more than even home plate for some reason, probably because it's further. One of the other things that I think people loved about Roberto Clemente, and I think that made him such a true baseball player in a lot of people's eyes, at least in mind. But he was very well known for going after pitches that other people would have taken as a ball. Clear balls, well, high and outside, high and inside low and whatever. And he would go after him, and he would hit them a lot of the time, which is one reason why his batting average was so high, because he would go after those pitches that other people would just let go by. And then in hitting them, he would send them into places where you wouldn't expect him being a right handed batter to hit so he could get to base pretty frequently, too. He also was a fast runner, but he ran like he was out of his mind completely. Yeah, it's pretty fun to see him run. He would hit pitch outs, which, like I said, if you don't know baseball, pitch out is when there's somebody on first base, and the catcher signals to the pitcher right before they throw that the gown first is going to steal second. So they throw it completely out of the strike, though the catcher can stand up and catch it to make the throw to second. And that's called a pitch out. It's not even a real pitch. And he would swing and hit pitch outs. That's awesome. No one does that. It's unheard of. It's crazy. Yes, that is crazy. So suffice to say that Roberto Clemente is one of the great baseball players of all time, because he had it all, but also, it turns out, a really great human being in a lot of ways, too. He was an activist for civil rights during the civil rights era, and he was also humanitarian, as we'll see. Like, he really cared about other people, and especially the plight of people who were less fortunate than him because he had came from less fortunate circumstances to begin with, and he never forgot it. Like, he was genuinely one of those guys who never let his fame get to his head, the ways that he let his fame get to his head was in, say, animosity towards the sporting press or saying, like, you guys aren't giving me enough credit for being what a great player I am. That was separate. That was different when it came to people outside of baseball. Just everyday people. He was friends with those people throughout his whole career and life. Yes. And that is why Major League Baseball has honored him with the Roberto Clemente Award every year, which is given to the player that they feel best represents the humanitarian and humanitarian and philanthropic side of the game, or outside the game, rather. So quite an honor to have an award named after you. So I think we should take a break and then maybe go back to the beginning where and when he was born, right after this. All right, so Clemente was born in Puerto Rico. He was born in a little town called Carolina, or Carolina, and it was sugarcane territory, sugar cane plantations. And his dad, he was actually born Roberto Clemente Walker. His mother's maiden name was Walker, and his father's name was Clemente. So he used both until he got into baseball. And he was born in the middle of the Great Depression, the youngest of seven kids. Very tough way to be born into life. It was. But, I mean, like, if you come from a farming family, it makes sense, you know? Oh, they have a lot of kids. Yeah, sure. And plus, you have a lot of people to play with as you're growing up, too. That is very true. So his father was actually a foreman on a sugar cane plantation, and his mom was a huge influence in his life, I get the impression slightly more of an influence than his father was, even. But one of the things that she had hoped for her son was that he would study engineering. I'm not sure why, but she wanted to become an engineer. And he said, yeah, I really like playing baseball, to the point where he and his brothers and his friends would make baseballs out of whatever was handy. Like, they would put, like, stones in a sock. They would wad up paper, tape, whatever they could get their hands on, and use whatever they could for a bat, and they would play baseball. And then as they got a little older and started to start playing in school, they had actual equipment to play with, and they would just play constantly. I read he had ten home runs once in a game that started at 11:00 A.m. And ended after six, because they just kept playing and playing and playing. That's all he wanted to do, was play baseball. And one of the reasons why is because he was really good at it from a very young age. Yeah, I think I have a theory about Caribbean players that they develop so well because so many of them don't have the right gear growing up, and especially back then. Because if you're out there with a broomstick and a bottle cap, imagine what that does for your hand eye coordination to when you have like a real barrel of a baseball bat and a baseball it's no wonder that he could hit anything if you're growing up hitting bottle caps. And this wasn't just him. So many Dominican and Puerto Rican and Cuban and now just all over the place in the Caribbean, players are coming up and I think they make do with less as children. And that really hones their skills in ways that there's a baseball problem in America, period. Far fewer kids are growing up playing baseball now and there's far fewer American baseball players now as a result. So one of the reason Chucky was super into baseball was because the whole island of Puerto Rico was in the baseball at the time. It had been exported a couple of decades before he was born from Cuba to Puerto Rico. And then also by the time he was playing, the Puerto Rican baseball league had really developed into something substantial and they played their season in the winter. So if you were an American ball player, you could play in your offseason down in the Caribbean, specifically in Puerto Rico, among other places. But Puerto Rico is a really attractive place to play because they were so into it. There were so many teams and so many good players already down there. It still is. Yes. But one of the ways that it developed was from especially Negro league players making their way down there in the off season to play. I believe Roberto Clemente actually played a season with Willie Maize himself. And Willie Maize had just led the New York Giants to win the World Series. And a couple of months later he was down in Puerto Rico playing during the winter leagues because that's just what you did when you really wanted to play baseball. You go down to the Caribbean in the wintertime. Yeah, it's something that still happens. And it's mainly what you see now is players, younger players play winter ball in Puerto Rico to just hone their skills and to get better. It's not something you see a lot of veterans doing. That's why it's pretty remarkable and I think shows the love of his country in the game that Clemente played winter ball, like every year through his career. Yeah, one of the reasons I saw that he did that was because he knew that most of the people who lived in Puerto Rico wouldn't be able to afford to go up to the States to watch him play. And he wanted for them to be able to see him play. So he played every year. Another thing, it was like you were saying, some of those younger players hone their skills down there. He kept his skills honed by playing winter ball. He kept his swing loose and he didn't fall out of shape ever because he played baseball basically year round for 18 or 20 years. Yeah. So by the time he hits 14, he's recruited to play softball, which is a little weird, but it was a competitive softball team and then eventually an amateur baseball team and was making, I think, like $40 a week at 17 playing amateur baseball in Puerto Rico. And this was a time where you didn't have baseball scouts combing the Caribbean for the next new young talent. It was a very new idea to go to the Caribbean to find players and not a lot of teams. I mean, most teams were doing it a little bit, but they didn't have the robust scouting programs down there like they do now. Right. And they sent the dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who very famously broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 47, sent a scout named Al Kimpanis, who went down to Puerto Rico, saw 19 year old Roberto Clemente in 1954, and said, this guy is a five tool dynamo, and we need to get them up here as fast as we can. I mean, that was actually kind of insightful of him because it wasn't readily obvious, especially very early in his career when he was playing with what they called the Kengrah Harrows, the Crabbers, that he was just going to be one of the all time greats because he swung at lots of pitches that other people wouldn't have swung at. He ran like he was crazy. He was still finding his skills. But to be able to see how great he was going to be at that young stage, that's a credit to that. What's his name? Campanis's Eye for Talent. Yeah. And he went on to be a lifelong baseball executive, I think retired in shame for some racial statements he made, but longtime baseball guy. But the Dodgers got Clemente. And there was a thing, there was a rule back then from 1947, 65 that they got rid of in 65 for a very good reason. It was a little bit weird if you're a baseball fan today, because it's so different now. But the rule was that if you were a player that was signed for more than $4,000 as a signing bonus, then you had to be on a Major League Baseball roster for two full seasons. And if you weren't, then you would become part of the rookie draft. And Clemente was signed for, I think, $10,000. And I'm not sure why they signed him for that much. Maybe he wouldn't have gone for less. But it was not a great move because this meant that the Dodgers had to either take them to the major leagues for two full seasons, which was not a good call because most players in baseball started out in the minor leagues. In fact, all do. No one makes that jump straight to the major leagues, even if it's just like a cursory half season or so. But that's even really rare. But they kept him in the minor leagues, and their plan was to hide him. And literally, he would go, like, two months between starts because they wanted to get those two seasons out of the way, because after those two years, you could send someone to the minor leagues. But it didn't work. People saw him play, and even though he didn't get to play much and the Pittsburgh Pirates really honed in on him right away. So, yeah, the Pittsburgh Pirates were led I think the GM was Branch Ricky, who was the guy who had scouted Jackie Robinson and got him onto the Dodgers. Now he worked for the Pirates, so he ended up getting his hands on Roberto Clemente and brought him to the Pirates. Apparently, when they found out or when Clemente found out that he had been drafted by the Pirates, he was down in Puerto Rico. And he said later on that he didn't really know where Pittsburgh was. He had been excited to play for New York because there's a big Puerto Rican community in New York. And all of a sudden, he sent off to Pittsburgh, doesn't know where it is and doesn't really know anybody. So this is kind of his entree into America. But it actually was even rougher than that, because first he started out, I guess, on Pittsburgh's minor league team, or that's what it was. It was in spring training down in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, and he came face to face with the stark reality of basically Jim Crow South in the thing when he got to America. And he was one of the reasons I said earlier he was a civil rights activist, because he did not take very kindly to that and bristled and railed against it from the outset. Yeah, he didn't have any frame of reference for this. Like, he came from Puerto Rico, where this wasn't a thing. He was of African descent, so to Americans, he was a black man. To him. He was Puerto Rican. He was caught between two worlds and didn't understand why he had to stay in a different hotel or eat in a different restaurant than his white teammates. And so this really upset him. And what upset him even as much was how his other black teammates on the team understood it and just basically had to take it because they were afraid if they caused a ruckus that they would be sent back down to the Miners. And he was just like, you shouldn't be deferential. Like, what is going on in this country? And he would speak to the sporting press about this stuff. And the sporting press either would just ignore his comments about that or actually, yes, they would ignore his comments about that, and they would just talk about whatever he said about the game, but then to kind of keep the sense that he was an outsider that wasn't respected because he was looked down upon because of his race and his origin. They would quote him phonetically in the press. So when he said there was a headline that famously said, like, I get a hit, I feel good, but they spelled it out like, I get heat. Heet is how they spelled hit. I feel good. That was a headline in the Pittsburgh newspapers after a really big game, and he found that extremely demeaning, and it actually really kind of framed the way that he felt about America. Yeah, it framed how he felt about America. And don't forget Puerto Rico. By this time, it was an American territory. It had been for quite a while. So people in Puerto Rico had long considered themselves American. People in America didn't consider Puerto Ricans. They considered them ethnic. And Roberto Clemente was treated just like any other person from Puerto Rico, which was not very well back then. Yeah. So his reputation started to develop as a loner, as a very moody player. The Pirates were a really bad team. I don't think we mentioned that at the time. Just terrible. Like one of the worst teams in baseball. He didn't catch on in his first few years there either. I think in his first five seasons, he only hit over 301 time, and a lot of this was due to injury. He had a car accident that hurt his back, so his back was all jacked up for a while. He had other injuries along the way, and he wasn't shy about talking about it. He would complain to the manager. He complained to the press about his injuries. And baseball still kind of this way. Most sports are actually you kind of don't take that stuff public. You don't want to be seen as someone who either fakes injury because they don't want to play or who just complains about it too much. Right. So he didn't have the best reputation early on because a lot of this stuff yeah, I know. He was thought to be a complainer, a hypochondriac, moody, abrasive egotistical. And that was something that's indisputable is the egotistical part. Because he knew that he was playing better than he was getting credit for. And it ticked him off because he knew the reason he wasn't getting credit for it was because he didn't act the way that the white sporting press expected him to act. And they didn't like him for it. So they didn't really give him any credit. And they actually withheld credit. That was definitely due him for the way he was playing. But like you said, it took a few years for him to start to catch on. But even after he did. Which first began in the 1960 World Series. When the Pirates went from I don't know if they went from worst to first. But it was pretty close to something like that. He was passed over as the World Series MVP. I think. Like a lefty relief pitcher got more votes than he did. Despite him being one of the clear heroes of that series. And he really was not happy about that. And it really kind of created this lifelong animosity with the sporting press that had already been brewing. But that one, to him, showed that they were basically working against him at that point. Yeah. And I think 1960 was a pretty bittersweet year because it was his breakout year. If this status right, dave says his average never dropped below 300, then that means he was hitting 300 in game one, which is pretty remarkable to start out that hot and to maintain it over the course of a year. Right. But if you've been playing winter ball in the Caribbean just a couple of weeks before that, it would make sense. Yeah. And they won the World Series, which is a big, big deal in Pittsburgh. But he didn't feel like he was getting his due, like you said. So he didn't go off and celebrate with his fans. He kind of went off to himself. He was happy, but it said the quote was, I'm happy, but not but unconcerned with all the fanfare, is what a reporter said. And he just wanted to get back home to Puerto Rico so he could use his World Series bonus money to buy a house for his mother. Yeah. And he was loved there, so he wanted to get back to where he was cherished and he did. When he went back to Puerto Rico, he was a national hero, and the press, like, followed him everywhere he went, and the kids loved him. And he bought a big Cadillac and mentored all the kids. So it's not like he went back like Elvis and just sort of lived high on the hog. He did go back a hero, but he really got involved with the community right away. Yeah, he kept playing. He would mentor little kids who were learning to play sports, and that actually became one of his dreams as he wanted to make enough money and get big enough to build a sports complex, a sports city or Deportez. Not bad if I can pat myself on the back for that one where kids could learn to play, but also, like, you didn't have much of a role model is the kind of place you could find a role model, too, and not just play baseball, but also play maybe basketball or whatever sports you wanted to play. I think that was, at the very least, on his mind back then, if not, like, one of his stated goals in his life. By the time 1960 rolled around, he went back home. Yeah, absolutely. He got married in 64 to Vera Zabala, and she was from his hometown there in Puerto Rico. They had three kids, and he was very insistent that all his kids be born in Puerto Rico, which they were. And I think one of his sons I think Junior even played baseball and then ended up being an announcer. Obviously, he never achieved like, what his father did, but it's pretty imagine tough to grow up the child of Roberto Clemente. Sure. It's like being Michael Jordan's son or whatever. Yeah. So he had roberto Jr. There's also Louise, Roberto and Roberto. Enrique. Those are his three son's names. Kind of like George Foreman by the time so 1960, it's like you said, that was his breakout year. He got married in 1964. And when he was down there in Puerto Rico, one thing I wanted to say that I saw that a lot of people kind of overlooked is he played winter ball almost every year. But there was one year, I believe, in 1958 where he didn't play winter ball, and instead he enlisted in the US. Marines reserves, and that's how he spent the winter. And he ended up spending the next six years as a Marine reserve, which is something that very frequently gets overlooked, especially from Americans who really don't think of Puerto Rico as a territory or 51st state. Like he became a us. Marine while he was an up and coming baseball star. And then even after he was a baseball star, he remained a Marine until apparently one time, I think the 1964 World Series coincided with the training exercise, and the Marines were like, you're honorably discharged. Go play the World Series. Yeah, but he's in the Marine Sports Hall of Fame, which I didn't even know was a thing. Oh, no, I didn't either. But it makes sense. I think he's the only player in there. That's right. Yeah. That's not true. Surely there's others, but The Rock was in there. Should we take a break? Probably. All right, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the game of Roberto Clemente right after this. Okay, Chuck. So we have already said that he was a five tool player, a complete player. And you I think I have an understanding of what made his place so amazing. So what made his play so amazing? I'm laying on my baseball resource. Well, I mean, he was built for the game. He never lifted weights in his life. But he was sort of a perfectly chiseled specimen of a baseball player. Very handsome, which has nothing to do with being a good baseball player, but doesn't hurt. Thought I'd throw that in. It moves the Cracker Jack. It sure does. So he was just very fluid. Aside from his base running, like you mentioned earlier, it was kind of crazy. I think one sports reporter said it looked more like he was fleeing than running. You'd have to see him run. All of his limbs were kind of just swinging. And it wasn't the most graceful run, which is weird because he was a very fluid and graceful player. And those five tools, he was known most for his outfield arm. And I think he. Led the league and outfield assist five or six years in a row, or maybe not in a row, but five or six seasons. And he was fearless. He was sort of like Willie Maize and that he would go after these outfield hits with reckless abandon, like just run right into the wall to try and get a home run ball rolling over. Or like I said, throwing out those players from right field to third base, which is just a very tough thing to do. And this was like before padded walls, or at the very least, they didn't have them in a lot of the places he played because he would get, like, stitches or really mess up his shoulder or something like that. And don't forget, he's also playing through a spinal injury from that car wreck. And yet this guy's throwing, like, people out at third base from right field or running for an infield grand slam, I mean, just doing crazy stuff despite these chronic injuries that he's been accumulating. And I've read somewhere that he credits his mother with his arm. He was a javelin thrower. He was a javelin thrower in high school. And that really kind of helps you develop all of the same muscles that you need to throw something like a baseball from right field, the third base, or home. But he still said yes through the javelin. That definitely, surely helped. But I got my arm from my mom. She can throw from second base to home plate with something on it still when it gets there. So he said he got his arm from his mom, which I thought was pretty sweet. Nice. I love it. And off the field is why he got the award named after him. He would mentor because he was one of the first Latin American stars. He would mentor anybody that came through, especially through the Pirates organization. But he would reach out to players on other teams that were from the Caribbean to try and pave their way a little more smoothly. When he would go to different cities, he would go to visit kids in the hospital. Basically every city they visited, he would mentor these players. This great, great story about the friendship he developed. This is a good find by Dave about Carol Breza vetch or Brisa vic, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but she was a Phillies fan and a teenager and was hanging out after a game looking for autographs and saw a little crowd around Clemente, but didn't really know who he was because he was playing for the Pirates and she was speaking Spanish in high school. So after she got her signature, she kind of let out a very shy mutecracious, and he just lit up and started talking to her in Spanish. And she was like, oh, I don't understand. So he switched to English, and they ended up talking and talking and talking in the parking lot. Such that he and his fellow teammates that were there miss the bus back to the airport, and so her dad had to drive them. And he was a big time Phillies fan, and if you know anything about Philly's fans, he was probably not happy about this, but he had to drive two Pittsburgh Pirates to the airport, and he and his daughter struck up a real genuine lifelong friendship. Right. She was a little sister figure to him. So was her mom as well. He kind of adopted them both as sisters because he had a sister. He had one sister out of his siblings, and she had died in an accident when he was young. And so this girl just kind of struck him in just the right way and her mom as well. And so he adopted basically our whole family. He had them out to, I think, the next away game in New York that they played. He invited the whole family out, put him up in the Pirate's Hotel, took him out to dinner afterward. And then as their friendship continued, he and his wife had a little carol down for Christmas in Puerto Rico one year. So, yeah, this is like just this random girl. He wasn't even a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, and he became basically lifelong friends with her and her family. Yeah. I think it really speaks to the man he was. Because it was a time in America where just to hear an American girl say much as he is. It seems very throw away today because so many people have learned Spanish. And it's taught in all the schools. But back then. It was a big deal that this little girl said two words of Spanish to him. And that was all it took. And just really very pure, sweet story. I love it. Yeah. And the fact that he was out there signing autographs was apparently pretty standard for him, too. He was known to be, like, the kind of guy who he stuck around to sign every autograph that was asked of him, of all the kids. So he was a pretty good guy. And so it makes it kind of rewarding then, that he finally started to get the recognition that he had long sought, that he felt like he definitely deserved. And one of the other things, too, as it's easy to point to Roberto Clemente and be like, look at how artistical the guy was. He knew he was a great player, and he wanted respect for it. To him, he represented Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people, and he wanted respect not just for himself, but for them as well. Like, if he could gain respect, other Puerto Rican people would gain respect by proxy. And so I think that's why that was one of the reasons why it was so important to him. Not just because he wanted adulation and respect. He wanted it for all Puerto Ricans as well. And he was like a vessel for that kind of thing. So finally, when it finally came around in, he actually started to loosen up. He became known as less moody. He bonded with his players a little more because he played all 18 seasons in the Pirates. He was a Pirate through and through, but he was voted as the National League MVP in 66, and apparently that was a huge turning point for him and his relationship with America and baseball. Yeah, it was a big deal in 1971, is when he went to a second World Series, great World Series, the year I was born. I remember it well. They were the underdog against the Oreos, who are really, really good team at the time. And it went to a 7th game just like that Yankees game did. And he hit in all seven games, hit safely in all seven games, which is a really huge accomplishment, and hit a fourth inning home run in game seven that gave them the lead, basically the go ahead home run, and they ended up winning that World Series. He was named MVP, like I said earlier, after batting 414 in the Series, batting 341 for the season. And this time he was really involved in the celebration. And like you said, since 66 had warmed to baseball, to the writers a little bit more, and definitely to his teammates. Right. So it was like a really great way to end the career. And that wasn't the end of his career. He played another season, the 1972 season, and the Pirates got all the way to the NL East Conference. I think they made it past I don't remember who they made it past, but they faced the Reds and lost to the Reds for the NL title to move on to the World Series. But they got pretty far. It's pretty respectable season. And in that season, he got his last hit. He had 30 hits on the nose. He was only the 11th player in baseball history to reach that milestone, and he was the first Latin American player to reach that milestone, which was a huge accomplishment for him as well. But there's also something really great about it, just such an even number, 3000 hits, and he got that 3000th hit in the regular season. They didn't make it to the World Series that year, but he went back down to Puerto Rico basically immediately after the season to go play winter ball again. That's right. He had the distinction of managing an All Star team down there in the Amateur Baseball World Series tournament, which was held in Nicaragua that year. And he really, really fell for the people of Nicaragua. And very tragically, in December of that year, a big earthquake struck, killed 7000 people and left about a quarter of a million homeless. And he really wanted to get involved. His heart was broken. He had met so many great people in Nicaragua and wanted to get involved and help him out and personally organized a relief mission there, raising $150,000 by going door to door to purchase food, 26 tons of food and clothing and medicine. He gets the word that their president there, who was corrupt, was like so often happens in those situations, common during the supplies, and they weren't getting to the people. So he said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a plane and I'm going to fly a shipment of supplies down there myself. And so he boarded a DC Seven on December 31, new Year's Eve, 1972, to do just that, right? Yeah, he did. And it turned out, unfortunately, that highly successful campaign, the drive that he spearheaded that produced 26 tons of supplies, well, 26 tons was way too much for the DC Seven that he charted, and the engines were taxed from the outset. He took off from Puerto Rico and started flying out over the ocean, and the engines actually blew up, and they tried to turn the plane around while it was on fire and fly back. And they made it, I think, a mile from the coast before the plane broke up and fell into the ocean. And all five people on board were killed, including Roberto Clemente, who again was overseeing personally humanitarian mission in Nicaragua to help people who are victims of an earthquake. And that's how he lost his life at age 38. Yeah, just brutal end to his story. People search for his body. People on the beach held daily vigils, hoping that he would somehow be found alive and rescued. But obviously nobody survived that crash. His body was never even recovered. And a few months after the crash, he was inducted into the hall of Fame one of only two times it's happened. The other was Luke Eric, where you don't have to wait that mandatory five year period after the end of your career. And in fact, I think he has set the precedent now that if you had been deceased for six months, you are eligible for hall of Fame induction. And he was just the second one. And then they created that award in his honor, clemente Award, which is for humanitarian baseball players. So that's a huge honor in and of itself. I think you said that he got like twelve Golden Glove or Gold Glove Awards for fielding his last one, maybe his 13th. His wife accepted on his behalf the following April after he died. And Vera dedicated herself to seeing through his dreams and actually organized and got that sport city in Puerto Rico built. And it's still there today, as a matter of fact. She's amazing. Yes. She really continued his work, and I hate that phrase, behind every great man is a great woman, because it's really beside every great man is a great woman. And that was definitely the case with Vera, and she was a lifetime humanitarian and philanthropist as well, which is amazing. Yeah. One of the great things about Roberto Clemente is he's the kind of guy you can name a school after and feel pretty good about it. And as a result, around the world, there are 40 public schools, two hospitals, and more than 200 parks and ball fields named after them. And I think now there's at least 41 public schools, because this past September in Orange County, Florida, stonewall Jackson Middle School was renamed Roberto Clemente Middle School. Yeah, that's about appropriate for our times. Yeah, it's pretty great. So now there's 41 schools named after Roberto Clemente. So if you have a school and you're like, who can we name this after? You could do a lot worse than Roberto Clemente. And people still probably complained about that. Who cares? Who cares? Eventually, Chuck, you just have to say, I don't care that you're complaining. Yeah. Because you're in the wrong. That's right. So you got anything else about Roberto Clemente? Nothing else to watch. YouTube videos of him? It's amazing. Yeah, just say just type in, like, Roberto Clemente throw from Wright Field or home run. He's had some amazing home runs. Yeah. It's just fun to watch. Plus, you're right. He was pretty easy on the eyes, especially as far as baseball players go. You know, a lot of them are horribly ugly. That's right. Boom. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail, don't you think? I think so. This is called Eddie Van Halen. You know, we lost Eddie Van Halen recently. It was very tough for me. But we got an email from Australia says I jinxed it. Hey, guys, I'm writing in because I was just listening to the political polling episode, and Chuck mentioned he was having a break from Internet news, and he was only looking at something that brings me joy, like old Led Zeppelin and Van Halen YouTube videos. Cut to a couple of weeks later in the tragic news of Eddie Van Halen passing, like it's some weird, twisted way of the universe saying, oh, you found something that brings you joy in 2020. I'll fix that. I don't believe in that stuff, but it was fairly ironic. But truth be told, I can usually be found watching old Van Halen videos. I know I'm making light of the death of someone. Oh, I don't think you really are, Matt. That would have been a massive influence in a lot of lives. But in these times, we need to find a laugh wherever we can. Anyway, I love the podcast. I can't wait for you to touch on some Australian topics. Hint, hint. All the best. And that is Matt from Melbourne. Oh, and you even said it right, Chuck. Thank God. Yeah, I'm sure Jimmy Page is like, chuck stopped watching videos of me. Okay, well, if you want to be like Matt from Melbourne, who is awesome just for being from Melbourne, because we've been to Melbourne and Melbourne is a pretty great place. Wonderful. You can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
418a09ea-53a3-11e8-bdec-fbf5fcba6568 | How the Hoover Dam Works, Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-hoover-dam-works-part-i | It’s one of America’s biggest accomplishments in the 20th century, a slab of concrete holding back one of the country’s most finicky rivers, providing water and electricity to a swath of majors cities that otherwise couldn’t exist.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | It’s one of America’s biggest accomplishments in the 20th century, a slab of concrete holding back one of the country’s most finicky rivers, providing water and electricity to a swath of majors cities that otherwise couldn’t exist.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 16 Apr 2019 19:36:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=19, tm_min=36, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=106, tm_isdst=0) | 43826030 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. Rolland over there. And if you put all three of us together you get a little something called Stuff You Should Know. Oh, man. You did that Hoover Dam edition Uber. Have you ever been to Hoover Dam? I've been there twice. Yeah, I went in 91. Oh, the great Hoover damn tour of 91. Sure, man. It may have been 89. Almost cussed right then. Yeah, I heard that. I almost did that the other day too. I'm getting too movie crushy. Sure, it may have been 89 or 90. It was when I went out to visit my brother when he lived in La. And we met in Las Vegas, drove down to the Hoover Dam and then back to La. Is this the first time you guys met? Yeah, it was great. And then I went again in 96, for sure. 96. And I think both times I took the tour. Have you ever been? It's really something else. Yeah, for the first time. You and I went about a year ago. We drove from Scottsdale to Vegas and stopped in Hoover Dam on the way. And it was great as you do. It was very cool. Well, there's nothing hoover Dam Vegas is kind of how it goes. Yes. And we'll get to the water levels. But it's startling from when I was there, what it looks like now. Yeah, I can imagine. Like, if you've gone anytime before, about 2000, from what I understand, it's like a different place. But the dam still there and it's still intact and doing really well. You got that at least, right. It's just the ecological catastrophe that's kind of looming. That kind of is a downer. That's right. And we should give a big shout out to Julia Layton who used to be one of the great writers for Howstep Works.com back when we were still associated with that website. I think she might still write for them occasionally. Really? Well, she's great. And now we are commissioning some articles from her and, boy, she's good. Yes, she is. So what's her nickname? Chuck. The lates Julia Layton. Because it sounds like she's not Tardy. Oh, yeah, that's right. Let's just call her doctor. Layton. Okay. There you go. Although I don't think she's a doctor. But she does have her master's in writing. That's right. So way better than me. She cranks out some good stuff. That's right. So thanks, Julia. I'm glad you called that out, Chuck. Well done. So let's go back, shall we, to a time in the little area of the southwestern United States where Arizona reaches out to Hug, Nevada. Nevada. Which way are we supposed to say it? Well, we're supposed to say Nevada, but we're not from there. So we'll say Nevada. Right. Like everybody else. Right. And where they almost meet. There's a little gorge. There's a canyon. Well, there's a lot of canyons, but there's one in particular, and it's called Boulder Canyon. And if you went to Boulder Canyon today to find the Hoover Dam, you would be sol, because while they were originally going to build the Hoover Dam at Boulder Canyon, so much so that the name of the project for the first decade or so was called the Boulder Dam. Just Boulder once, not two boulders. The Boulder Dam project, they actually moved it a little further upstream to a much more suitable site called Black Canyon. And if you go visit the Hoover damn today, that's where you're actually going. It's Black Canyon, where Nevada and Arizona almost meet. That's right. And this idea was conceived, this concrete gravity arch hydroelectric dam. Hydroelectric. Almost there. Hydo. Electric. Excuse me. This is all conceived because, well, for three reasons, plus a cherry on top. One is that the Colorado River had a bad habit of flooding and causing loss of devastation. Just a nasty boy. So to lasso that beast. Number two, to create water in times of drought as creating a big reservoir that would be Lake Mead, to create energy. I love things that kill all these birds. So many dead birds. And I love birds. And then finally the little cherry on top. Those were the three big reasons they did it. But the cherry on top, it turns out, has been Lake Mead. Tourism is huge. Yeah. I think Lake Mead was the first nationally designated recreation area. Oh, yeah. It sounds almost Soviet, doesn't it? Like the government's, like this is where you recreate exactly on this particular designated lake. Traveled to the fun zone. Yeah. The first one, I think this is, I think, when the project is really starting to gain steam and the guy who is the secretary of commerce at the time, herbert Hoover, who would very soon be the President of the United States, who would very shortly after that be like the most hated man in America, hoover was like, this is a great idea. There's, like this whole spot of land down in the lower United States, and it just wants to be so much more than it is. It wants to be cropland, it wants to be cattle pasture. It wants to be a big old city like La. Or Vegas. They're just waiting to pop. But they really are having trouble with water and with flooding. Like, it's weird. It's like the Colorado River would be like, not enough. Sorry. And then up too much. Way more than you ever wanted. And because of this kind of mercurial nature of it, there is just not a lot that could be done with the Southwest unless you figured out a way to tame that river. And like you were saying, that's what the Hoover Dam was originally intended to do. And that's definitely what it did, just to kind of let the cat out of the bag early. It was successful as far as day and projects go. Yeah. And just to clear something up, when you just said herbert Hoover said big cities like La and Vegas, he had a crystal ball on Vegas because Vegas was cow town back then. Yeah. Population 5000 at around 1930. Yeah, Vegas didn't, people didn't want to go there until gambling started happening. They did have gambling. They had gambling. They had prostitution. Yes. They had drinking, I guess casinos. Right. Thanks to what's his name? Bugsey. Yeah. Bugsy was one of the first, didn't he? I think so. He wasn't the first, was he? I saw that movie and if I remember correctly, warren Beatty built that flamingo casino and hotel and that was kind of the first major casino, if I'm not mistaken. That sounds like a guy who deserves his own episode of stuff. You should know too. Bugsy or Warren Beatty? Bugsy. Okay. Warren Beatty maybe gets a short stuff. Man, what a cut burn. It's better than just ignoring his existence. Well, I think that's true. So the Colorado River, like we said, it's the 7th longest in the US. About close to 1500 miles of total flow. And I believe that it distributes water, the river itself and then it's tributaries to about 25 million people. 15% of the crops in the US. And 13% of the livestock drink its water in the United States. It does now. Well, sure. So before this, before the Hoover Dam project, when the Colorado just did whatever the Colorado wanted to do, it's not like the people of the Southwest had not tried to tame it before. They had extensive irrigation canals and ditches and dykes and earthworks and everything they could think of to keep the river going this way or that way and to keep it from flooding. And none of it worked. I mean, it would work. Some like, yes, an irrigation can now would work and you could irrigate your crops, but eventually the river was going to flood. And because you had diverted the river towards your cropland when it flooded, it flooded that irrigation ditch and it flooded your cropland too, which was a real problem for you because when eventually it would recede, you might have a lot more dirt than you used to, probably pretty fertile dirt, but your crops would be gone. Maybe some of your cows got carried away. You might have lost your ten gallon hat. It's not a good deal when your crop land gets flooded. And so this is kind of what was going on when they were trying to tame the Colorado. It was just way too big of a project for a handful of even large scale farmers to take on. Which is one reason why the federal government stepped in because at the time there was really no entity that could take on a project like this. And even then there were a lot of questions like, I'm not even sure the US government can handle this kind of thing. And the government said, oh, well, watch and learn, suckers. Yeah. So it's 1918 when the US Bureau of Reclamation said, all right, I think we can build a dam of all dams. We're going to make it a gravity arch design, I think that can handle the Colorado River, and we're going to have tunnels and turbines and towers, and we're going to prevent flooding, and we're going to deliver water to people. And the best news is we're going to create well, all that's great news, but more great news is we're going to create energy for a ton of people such that this thing will even pay for itself in 50 years time. And like you said, a lot of people, this is 1918, and a lot of people are like engineers were saying, I don't know if this is possible. Right. And so not only were people incredulous that it was even possible, there's seven states that draw water from the Colorado River, which is a pretty long river. It starts in the Rocky Mountains. That's where it's fed by snow, melt up there, and then it goes all the way down to Mexico. And so seven states lay claim on water. They need water from the Colorado River to live, to irrigate their crops, to feed their livestock. It's kind of like the main artery for life in the Southwest or one of them. And when they found out that people in the seven states found out the US government was wanting to dam and control the river, they got really worried that really this was just a project to divert all that beautiful water over to California, because California had it going on by the late twenty s the early mid 20s already. Thanks to Los Angeles. Well, thanks to Los Angeles. But it had a lot of potential and it was growing. San Francisco, too. Sure. It was growing in between those two cities. And so the people in New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona and Nevada were really worried that this was really just the federal government stepping in and saying, thanks a lot, we're going to take this water and send it off to California. And Herbert Hoover actually intervened and said, no. How about this? Before we even get this project underway, we will broker a deal for how the water from the Colorado River gets distributed. And I'm Herbert Hoover, I'm going to be the most hated man in the world. So I'm going to actually purposely inflate the capacity that this reservoir will hold so that no one feels like they're going to get left out. And everybody ended up signing on. So that was technically step negative one or maybe step zero before the plan was even fully adopted by the government. Yes. And it was called the Colorado River Compact. And again, it was just to make, I think, the only ones you left out were Utah and Wyoming and then the other five. And they said, all right, the way you apportioned it looks good to us. California was like, we all know that we're really going to get the most water, right? And they were like, totally don't worry about it. Everyone's going to hate me soon, and many people will hate California one day, too. And so Congress said, this looks great. Let's push forward. Despite the fact I don't think we mentioned yet that the private sector of course, if you think the private sector and the government have been like a newish thing that they're arguing over stuff like this, think again. Because since the dawn of time in the United States, the government in the private sector have squabbled. And so obviously, private power companies and water companies and just everybody was like, jeez, I don't like the sounds of this. Like the government's going to start getting into the electricity business. But regardless, they had no choice. Congress approved the Boulder Dam project, like you said, that later moved to Black Canyon. And for many, many years, it was kind of bounced back and forth between Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. They officially called it Hoover Dam in. But like you said four times, hoover people didn't like him when he left office, so they went, let's call it the Boulder Dam again. And then it took a congressional resolution in to finally bring it back and give Hoover his due. Right. The reason why people hated Hoover, especially right after he left office, he was a super conservative president. He believed that the federal government should intervene in business and personal affairs as little as possible. So in the grips the worst parts of the Great Depression, the greatest economic recession that's ever hit the world, he was literally vetoing bills that would give federal assistance to Americans. So he was very much hated and reviled by the average person and just about everybody. When he was soundly defeated by FDR, I think in 1932, that sounded so uneasy. Obviously, if you're going to undertake a project and award contracts to companies to build this thing, there's probably not one company that can tackle something like this that has all the different skills necessary to build something like the Hoover Dam. So six actually companies, six big construction firms got together and formed what was called wait for it the six companies in 1931. And they served as the kind of mega construction firm that undertook this huge project. Yeah, they bid the project out at $48.8 million, which is so funny to think about now. It is a little money for something like this. Yeah. Even when you adjust for inflation, it's still a surprisingly low amount. It comes out to about $800 million. And it's like the federal government today spends billion dollars like it's nothing. This is like a huge deal that the federal government was spending the equivalent of today's, $800 million. But one reason why they went with the Six Companies consortium is because the Bureau of Reclamation, this is the department that oversaw the project, they had calculated the costs themselves and the Six Companies bid was only about $24,000 more than the Bureau of Reclamation had estimated the project would cost. How much? About 24 grand over jump change. Right? So they were like, all right, if you want to build this whole project for $24,000, have added. And I mean, obviously there were six legitimate major construction companies and then all of them combined together formed one super construction company. So they seem to be pretty comfortable with this consortium. And from everything I can tell, unless you're a workers rights kind of person, this company, their faith in this consortium was well placed because they did a pretty good job saving maybe one major mistake, which we'll get to later. It's a pretty good government construction project if you ask me. Public private partnership. Alright. I feel like we should take a break now and come back and talk about infrastructure right after this. Alright, so we're back. And it would take a couple of years. Obviously you're not going to dive into a project like this right away because you can't back then because of where it was located. And if you think about it, part of the problem with this project from the beginning was its location and how isolated the Southwest was from other major parts of the US. At the time. And so they were like, wait a minute, we're not close to anything. Like, Vegas only is the closest place and it has 5000 people. That doesn't really help us much. It's like 20, 30 miles away. So here's what we're going to have to do. We're going to have to build a town that's really close by for all of our employees and our workers to live. And so they did just that. I think this was about 6 miles away. They literally constructed a city called Boulder City, west of the dam site. It had 758 cottages. If you were married and worked or had a family or whatever, it had nine dormitories for single men. I imagine that was a wild scene. They had a hospital, they had a department store. They had laundry, they had a school, they had a post office. They had liquor stills. That's really illegal, by the way. Sure, of course it was depression or prohibition, right. But they needed their booze, to be honest. And the city actually remained under government control until 1959 when it got its own incorporation, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. Hoover Damn was dedicated. Like the project was done basically by 19, 1339, I think. They're still working out buildings and stuff for a little while, but for 20 years after, a lot of the people who had built the dam were like, I really like this Boulder City town. I'm going to stay here. And one of the reasons why you would stay there is because the government ran the town. There were no elected officials. There was an appointed Bureau of Reclamation Department administrator that was, like, the de facto mayor of the town. And if there was something wrong with your house, bureau of Reclamation workers would come fix it, like your sink or paint your house or whatever. You don't have to do anything because the government this is like federal land. And finally, in 19 what did you say? 59, 59? The government was like, all right, freeloaders. You can paint your own houses from now on. This is your place. And they incorporated it into a city in 1960, I guess. Yeah. And it's still one of two cities in Nevada that said no gambling here. Which is pretty unique, you know, at the height of this project to Chuck Boulder City, which hadn't existed just a couple of years before, it wasn't like they took over an existing city and built it up. There was nothing there before. And they built a city from scratch. It had the biggest population in Nevada at the time. Yeah. More than Vegas. Yeah. By a few hundred people, I believe. All right, this is keep in mind, again, before they can even get started on this dam, they say, we got to build a city. We got to build 7 miles of highway, we got to build 23 miles of railway. We got to bring in, like, 200 miles of power lines, and we have to bring in cableways spanning this canyon. And it's just all this massive amounts of infrastructure to tackle this project where they were going to be paying dudes fifty cents to one point twenty five an hour. Which is between $8 and $20 an hour in today's dollars. Right. What's ironic is the harder and the more dangerous your job, typically, the less you were paid. Kind of like today. Kind of, yeah. There was a group called the Muckers and they were the ones who had to get the stone and the sludge and all that stuff out of the canyon bottom. And they got paid the least even though they were the most exposed to falling rocks and falling items. And apparently falling stuff was a real danger on this project. Yeah, we'll get to that later. But a lot of noggins suffered. Right. So then the other thing that they had to do, they were like, all right, we got the city built. We got all these highways. We got all this stuff. We got all these people. We got a good plan. They're like, we need to do something with this river because you can't just start stacking rocks and divert the Colorado River. So they literally had to come up with a plan to reroute the Colorado River while they built this thing. I hadn't thought about that. I'm sure you knew about it two times over from your double visits in the tour. Did you tour it now? Did you just drive across it? No, we walked around. We didn't take one of the actual tour tours. It was $17. I'm sure I know as much as this guy, but no, we took the whole thing, and we were there for a couple of hours or anything, but it was self guided tour. How about that? I got you. That's great. But it had never occurred to me, and I didn't learn on this self guided tour that we just made up ourselves, that you would have to divert the river, that the river was still going through Black Canyon at the time, and you just couldn't build the damn there while the river was trying to get through there. There's a lot of stuff you could do. So to divert the river, they did some really ingenious stuff. And if you step back and look at it from the eyes of a child, it's really just two, three, four steps in building this dam. That's true. If you really look at it super high level or super, I guess, childlike again, all of them make total sense, but just the audacity of saying, yes, we can do that. Yeah. Add that extra step on before we get started, it really kind of goes to the heart of just what an amazing civil engineering project this was. Yeah. So, like, with any damn, if you want to divert that water, you're going to have to go upstream a certain amount. And they have very smart engineers that figure out exactly where to do this. And in this case, they built Coffer dams, which is a very common thing to do when you want to build a dam downstream. It's basically sort of like a big hole in the river. The water would just flow into these. So the water, instead of going downstream, dumps into these Coffer dams, and then it funnels that water into these four tunnels, two on each side of the canyon, under the canyon, instead of between them, diverting everything around to then rejoin those tunnels, rejoin each other as the Colorado River, once again, downstream. Right. And I think the Cofferdam is actually kind of like an earthworks, like a wall inside the water. Yes, it's a big hole. Well, you pump the water out, you kind of make it a hole. But yeah, these tunnels that they diverted this to Chuck, where it combined 4 miles. 4 miles of tunnel. So each tunnel was about a mile because there were four of them through the canyon rock, which was granite, and they dug out these tunnels and build the Coffer Dam just to start the whole thing, not as part of the larger project, but this is like, just to get started. That was the first thing they had to do. Yeah. They were 50ft in diameter. These were not small tunnels. They had to be lined with 3ft of concrete to hold up. And I think the water was racing through those at a rate of 200,000 cubic feet per second. It's amazing that's 136 Olympic size pools per minute passing through there. Yeah. I mean, this would be remarkable today, dude. Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, those things are still in operation, although they use them differently now. But, yeah, that's just a ton of water. And they said, yes, success, it worked. We diverted this water further downstream because the tunnels ended below the damn project site. And then all of a sudden, the Colorado river had been diverted around the dam, and now they could get started. Right. And so they were like, all right, we feel like we could just quit now because what we did was pretty awesome. But we don't have a dam yet. So in this huge canyon, if we're going to build a dam, we need to make these walls smooth. Because it was a canyon. It was just jagged rock, and you can't just fill in a bunch of concrete against this jagged rock. They have these abutments that are going to secure this huge concrete slab to the canyon walls. So they had to smooth these things out. And that was done by, I want to say, the most dangerous job, but it's kind of hard to pick. But the high scalers are definitely up there. As far as danger goes. If you go to the hoover Dam site today, there's a statue of a high scaler. It's a guy, like, on a rope with, like, a tool bag hanging from me. He's, like, scaling down the side of the canyon wall. And that's exactly what they did, because if you're trying to clear the canyon walls and you're talking you're 700ft up between the bottom of the canyon and the canyon rim, you got a lot of rock that you're trying to get out of there. It's not easy. You can't just hit it with a pole and pry it loose. You have to blast it loose. Actually, they did hit it with poles, too, though. Sure, but to no avail. They spent a good year and a half trying that, and nothing happened. But I'm totally joking about that, by the way. Okay. To blast it, though, Chuck, you have to drill a hole and then put the dynamite in and then blast it. But if you're trying to drill a hole somewhere halfway between the canyon ridge and the canyon bottom, you have to have a guy on a rope who is willing to swing down there, have a jackhammer, 44 pound jackhammer lowered to him, and then drill a hole with a jackhammer suspended from the edge of the canyon into the mid air. And then pack it full of dynamite, light it, get out of the way, let the blast happened, and then come back and then use a pole to pry the rocks loose. That's what these guys had to do. And if you want to know how Jackhammers work, everybody, let me tell you. We have maybe our best episode ever in eleven ish years is Jackhammers. It was the worst one we've ever done. There's no question. Like the sun. Haha. It was terrible. Jayhammers was actually bad. At least the sun is an interesting thing, right? Good point. All right, so they're blasting these things out. These dudes, believe it or not, did not even have hard hats at the time. They were not supplied with hard hats? No. That's one big criticism of the Six Companies consortium, that they did not care about workers rights. There was a strike that happened in 1931, and the guy running the show for the Six Companies, his name was Frank Crow. They call him hurry up, Crow. He fired everybody. He just fired everybody and brought in new workers. They didn't get hard hats until they basically said, we're not going to work anymore unless you give us hard hats. They had to make their own hard hats by taking soft hats, which I guess is just a hat, and then putting it in like, coaltar and letting it molten coltar and then letting it cool. And all of a sudden you had like a homemade hard hat. And then finally the company is just like, all right, you're making this look bad. We'll get some actual ones. But it took a little while before they had any actual hard hats on site. Yeah, those homemade ones are called hard boiled hats, and they really actually work. I know that thing you said, said that some of the rocks falling on these hard boiled hats, their head would be fine, but it would be such force that would actually break their jaw. They work. These hard boiled hats actually worked, but I imagine they wanted the real thing. You'd be like, I can think so. And they would do tricks and stuff, like in their downtime. A lot of these people were, I mean, not a lot, but some of them are like circus workers and people like former military that could do this kind of thing. Apparently, between working, they would fly around and do little high wire tricks and stuff, basically, and Native Americans, too. And you always hear about when the skyscrapers were built, they'd be like, yeah, we just hired a bunch of Native Americans, and they'll run all over steel beams as much as you please without any fear. And I've always wondered why that's the case. And it's got to just be some sweeping generalization that Native Americans aren't afraid of heights, obviously, but are there specific tribes that were exposed to things like cliff walls for generations and generations, and that they became used to these Disney heights so that it wasn't a big deal? And those are the same tribes that made their way out to New York to build the skyscrapers, too. We've got to get to the bottom of that one or. Maybe they were just tough and not scared of anything. They just didn't let on. Yeah, it's possible. But we have to tell this one the story of BERL R Rottledge, though, man, I almost faint just reading about it. I'm sure because you don't love heights. No, I don't love heights. Let's just go over this one more time. If you were in the canyon rim of the Boulder Dam Hoover Dam project at the time, you were more than 700ft above the bottom of the canyon, which for all intents and purposes, is straight down. That's like a six story building, basically. That's a really big height. And you can sense it, man, when you're there. And Hoover Dam, if you haven't been go, it's totally worth the trip for sure. Especially if you're in Las Vegas. But there was a guy named Burl Rutledge who was one of the engineers for the Bureau of Reclamation, and I guess he lost his footing or something and he fell off the canyon rim on his way down to the canyon bottom, a 60 story building below him. That's right. And then, thankfully, he either had a former circus worker or somebody who was just very brave named Oliver Cowan, about 25ft below, apparently heard this, I guess it caused a bit of a commotion and swung himself out. He's hanging in what's called a Borson seat that's sort of like a little sling seat. He rushes over as fast as he can go, swinging out, and grabs this guy's leg as he sliding down the canyon wall. And then another high scaler named Arnold Parks then swings over, helps him pin his body to the wall, and they held him there until they could drop a line and pull him up. If I were like, Just let me go, let me go. I can't stand this. I'm so scared. They're like, Josh, we've really got you all over. I'm never going to be the safe again. Well, that's probably true. You would just move to the lowest place in the contiguous United States. I can't imagine what the rest of Burrough Rutledge's day was after that. I bet it was good. I bet he drank a lot. I hope it was a good day. Yeah. So that happened. The thing that everyone's imagination thinks of when you think of a bunch of people doing construction work on a canyon ledge, that happened. And it actually penned out pretty well for borough rot ledge, at least. All right, man, I think it's time for a message break. Agreed. Alright, so dudes are dying, though. I saw anywhere between like 93 to 96 to 100 people died total in the whole project, which, all things being equal for what they were doing, isn't that high of a number. 100 lives is a lot, though, to be lost on a civic engineering project. Yeah, I saw as high as 112. And the six companies, again, they weren't exactly known for having like, the loosest pockets if you filed some sort of health claim against them for an injury or an illness sustained working on the job, there was, I think, like 36, 42 people associated with the project died of pneumonia. But I think the Las Vegas star did an investigation either years later at the time and said there were basically no deaths back at Bowler City of pneumonia. If there was pneumonia, it would have been going around Bowler City. And we think that really pneumonia is just a code word from the six companies for carbon monoxide poisoning because the six companies wanted to cover it up so they didn't have to pay out any money to the family because they accidentally killed the dad with carbon monoxide poisoning because he was working all day alongside, like, a diesel engine in one of these mile long tunnels. Wow. Yeah. So that was the kind of stuff that they endured. Heat stroke killed a lot of people, too. Oh, yeah. In the summer of 1933 alone, apparently about three people per week were dying of heat stroke because dude in the sun, in these tunnels in particular, apparently it would get up to 140 deg, which is some ungodly amount in Celsius, too. And then in the shade, on the worst days, it would get to like 120 deg in the shade. It's a dry heat, though. Sure. It's not the heat, it's the humidity. Unless it's 120 deg and then it doesn't matter. Yes. And one of the common urban legends is that there are dead bodies in the concrete of Hoover Dam. That is not true, and I love how Julia put it. Common decency aside, she says it would have compromised the structural integrity. So they had to fish these bodies out, because if you are a body in concrete, you're going to decompose eventually, and that's going to leave bubbles and introduce gas into the concrete and that's going to weaken the structure. So they had to fish all these bodies out. And even still, we'll talk about the concrete next, but just to kind of lay the foundation for this point feel, forgive the pun, when they poured a bucket's worth of concrete to build the damn face or the dam itself, I guess. The dam is so enormous that a whole bucket only raised the level of concrete by like two to six inches, depending on the block they were pouring. So if you fell into the concrete, you fell into two inches of concrete, basically, so you weren't going to get lost in the concrete or anything like that. And then on top of that, even if they did not care about whether you spent eternity entombed, they would be like, well, you're not going to screw with the integrity of our damn. So, yes, there's no dead bodies in there. No dead bodies. Let's talk about the concrete, shall we, real quick. Yeah. So at this point, the walls are clean and smooth. They've got these abutments in place, which, by the way, if I may yes. Okay. So I looked all over for the abutments, and all I ever saw was it's the walls of the canyon. The rock walls of the canyon are the abutments, from what I can gather. You know how when you grab somebody nicely and jokingly by the shoulders, right, and are holding them securely like this? Right. So you've got your thumbs on the front of their arms. You got their fingers on the back of their arms like that, right. Your fingers and thumbs are acting as abutments. And so the abutments that are holding, rather than this poor SAP who, again, you're just joking around with, rather than that person, these abutments are the canyon walls holding the dam itself in place. That's right. Okay. I just want to make sure abutment, I mean, I had, but I couldn't tell if they were, like, parts that stuck out of the dam or parts that stuck out of the canyon walls. And I don't know, maybe it was one of those things where everybody else knows what abutment is, and that's why no one went to the trouble of explaining it. But I couldn't find it, like, spelled out or a good picture saying, here's the abutments. So I just assumed that no one else knew, and I was the only one digging into it. But now I feel like my eyes have been open. Well, I have three fake teeth and implants, so I know what abutments are. There you go. It's different in your teeth, but not really same word. Yeah. Same function. Right. So these abutments are in place, and they were like, all right, we've got to start pouring some concrete. The design itself a lot of dams used this design. It's called a gravity arch, and it's basically just using the natural pressure of the land to kind of force everything tighten down that concrete between those two canyons. Yeah, it's really ingenious, dude. It's just like an arched bridge where gravity presses down on the arch, which makes the arch press into, say, like, the walls of the canyon that the bridge is crossing, and the walls of the canyon push back, which only strengthens the bridge. Same exact thing. It's like if you took a bridge, an arch bridge, and put it on its side. That's what the Hoover Dam is. So when the water presses into that curve of the arch, it tries to straighten the dam, which presses the dam into the sides of the canyon walls, which press back, which strengthens the dam. It's ingenious. Ingenious, I tell you. Yeah. And so they didn't even need that. That's kind of the funny part about all of this. There's so much concrete that it could have been a flat slab, which a lot of dams are, but apparently engineers thought that would freak people out. They have a flat slab dam that big, and so they said, let's just curve it anyway because everyone understands basic physics, right? Right. And it looks cool. And it does look very cool. All right, so we're actually finally to the concrete. There are 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete that make up the Hoover dam and then another 1.1 million cubic yards. And it's not just the damn face. There's a lot of houses. A power plant. And all these outlying structures and 5 million barrels of cement. 5 million barrels went into mixing all this concrete. Which they mixed on site. And rail cars hoisted down on these cable ways that they had built. And every 78 seconds. These workers would get a new bucket of concrete to pour right until about 5ft of the dam had been poured. And then after that, they had to stop for 72 hours to let it cure. Because curing is a huge part when you're working with concrete. If it doesn't cure right, then the stuff inside is going to take longer to cure than the stuff outside, which isn't that big of a deal if you're pouring like a driveway in a house or something like that. But when you're pouring a dam that has to have like really exact dimensions, you have to keep the outside and the inside curing at about the same rate. So they came up with this really ingenious way to cure this concrete really fast. And they ran steel pipes all through all the concrete that they poured. So there's steel pipes running all over the Hoover dam inside of it. And they cooled water on site to just above freezing, and they pumped it through these pipes so that when they were pouring concrete, the concrete was being cooled internally and they were spraying it with water on the outside, too. So it was curing at about the same rate inside as it was outside. And it was curing fast in about 72 hours, where if they had poured a slab, if they poured the Hoover dam in one big slab and just left it, first of all, it would have been all messed up all kinds of ways, but it also would have taken about 125 years to cure fully on its own. It would still be curing now, but they managed to get these five foot increments to cure in about 72 hours. So, again, just the idea that nobody had really tried something like this on the scale, so these people were kind of making it up and going and doing the math as they went along. And they were right, like, time after time. That's the most astounding part to me. Yes, the heat is a big problem for concrete because it's going to expand in that heat, and then in the desert, it can cool down quite a bit. The temperature variation between the heat of day and at night can be really drastic. It's really tough to control all that. And they managed to do it which is remarkable. They divide this whole thing up into blocks, and there are 200 blocks total making up the Hoover Dam, depending. They're smaller at the downstream face and they are upstream, but they range from about 25 those blocks together. All 200 of them make up the Hoover Dam. Finally, on May 20, 1935, they poured that last bucket of concrete, which I imagine was a pretty darn good day. I'll bet it was, too. And then after that, after that last block of concrete cured, they squeezed grout, which is cement and water, like a really kind of slushy mixture, into every crack and crevice there was in between those blocks to form a solid sheet. And then, just for good measure, they pump grout into those cooling pipes, and then they cap that off. So inside the Hoover Dam, there's enough concrete to make a 16 foot wide, eight inch deep road all the way from San Francisco to New York. Amazing. It is amazing. So, dude, I think we should do this into two parts. If evil can, evil got a two parter. I think the Hoover Dam deserves a two parter, too. We've been at it for 45 minutes, so there's still a long way to go. Should we do that? Yes. So since we're doing a two parter, I guess that brings up listener mail, right? Chuck? I think let's skip listener mail, okay? Doesn't get two listener mails. Okay, fine. It was getting a little ambitious. Well, in the meantime, if you want to drop us a line, you can go to Stuffyoushorenow.com and check out our social links. You can check me out on the Josh Clark way.com, and you can send me, Chuck, Jerry and everyone involved in Stuff You Should Know, an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. 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20cc2c68-121b-11eb-85ed-7b33c0c4ed1a | Short Stuff: Balloonfest | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-balloonfest | In 1986 Cleveland released more than a million helium balloons at once! It didn’t go at all according to plan! | In 1986 Cleveland released more than a million helium balloons at once! It didn’t go at all according to plan! | Wed, 03 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=34, tm_isdst=0) | 12936294 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff. And one I'm excited about because I've been wanting to do this one for a very long time. Chuck. Yeah. I kind of remember this a little bit. Do you? A little bit, definitely. When I was researching it, I was like I think I remember just like, walking through the living room when the news was on and hearing about this when I was, whatever, like, 15. It's so sad to think about that this happened the way that it did, because what are we talking about? We're talking about something called Balloonfest 86. And it was a publicity stunt initiated by the United Way of Cleveland to basically rehabilitate Cleveland's image. Because back in the earlier, cleveland did not have a very good image, apparently. It was referred to as the mistake on the lake. Lake Erie, the Coyahoga River that flows through it, had caught fire very famously in the just didn't have a super good reputation. So Cleveland said you know what? We're going to put ourselves on the map, and we're going to do that by releasing the largest number of balloons anyone's ever released. And we're going to set the world record in this beautiful display of millions of balloons just floating up into the sky over Cleveland. And it's going to be a new moment of rebirth for the city. And the thing is, it didn't really go according to plan and kind of back. Yeah. First of all, this just is such an 80s thing, right? Yeah, totally. It feels just like a balloon release. Like this could have only happened between 1981 and 1988. Yeah, I think you might be onto something there. Not even 89. It's just a very 80s thing to do. And we also want to mention that we have to tell this story, but we don't want to throw United Way under the bus for what ultimately ended up being a mistake, but a good, well intended, good hearted mistake. Or George Fraser, who was the employee of the Cleveland chapter of the United Way, who came up with the idea. I'm sure George, again, was very well intended and really wanted to create a happy moment for the city and for the state of Ohio. But like you said, it didn't go well. They knew they needed a lot of balloons, and you can't just willy nilly get a bunch of balloons and some volunteers to make it happen. It needs to be planned and coordinated. So they went to who else would you go to in 1986 for this, but Trev Heining. Yeah. Who is a balloon artist, and by this time a very famous balloon artist because he'd done balloons for the opening ceremony of the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles, and he's done Super Bowls and World fairs. And he's also known as the man who invented the balloon arch, which you've seen a million times. You see that kind of thing, you never think, like, somebody had to be the first one to put one of those together. Well, that's true. And it was Trevor Henning, I'm not sure how you say his last name who did that. And he did it actually for the third birthday of Cher and Greg Allman's son, Elijah Blue. That's where the balloon arch came from, was Cher's son's third birthday party. Yeah, I did a little bit more research on TREB Heining and don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but he's always been a big balloon guy. I think when he was like a teenager, he was some sort of junior balloon captain at Disney World or Disneyland. So made it his career, which is really neat, and spent a lot of time on this. It took about six months of planning and built a big rectangular structure right there on the public square downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Have you seen video footage of this? Oh, sure. And I've been in that square. So that structure must have been maybe the most magical place on Earth for that day, for those few hours they were filling up those balloons, don't you think, until they released them. Yeah, right. That's the irony. It was huge. It was 250 by 150ft, about three stories tall. It's got this netting, obviously, to hold everything in. Apparently the same people that made the cargo nets for the space shuttle chipped in and made this mesh net. Yeah. And they had student volunteers, about 2500 student volunteers who sold these sponsorships to raise money and then blowing up these balloons. Yeah. So they were actually sitting inside this structure, which is an open air structure, but was covered at the top by that cargo net. And everybody, like hundreds of them just sitting there filling up helium balloons. And then when you filled it up and tied the balloon, you just let it go and it floated up and it was trapped by the cargo net. And as more and more balloons were just constantly being added to it, it was like this growing mass of multicolored balloons all just 30ft above everyone's head. It was really neat to see footage of that stuff in there. And apparently they were going to go for 2 million balloons. That was the original idea. And they were going to break Disneyland's record, which must have been bittersweet for tread hiding from a year before. For the 30th anniversary of the park, disneyland released 1,200,096 balloons, and the United Way said, we're going to release 2 million here in Cleveland. All right, so that's a perfect cliffhanger. Let's take a break and talk about what Mother Nature had to say about all of this right after this. All right, so you've got well, you've got 2 million balloons you're going to blow up. They probably had a few spares for breakage and stuff like that, or poppage, as they call it in the biz. And they're blowing these things up, the weather turns bad. It is Cleveland. It is right there on the lake, like you mentioned, and the weather can be very dicey there by the lake. And it's late September too. Yeah. Which means it's the dead of winter, pretty much, for Cleveland. No, it's fall, but it gets really windy and really cold by the lakes, like big time winds. And the weather turned bad. And they said, you know what? Let's just stop at 1.5 million. That still breaks the record. It still looks amazing. They start to get a little bit nervous, and then they finally said, all right, we got to go here. It's 150 on Saturday, the 27th, and they lift this net off and unleash 1.5 million balloons. And it is amazing looking. It really is. That net was lifted off by larger balloons, and that was pretty cool in and of itself. But as these balloons start to move their way out from under the net, it's just like this huge, writhing mass. They don't just immediately separate. They're kind of moving together as like a living thing. Yeah. Or like a cloud rising in the sky made of balloons. But now you're right, it did look like a living thing, especially because they released it right around in Public Square, right around the what is it? The Terminal Tower, which is like a 52 story skyscraper in downtown Cleveland. And it just kind of like, wrapped and writhed and moved around the building. It was really cool looking for about 30, 40 seconds, I would say. And then things really started to go badly. I bet people are like, is he going to say minutes? Please say minutes. No, he say 30 minutes of joy. Yeah. No, nothing like that. It was much more short lived than that. The joy was yeah. So then things get weird. These balloons basically just have a mind of their own at this point. A lot of them, because of the cold air, were just pushed back down to the ground. Right. Imagine a million balloons and what kind of it's hard to say destruction, because you're still talking about balloons, but just chaos. That a million and a half balloons cause when they're coming back down to the ground in traffic and over the water and over, I don't know, a horse farm where a woman named Louise Noakowski was raising some very expensive Arabian horses who freaked out and got injured, and she ended up suing. Yeah. There were a lot of stories that came from, like you said, chaos that erupted from these balloons coming back down, because the original plan was, these balloons are just going to go up, and they're eventually going to start to disperse. And in the United States defense, the balloons were supposedly specially made natural latex balloons, which would eventually biodegrade, but they would, by the time they, like, came back down to the ground and lost all of their air it would have been days or weeks later, and they would have been so far separated, there shouldn't have really been any kind of problem whatsoever. This huge mass of a million balloons didn't disperse at all. They just started to move together. And when you see footage of this stuff, like all over Lake Erie or coming down in fields and stuff like that, it's insane how many balloons there really are just right back down on the ground a minute or so after they were released. Oh, yeah, they're coming down in the lake. They're coming down in the Kioka River. They're coming down wherever they want to come down. Right. And like we said, the one lady sued, I think, for $100,000 for those Arabian horses. Undisclosed settlement. The Burke Lakefront airport had to shut down for a half an hour. There were traffic collisions on the highways. And then there was one sort of genuinely sad story because of some lost fishermen that the Coast Guard had to suspend their search and rescue for because of these balloons. Yes. These two, you guys, Raymond Broderick and Bernard Solzer, had gone out fishing in a little open boat, and their boat was discovered later, but they weren't they were nowhere to be seen. So the Coast Guard was looking for them out on Lake Erie, which normally they may very well have found them because there's not really many things that are, say, orange, like a lifejacket, or white, like a head or something bobbing around in Lake Erie under normal circumstances, because so many of these balloons came down and just landed still inflated on the lake. The Coast Guard was like, I can't see anything. Everything looks like an orange life vest or somebody's head bobbing. And they actually had to, like you said, call off the search because they were just getting nowhere. They couldn't differentiate anything from the balloons. Yes, the whole thing cost $500,000. I think one of the wives of the fisherman actually sued, and again, financially not disclosed settlement. So we really don't know about these terms of the settlements, but they did spend $500,000 on the whole thing on top of these settlements. Right. So the whole thing just makes me feel terrible for the United Way, for Cleveland, for George Fraser. It's just a sad story. It really is. Especially when you watch some of the news footage from that day. They were so happy. They were so excited. Like, they genuinely were like, this is going to turn the page for Cleveland. This will change Cleveland forever for the better. This one thing which is pretty questionable, like putting that much stock into a balloon release in a world record, which they did get, by the way. The Guinness recognized them as the largest balloon release ever. But it's still like they were trying to undo one terrible reputation for an environmental disaster, the Coyoka River catching fire. And they ended up replacing it with another notorious environmental disaster. The million and a half balloons just clogging up everything and screwing things up. Yeah, and I think many lessons were learned that day. They really were. Don't release a million and a half balloons all at once. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I love you, Cleveland. Yeah. Way to go, Cleveland. We still love you no matter what. And since we said that's at everybody, that means, of course, that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
Why Do Lefties Exist? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-do-lefties-exist | For at least the last 200,000 years, between 10-15% of the human population are left-handed and this fact has utterly left science baffled. In searching to explain handedness, all sorts of contradictory evidence has emerged, creating a fascinating mystery | For at least the last 200,000 years, between 10-15% of the human population are left-handed and this fact has utterly left science baffled. In searching to explain handedness, all sorts of contradictory evidence has emerged, creating a fascinating mystery | Tue, 24 Feb 2015 15:41:02 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=15, tm_min=41, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=55, tm_isdst=0) | 38563495 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke with Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there, too. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. Man, oh, man. I would love for people to just lie on the wall in the studio sometimes and get squashed. It's a lot of fun prerecorded today, people. I hate that you miss out on that kind of stuff, but you know what? That's for us. We deserve a little something. Yeah, that's called pre show fun. Fun. Hammering out the details. Hammering out the details. I thoroughly enjoyed recently searching this one. Oh, really? It burned my brain a little bit. It burned my brain a little bit, too, but I didn't know anything about handedness. No, not really. Don't use your hands much. Well, I mean, as far as why you are left or right handed or ambidextrous, it was all kind of new information for me. Yeah. I feel like I'd read that IO Nine article, which we should give a huge shout out because it's forming partially the basis of this episode. Yeah. Why are so few people left handed from IO Nine? And they sourced a lot of great stuff from Discover magazine in their article. And science. And science. So it's legit. It is legit. Possibly even too legit to quit. Yeah. Yeah. Which I could not do with my left hand, I guess. I can't. I just did it. You're signing to me? Yes. I'm equally bad at doing two legit to quit finger motions with either hand. I'm right handed, by the way. What about you? I'm right handed. But that is weird since you have your empty hammer pants on. I thought you'd be good at that. It's not hard to put on pants. It's hard to do too legit to quit finger motions. Yeah, I'm right handed. I was about to say to a fault. But heavily, heavily right handed. Because after reading this, I do believe that there is a bit of a spectrum, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think some people are way dominant with their one hand, and some people skew more toward, yeah, I can do some things with this hand. And some people are ambidextrous, which we'll talk about very few, though. Fewer than you think. Yeah. But I am heavily, heavily right handed. I cannot do many what's the word I'm looking for? Like, my fine motor skill tasks. I cannot do very well with my left hand. I got you. I can just, like, club things and smack things, right? Knock stuff over. Yeah, knock stuff over. Like Frankenstein clearing a table. Pretty much. What about you? Can you do anything with your left hand? I used to think I was pretty much just strictly right handed, but then, especially researching this, I paid attention. I'm like, no, I use my left hand a little more than I thought. I'm definitely not ambidextrous. And if there is such a thing as a dominant hand. It's clearly my right. But this article points out or actually, it was a science article that said there's this idea that there isn't a dominant hand that you have uses for both hands, and one kind of specializes in one thing and one specializes in another. And the example they used to illustrate that was cutting like meat with a fork and knife. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I was thinking about it. I was like, oh, yeah, I guess I do use the knife pretty well with my left hand. I thought, Crazy. No, my fork is in my left hand. Yeah, me, too. My knife is in my right hand. I do. And then I switched the fork over to my right hand. That's what I do too. I was going to ask you that. So I'm definitely right handed, but my left hand does a great job holding the stake in place with my fork while I cut it with the knife. Yeah. Well, I come to think of it, though, I play guitar and drums, so, I mean, I have some left hand skill, I guess. And I know if you break your dominant hand, you're going to learn pretty quickly how to adapt. So it's possible to learn if forced to. Yes, it's all very interesting to me. It is. And we should say, if you happen just randomly to be listening to this episode on August 13, happy National Left Handed Day. Yeah. When I looked it up, I was like, I wouldn't it be one of those another stuff you should no coincidence if this was happening, to be released that week or something. No, not even close. No such luck. And it's good that left handed people have their own day because they've been fairly maligned throughout the millennia. Yeah, let's talk about that, actually. Okay. Throughout history, in fact, even if you look at the words throughout history, there is a poopoo left handers, basically. Yeah. Like the word l y ft lyft yeah. From Anglo Saxon means weak. That's where the word left comes from. Yeah. And the word sinister from Latin is the word for left. Yeah. Anybody who saw that episode of The Simpsons where Ned Flanders opens the left orium knows that I have a sinister reason to invite you all here, sinister meaning left handed. And that was when he announced the leftorium. That show was so smart, very smart. So many of those jokes just flew over my head back in the day. Well, that's why I got smarter. They're coming back to Roost. There's a long list of countries who have languages that link to the word right with being good and the left with being bad or wrong. And in some countries, even making hand gestures with your left hand is a no no. Well, in a lot of countries or a lot of cultures that eat food with their hands rather than utensils. Using the left hand to eat or do a lot of things with is considered taboo because it's exactly right. You use the right hand to eat with, use your left hand to wipe with. Right. And I think if you pay attention and notice, I'll bet you have a hand that's dominant in that activity, wiping your butt. Yeah. All right. Are you okay? But if you try the other hand, it will feel very weird. Whatever hand you use normally, it's going to feel weird if you use the opposite and you'll just end up very messy. Sure. I wonder if you had a subconscious thing. Like, I was just eating these candy pecans with my right hand, and I know I'm going to go back and eat them with my right hand. I don't even use my hands to eat. I'm a little too germ conscious. I scoop food up in the crook of my elbow, which is very clean because it doesn't come in contact with their stuff, and then I eat out of the crook of my elbow. That's pretty, buddy. So why have people been I mean, why have they picked on left handed people? There are some theories that it's just a minority. Ten to 15% of people are left handed, and throughout history, minorities have been picked on. That's right. That's one thing. There's at least a couple of cultures that equate left handedness with clumsiness. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Some hypotheses theorize that tool making for a very long time has been done following right handed techniques. Still is in many cases. Sure. And so when a lefty was trying to make tools or do whatever using right handed tools, they would have been clumsy with them. And therefore, the idea that left handed people were clumsy or weak or whatever could have developed and carried on. Yeah. Like Colonial Day, dad is teaching his two sons let's go with the son and the daughter even let's mix it up. How to use a saw. And the son's left handed, and he can't saw well. So the dad's just like he favors the daughter because she's better with the saw. Right. It's easy to see how that could happen. Like, he's mad at Roger, but pleased with Prudence. Yeah. Because Prudence, she's always sawing things well. That's a Colonial name. Yeah, sure. Well, I feel like it is. Okay. Well, what else is there? Who goodie? Alice. Okay. It's timeless, but there is still that if you're lefty today, you might be frustrated with things like scissors and can openers and spiral notebooks and things that sort of favor the right handed. Yeah. Sitting next to a right handed person at dinner. The elbow thing, it's the worst because there are so few left handed people. If you're planning a dinner party, first of all, it's just common courtesy to know the handedness of all of your guests sure. And then to put them appropriately right to put the left handed person at the end of the table so that their left elbow is off the table and they don't have to worry about bumping into other people. Yeah, my mom is left handed, my father is right handed. And you came out right handed? Yeah. Crazy. I sure did. So despite everybody knowing that there's a right handedness and a left handedness, it turns out after investigating this kind of thing, science is really baffled as to what exactly is going on, why we would have handed this at all, where it comes from, why the proportions seem to be steady. There's a lot of questions that come up when you look into handedness, whereas the average person would just kind of take it for granted. But no, not the average scientist. No. There are a lot of interesting theories, though. One is that as we all know, we have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere of our brain, and we are one of the only mammals that are very much it's called brain lateralization, when primarily, and this isn't across the board, but primarily, one hemisphere controls certain things and the other controls other things. And that is primarily controlling the opposite side of the body as the hemisphere. But language and controlling your fine motor skills, like things you do with your hands and fingers, have often been linked because they are generally linked together on one hemisphere of the brain. Right. For the most part, people who are right handed, they make up the vast majority of human beings, by the way, 85% to 90%. Yeah, I saw as low as 70, but nothing lower than that. Yes, you're right. Sorry, exactly. Those people have their language center in the left hemisphere and I guess also their motor cortex in the left hemisphere, right, and the left. And there's a lot of questions about why this would be. And the brain supposedly is always looking for efficiencies as much as possible. So they're saying, okay, well, these are two very human activities, speech, language, and using your fingers to do stuff. They're also some of the more complex activities that humans engage in. So it makes sense that you just leave it up to one side of the brain so that these things can not have to cross over the corpus colossum. Yes, it's just a cluster together. It makes sense. It does make sense, but it's also a pretty thin explanation. You could also say the exact opposite, that it would make more sense that our motor skills and our language skills would be in opposite sides of the brain to give each other a break rather than just waiting it down on the same side. The point is, though, is if you crack open a human brain and you look for the motor cortex and the language region, the language center, you're going to find them most likely, statistically speaking, on the left hemisphere, hence more right handedness. Right. Because of what you said, that brain lighter elimination where stuff that's carried out in the left hemisphere is going to manifest itself in the right. So if you're shaking somebody's hand using your right hand, the left hemisphere is blowing up. That's right. If you're taking in visual information with just your left eye because you got your right eye closed or it was poked out by a seagull or whatever yeah. Then your right hemisphere is going to be active, right? That's right. Interestingly, though, if the opposite isn't true, if you have your language center in your right hemisphere, it doesn't always mean that you're going to be left handed, right? It means you're more likely to. But I like the way this article looked at it. It's an evolutionary rule of thumb, I think they said between 61 and 73% of lefties have the language centers on the left. 90% over 90% of right handed people. Right. Which raises a really great question. Is there such a thing as righties and lefties, or is there such a thing as righties and non righties? Yeah, because if a righty and a lefty are equally exactly the same thing, if handedness is completely binary like that, then if you're a lefty, your language center should be on the right hand side. And like you said, that's just not the case in most lefties, even. Yeah, that's true. And the IO Nine article also points out that they don't know why necessarily, but this is just how we evolved. It could have just been the opposite, and then we'd have more lefties, right? Well, that's the idea, but I think there are a couple of explanations possibly of genetic mutations along the way. Two in particular. One about 200,000 years ago, that basically mutated us to the fact that we are going to be more right handed in the language center, is going to be on the left hand side. And then more recently, there's a theory that there was a second mutation 20,000 between 20,100 thousand years ago where that basically balanced things out, or it canceled that out, which means the possibility of left handedness became a thing, or else we would have all been right handed. Right. That makes sense, too. It does make sense in that the humans possibly evolved to use their hands more, and by using their hands more, our brains were forced to become specialized and basically forced to choose. So then some sort of gene was set up that made the developing human brain most likely to be a right handed person, right? Yeah. And then that second gene came along and canceled that out in some parts of the population. Yeah, I think it's the D gene and the C gene. There are two LLS, which is the manifestations of a gene at the same location, and the D gene is more frequent in the population, so it promotes the right handed preference. The C gene is less likely within the gene pool. And so there you have like a 50 50 chance of being left handed if you have that C gene. Okay. I got you. Yeah. But you don't have a 50 50 chance of being a left handed person in general. You have about only if you have a chance. Yeah. Because the DG is more prominent, and that means almost certainly you're going to be right handed. Okay. So the caveat we should add to all of this is that this is all just strictly conjecture. Sure. And we'll get to a little more of this conjecture right after this. So, Chuck, we were saying that it's possible that genetic mutations far back in human history account for this. Sure. And there is a lot of evidence that humans have been mostly right handed for about the last 200,000 years. Fossil evidence suggests this. Looking at Neanderthals skeletons, early human skeletons, you can see evidence on the skeletons of right handedness. And they think that it's so obvious and obviously prominent because these people were using things like spears. Yeah. So if they did have a hand preference, then a spear would definitely develop that arm connected to that hand, and it would stay in the fossil record through the skeletons. Right. Yeah. They also have looked at other fossils as far back as 1.6 million years. There's a skeleton called, I want to say, the Kokomo Boy, even though it's not, but I love that song. It's the nario kotome boy. Do you love Kokomo? Sure. And he is a 1.6 million year old homo air gaster, and he was clearly right handed as well. Other fossils have turned up evidence of right handedness. The teeth striations on the teeth suggest eating with their right hand. So what we can say with a pretty decent amount of confidence is at least for the last 2000 years, humanity has been the majority right handers, and there's been maybe about this constant ten to 15% proportion of left handed people, which makes the mystery even more crazy to me. Yeah. But it also makes sense that in early tool building and teaching how to use tools, I mean, it holds true today they've done studies that you teach your son or daughter to tie a tie, and it's going to be more difficult if they're left handed and you're right handed for them to try and do it with their left hand. So they'll pick it up easier if they go against their instinct and learn it how you've talked. Right. With the right hand. Studies have shown that. Yeah. So you learn faster from watching somebody and then using the same hand in that they do. Yeah. And that makes sense. Back in with Tuktuk and showing his pal how to use the bone to smash skull. Right. If his buddy picks up with his left hand is going to shake his head. No, no, don't be stupid. Yeah. Use right hand or they're just going to everyone wants to fit in, even back in the old days. Well, that's actually a suggestion of why left handedness is possibly not a little more prevalent among a certain age group today because it was equated with being weird or off or crazy or whatever. And parents and teachers would force children to learn how to write with their right hand, effectively wiping out a lot of the left handed population. Yeah, and just jumping back a minute, I wanted to mention something important that the whole correlation versus causation thing with the whole language center link, it's not necessarily that's a correlation, they appear to be strongly linked, but no one is saying that because the language hemisphere is on the left side of your brain that's causing you to be right handed. Right? And again, the reason that they are linked in a lot of scientists minds is that speech and fine motor skills are basically uniquely human. Almost uniquely human. And it's kind of like a red flag or a signal that they're both usually in the same hemisphere and they do seem to be connected. And one hypothesis for why they're connected I thought was pretty smart. The idea that spoken language emerged out of gestures, hand movements, which would require fine motor skills that I don't have trying to do the two legends to quit thing. Sure. But the idea that language emerged out of that would suggest some sort of connection between the two. Like maybe the fine motor skills section is the more ancient of the two and then language evolved out of that. Right, but we also still need our fine motor skills to eat with a fork and knife and everything so stuck around it didn't become obsolete just because we started speaking. Yeah, I liked that theory. We did mention that this is a largely uniquely human trait, but they have followed. They basically been looking at our closest ancestors to try and figure a lot of this stuff out. Although I did see some studies that said that 30% of cats are left handed because they'll go to swap things with their left hand. But I'm not so sure about that. Yeah, not only is it difficult, apparently to test or do you attribute a handedness to an animal, it's also difficult to attribute handedness to a person. Yeah, because the idea of whether or not you're left handed or right handed, it's still questionable. Like if you write with your right hand, but you actually can write better with your left hand or something like that. Right. What are you the one you're comfortable with or that you're actually better with? Yeah, that's a good point. But they have been looking at our primate ancestors since about the 1920s and they have found patterns. Apparently lemurs are more left handed and other prosimians macaques and old world monkeys for the most part are evenly split and gorillas and chimpanzees are about 35% lefty. But this is interesting. The more, as they say here, the more primitive the primate, the more likely it is to be a lefty, which goes in the opposite of the gene mutation. Right. It's the exact opposite. It implies that we were originally left handed, right. As primates, and then as we evolved, we became right handed. So therefore right handed people are more involved than left handed people in some weird way. Yeah. So again, it's another inconsistency. And of course, this is in primates, too. It doesn't necessarily mean the same thing with humans. No, definitely not. But if you're looking at our ancestry and trying to figure out where handedness came from, you have to go pretty far back. Right. And that's a pretty good example of how this body of work or knowledge is very contradictory still. Yeah, it's baffling. It's pretty awesome. Hey, Chuck. Hey. You sent me something about ambidextrousness? Yeah. I thought this is kind of interesting from mental floss. It was just kind of my understanding that anybody who said I'm amadextrous knew what they were talking about, but it turns out that's really just not the case for the most part. It's a very rare condition, I guess you'd call it. Yeah. Because I don't know if there is a strict definition for what constitutes being ambidextrous. Like a switch hitter in baseball doesn't necessarily mean they're ambidextrous. It means they've taught themselves to hit from the other side of the plate. If you notice as a baseball fan, you're never going to see a player that hits equally as well on both sides. Like the great Chipper Jones here from Atlanta. He favored one side of the plate. Although he was a switch hitter, he was a much better hitter. I think it was as a lefty and not as a righty. So that's not ambidextrous now someone who's taught themselves because it's a valuable skill in sports to be somewhat extra or in a lot of sports. But as far, I think writing is one of the things that they can look at as a clear indicator of which hand you're best at. And they say about only about 1% can write equally as well with either hand. Right. So that's like super low, apparently, too. So this handedness and the lateralization of the brand and division of labor and all that has a lot to do with how your brain is connected. And apparently handedness is a part of that, too. Yeah. So, like, for example, people who are ambidextrous are more likely to suffer from schizophrenia. To have schizophrenia, yeah. And it's not just ambidextrous. People apparently lefties show a greater propensity towards schizophrenia. Something like 40% of people with schizophrenia are left handed, which is a very high proportion considering the general population is about 10% more than that. Dyslexia and stuttering as well. Right. Which suggests that left handedness has an effect on how your brain is wired. It's not just as simple. Oh, my hand is I use my left hand. My brain is otherwise the exact same as a right handed person. The brain does appear to be different in some ways, especially in the ways that it's connected. Yeah. We talked about synesthesia before. One of our favorite, what do you call it? Condition. Is it? Yeah. Is it? Sure. I always just think of condition as something that's derogatory. That's bad. Yeah, I know. Like a malady or something. I think that falls under that one is one, but the other one isn't necessarily that one. So like, a malady is a condition, but conditions are necessarily malady. Anyway, that's my long window way of saying synastytes are awesome. Yeah. And the rate of ambidextry and sinistereds is much higher and left handedness than in the general population. Right. So we have some clues here. Handedness has to do with how your brain is wired. And if your brain is wired in such a way that you are left handed, your brain is wired differently from a person with a right handed brain, right? Yes. And a lot of studies have backed that up and have come up with things like it's entirely possible that if you're a left handed person, you've got some advantages in life. We'll talk about those right after this. So, Chuck, one of the things that left handedness possibly bestows confers upon you as a benefit is the idea of thinking quicker, to be able to process information more quickly. Yeah, they have done some studies on this, did a couple of studies, one of which they sat down 100 people, 80 right handers, 20 left handers, and basically just showed the computer screen with a single dot, either on the left or the right side, and you had to press a button. It's just a speed test, basically. Like, which side is it on, left or right? Right. So if something shows up on the left side, I'm sure you have a clicker in your left hand and clicker on your right hand. You click the left hand, clicker. But this is all happening very fast that's right and left handed subjects were overall faster in the other tests, they had to match up multiple letters that appeared, in some cases on either side of the line, and in other cases on just one side. And again, left handed were faster, but just at matching letters that were on both sides of the line. Right. Which I thought was interesting. Well, and that supports this idea that the brain, the fact that some left handed people's motor skills and language centers are on different sides in their brains could make them talk more. The sides of the hemispheres of their brains are more connected, there's more white tissue, or their corporate colossal is more efficient. It makes sense in a way, but at the same time you're like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. So this data should be taken and just locked away in a box until we understand the whole thing more, because it doesn't really do a lot at this point. We don't know enough to make it fit. No. And it's actually kind of contradictory to some other stuff, too, as far as handedness goes. Yeah. But they do say that if you're left handed, you may be like a better gamer or a pilot, because you're able to just process this quick information super fast. Right. Like rapid fire stuff coming at you. It also suggested, too, that language can be processed in both hemispheres among left handed people, which, again, would require a lot more connections between the two hemispheres, faster communication between the two, and hence quicker thinking. Yeah. In the long run, as you age and your brain deteriorates, you may be in better shape as a lefty because your other hemisphere may be able to pick up that slack more easily. Whereas if you're just a dumb right hander, you're just screwed. You're in trouble. Of course, this is a proven this is just they're postulating here. Right. But I mean, it adds to this mystery. Yeah. You definitely have an advantage in sports in a lot of cases, though. Yes, but not in the way that you would think. It's not necessarily because your brain is communicating the hemispheres of your brain are communicating. It's more because your opponent is statistically, likelier, to be expecting you to be a right handed person, to have trained against a right handed person. More practice. Exactly. To be used to playing a right handed person. Whereas if you're a left handed person, they're playing you now. You're going to throw them off guard, you're going to catch them off guard, you're going to be able to get the drop on them because they're not used to you. Whereas you being a lefty, you're still statistically likelier to have played right handed people, right. So you know how to handle them. They don't know how to handle you. You're the wildcard baby. You win. You're Rocky. Yeah. Rocky was left handed, apparently. Yeah. And there's a bunch of sports figures in real life that were left handed, and apparently it's one of those things where they are disproportionately represented as far as successful athletes go compared to the population at large. Yeah. And I think a lot of times you'll hear about, like, MMA or boxing. Tennis is another big one, because if you're used to playing right ease most of your life, that left handed server comes up there and it's different. It's weird. Right. And the difference is so pronounced that if you are a pro tennis player or something like that, or pro boxer, you're going to train against a lefty before a match against a lefty. You're going to do what you can to prepare yourself. Yeah. And I think Robert Lam wrote this on how stuff works are left handers quicker I'm sorry, better at sports. And he also points out that through history, This probably comes from, like, soldier training, mainly training and fighting and jousting and sword fighting and everything against other righties as well. So a lefty would have a left handed warrior might be more prone to be the great leader, like perhaps Alexander the Great, who was supposedly left handed. What's weird, though, is if that has been the case, if humans have been left handed and right handed, the proportions have been roughly the same for the last 200,000 years. If you're a left handed combatant, wouldn't then the proportion of left handed people have grown over time because of natural selection, because you have an advantage in battle or something like that. So therefore the population of right handed people would drop in relation to the population of left hand. Exactly. That makes sense. And I remember but that hasn't happened. Yeah. I remember our podcast on castles, like, 80 years ago. Remember they built the staircases going on the right hand side. I can't even do you remember how bendingly difficult that was for me to understand? Did you have our time with it? Oh, yeah. We had to rerecord it, I think, really? Twice, because I kept getting it wrong. Yeah. We also got in trouble for a cuss word in that one, too. That was a dark day years ago. Oh, yeah. But the castle steps would wind up on the right side of the wall to give the advantage to the person higher on the stairs swinging a right handed sword. Because obviously you couldn't swing a right handed sword going up the stairs because the wall is on your right. But a left handed combatant advantage taken away. Exactly. Even though you have the higher ground, because all of a sudden you're cutting the guy's knees off. Right. You're cutting them off at the knees. Yeah. That hurts. It does. But also included with natural selection, too, is if there were any real disadvantages to being a left handed person, or there were advantages to being a right handed person, this population shouldn't have remained steady over that long of a period, too. I see what you mean. Unless the advantage isn't so great as to cause that natural selection to occur. Maybe there are more US presidents that have been left handed. Yeah. More mental members, for whatever that's worth. Yet half of the twelve US presidents since World War II have been left handed. Yeah. So whereas the normal population is 10% to 15%, lefties US Presidents since World War II has been 50%. And apparently in the 1992 campaign, all three candidates, H. W. Bush, Clinton and Perot were left handed. Yes. That's 100% of the population perot man. He was fun to watch. He was. Dana Carvey was fun to watch. Doing Perot, too. Oh, yeah. And they say more musicians, or musicians are more likely to be left handed. Maybe. And it does run in families, even though identical twins can have opposite hand preferences. Oh, weird. And there is in the 1980s, there was a Harvard neurologist that said that lefties are righties. Whose brain centers in the womb change because of high testosterone. Yeah. So there's theories that we become handed in the womb because of something like that or birth trauma or some sort of trauma while we're in the womb, and that just adjusts the construction of our brains. Supposedly, a mother's age has an impact on her kids. Oh, yeah. That's crazy. Statistically speaking, a mother over 40 who gives birth has a higher likelihood of having a lefty kid. Way higher. Like 125% or something? Yeah. That's pretty high. It's more than 100%. I don't even know what that means. Yes. And then I guess your hand preference emerges about by seven months. Oh, really? But then it's, like, set by age three. So before seven months, you're just swinging poop with both hands equally as well. Pretty much, yeah. I read a story about a guy who found out as an adult that his mother had suspected he was left handed when he was a baby. So she immobilized his left hand so that he would be forced to learn with his right hand. It's abuse. He didn't seem to take it like that, but it came across like he felt like something had been kind of taken from him. He said it also explained a lot that he was like so with stuff that involved his right hand, he seemed to be better with his left and that he looked into it and that by doing that, which is very popular, kids were forced to become right handed through the 20th century, that you are basically making a less pronounced copy of the person. You're taking the original and making, like, a slightly dimmer facsimile of it. Yeah. Like forcing their brain to reorganize. Like that interesting. Whereas they thought they were trying to give them an advantage to actually give them a disadvantage. Exactly. But I would imagine that if you did that till, say, age 18 right. And then all of a sudden started using your dominant hand that you were naturally born with it's all, like, spindly and weak. Right. But then once you train it to bulk back up, I would imagine your brain would be better off like that. It'd be fuller right. To continue the abuse. Right. Until 18. Okay. Just continue the abuse, and then, bam. You got a super kid on your head. Yeah. Take your little old man spinly hands and fingers. Like, build them back up. Mr. Show character. Remember Titanico cross in the hospital? Yes. They're getting back together. Yeah. Exciting. So PFT tweeted jump in some picture. It's very exciting. The whole gang. If you want to know more about Paula Tompkins or Handedness or Mr. Show or any of that jazz, you can type that stuff into the search bar@howstepworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Christian shout out, hey, guys. Started listening a few months ago and I've already listened to about 160 episodes. Not bad. And by the way, we mentioned this a lot, but if you're just on itunes, say, and you think, boy, these guys have got 300 episodes. 301. Yeah. We've got like, how many now? 700 change. Yeah. 700 plus that you can find on our website. Stuffyoushouldnow.com. Yeah. And there's a little pro tip. If you go on to Stuffyshadow.com, aka the website, with one of the worst searches in the world, just do control F and open up your web browser search and then type it in on our podcast archive page. Oh, if you're looking for something yes. Okay. It'll bring it up. Don't bother searching for it using our search tool on the site we're terrible at. Are we working on that? I hope so, because this is really bad. Like, it doesn't bring up anything. Really? Yeah. Wow. That's pretty bad. Otherwise it's even there. I don't know, I guess for looks lame. So, getting back to this, we do have a lot of podcasts out there. For those of you who don't know, we have 700 plus. He got what we were talking about. He listened to 160 episodes. His favorite thing about them is how you don't poopoo anybody's beliefs. I'm a Christian, so when I was very much so begrudgingly listened to your evolution suite, I was expecting to be mad, but to my surprise, I heard a very non biased view of evolution. I do believe in evolution, but it's a long story. By the way, after many years of hearing creation of Slam, people talk about evolution, it's a very pleasant surprise. So I just want to say thanks for putting your hearts, but not your opinions in that episode. That is from Matt, very sincerely, and we've been taking a task here and there. We try to do our best, Matt, to keep things on the level like that, but we are human and we do flounder here and there with that. But we try. And we appreciate your kudos for that. Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah. If you want to give us kudos, we would love to hear about that. Or if you have any great stories that has to do with Handedness, let us know. If you had your arm tied to your waist until you were 18 as a baby, yes, you can tweet to us at Saskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetopworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com." | ||
41b68966-53a3-11e8-bdec-eb40c24b29ef | How Crystals Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-crystals-work | In a new age shop or on display at the Smithsonian, there are varying interpretations of what crystals can be used for. But at their base, they are a thumb in the eye to entropy, a perfectly ordered piece of matter. | In a new age shop or on display at the Smithsonian, there are varying interpretations of what crystals can be used for. But at their base, they are a thumb in the eye to entropy, a perfectly ordered piece of matter. | Tue, 21 May 2019 14:10:04 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=14, tm_min=10, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=141, tm_isdst=0) | 46977009 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce, templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is Crystals. How are you doing, man? Well, what do you think? It's okay. The source material is not great. We won't say where we got it, but I think that once we kind of make it through the structure part, we'll be home free. Plus, it's Crystals. They're so worth understanding, going to the trouble of understanding, because they are basically a finger in the eye to the tendency of the universe to move toward chaos and disorder. Because a crystal is the most ordered structure in the universe. It's a pattern that repeats over and over and over again. So much so that in a crystal, if you look at a perfectly formed pure crystal that came to be under ideal conditions, the shape that you're looking at, if you could zoom in to the smallest three dimensional unit of atoms inside that crystal, it would be the exact same shape. Yeah, I mean, that is the one positive I took out of this article, was just that thing early on the author did about the word crystallize that we take collectively. There was a couple of extra olds in there. Everyone knows what that means. It means, like, someone has distilled and made order out of something tough with their mouth words. Right? When you think about, like, an actual physical crystal, you get why that word came from that, because it is that it is this extreme order where all these molecules come together as friends to be perfect together. So we both love crystals for basically the same reason, it sounds like, right? Yeah. Before I started researching this, I just thought, I don't know, like, crystals were just the things you buy in little Five Points at the shop with the Kooky person who wears them on their forehead for healing, chakras who wore birkenstocks before they were cool. And I didn't even realize that. It's like crystals are also salt and sugar and snowflakes and diamonds and rubies. You're a crystal. As far as I'm concerned, so are you, Chuck. Thanks. Can we all be crystals in our heart? In our heart, chakras? Yes. It was a big takeaway for me, too, was the fact that crystals aren't necessarily a thing. They're a type of structure that a thing can fall into. You know what I mean? Yeah. And there's seven basic shapes, or lattices, that a crystal can take cubic trigonal, triclinic, orthohombic my favorite, Triaminic, hexagonal, tetragonal, and monoclinic. Monoclinic. I think there's, like, ten people on the planet who say that word out loud ever, so however you want to say. Okay. Nine of them will email us. Right. And again, the latest shapes that you just described, those are three dimensional structures, arrangements of atoms, and the crystal itself that you can sit and hold in your hand and be like, I can feel the energy just pulsating through this. If you zoomed in the smallest three dimensional arrangement of atoms that forms a pattern that can be repeated, the minimal size pattern that's repeated is called the unit cell. That is the exact same shape. I'm going to say that five different times, I think, in this episode. So there's two. Okay, sorry. I know we've already gotten started, but do you mind if I do a little plug here? Whoa. I know the field. Yeah, sure. Josh is Crystal shop. So just real quick, everybody jeez, this is really poorly placed, isn't it? I think it's great. We're not talking about crystal, so it's good. Right? So I wanted to plug I'm going to do some live shows. Chuck. Yeah. I'm going to be in Minneapolis at the Parkway Theater on June 19. Okay. Okay. And then the next night on June 22:00, a.m. I supposed to be at these places. Yes, you are. I've got a front row seat reserved for you both, and I'm going to have actually, a cardboard cut out of you sitting there so everybody will know they'll notice if Chuck didn't show up. You know what I mean? Yeah. The next night, you're going to have to travel to DC. Because that's where I'll be at the Miracle Theater on June 20. Awesome. If people were so inclined to buy tickets, they could go to theparkwaytheater.com or the Miraclethereater.com, and there are tickets there. And I assume this is end of the world material, correct? Yeah. Sorry. Thanks for that. I'm so bad at this. It's the end of the world live. And whether you've seen or listened to the end of the world Series by now, the podcast series are made or not, you would still get something out. This is going to be a pretty cool show because it kind of takes these themes and expands on them and explores other avenues, other blind alleys that I didn't go down in the series. I love it. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate that. Of course. So obviously we're talking about crystals again now. Yeah. So crystals can be very small. A great snowflake episode is a pretty good example, right? Or they can be very big. And the longer these crystals grow, the bigger they're going to get and they're going to have fewer contaminants. Although, as we will learn when we talk about gemstones, those contaminants are where they get their brilliant colors, right? Yeah. So you kind of want contaminants. But most crystals, from what I understand, are colorless. Like most pure crystals are colorless. Just don't say pure crystal. It's different. That's a different thing. So you hit upon something that I think is also worth pointing out. Like usually when people think of crystals again, they're thinking of like that Little Five Points hippie shop kind of crystal. And you imagine it being formed in like a cave or in some sort of fissure in the Earth or something like that, somewhere inside the Earth. But like you said, snowflakes, they form above the Earth, salt forms on the Earth's surface. These are all crystals. So again, a crystal is not necessarily just a thing. It's a structure. It's a repeating pattern of an arrangement of atoms that is a crystal. And one way to remember this, or to really just kind of have the offs mapped into your forehead, Chakra, is carbon can be arranged in different ways. So the same molecule of carbon can be arranged in a way that makes it graphite or makes it a diamond. So chemically speaking, diamonds and graphites are the exact same thing. Crystallogically speaking, they are two different things because they form two different crystalline structures. Right? And if you're confused by saying the words Little Five Points two times, we just assume everyone is from our neighborhood in Atlanta. But that is an area of Atlanta where you can find a drum circle or buy a crystal or some birkenstocks or some high quality incense or pure crystal. Or probably pure crystal in the right corner. It does a pretty good Halloween parade, too. Yeah, it's great. It's remained fairly unchanged since I was hanging out there in high school. It's kind of great in that way. I would think just about every city has its own version of Little Five Points, wouldn't you? Yeah, absolutely. I've been to them in every city. Okay, so there you go. So that's what we're talking about when we say low five points, everybody. Yes. So let's talk crystals. Let's talk what an actual crystal is made from or how it's made, I guess. No, I still can't come up with the word. What makes a crystal a crystal? That's what I'm looking for. Yeah. Because it can get really confusing if you think about the fact that crystals can be salt or snowflakes or semiconductors or in a computer display monitor or a television as liquid crystal. And I know we've hammered this home, but it's really all those things because crystals are a formation. Right. So you take atoms of a certain type of variety. Usually ions are a big early predecessor atom of crystals. Right. They're either positively or negatively charged atoms as an ion. Right. So they've got an extra electron. They are missing an electron. Something went horribly awry with their electrons, and it converted this atom into a charged atom. And those ions can attract other ions. They can repel certain kinds of ions, and they start to clump together in a certain way. And they will, depending on the ion or eventually the atom. I don't think you have to have ions to have crystals. I just think they're the most common basic type of atom that you find in a crystal. Yeah. But depending on the type of ion or atom that starts setting off this aggregation or attraction of other atoms into a clump, it's going to start to form a three dimensional model. What I spoke about earlier, what are called unit cells, and that little three dimensional model is going to start attracting more atoms in another three dimensional model, the exact same variety is going to be built. And now you've just gone from a unit cell, the most basic unit of the three dimensional shape of a crystal, into the lattice, which is the build out of that unit upon upon unit that just can keep going and going virtually indefinitely. Yeah. It's almost like these ions are attracted, and when they get there, they see what's going on, what kind of party they're having. Sure. And they're like, that looks great to me, I'm going to jump in there. And why would I want to mess it up by being any different? Yeah. I really feel like falling in line. It's kind of a fascist piece of matter if you think about it. Yeah. And there were another couple of decent descriptions, or metaphors, I guess, in this article, in terms of long range order and short range order. I thought that made a little bit of sense because crystals, like you said, it can be a single crystal or it can be a very large structure. And if it's a long range order, they liken it to like a half time band, all marching information, like 200 people altogether in synchronicity like that. Okay. Does that sound about right? Yeah, I just found that deeply confusing. But I got it now. Really? Once you explained it, I got it. Short range order, on the other hand, they like into that marching band, scattering around into smaller subunits. Right. And this is more like a liquid crystal like you would find in a TV monitor. Yeah. And so, from the research that I saw, this short range crystals almost didn't even need to be mentioned in this article, because it appears in so few places that really, when you're talking about crystals, it almost, by definition, has to have long range structure. Yeah. I usually think almost always of crystals. A solid manner. Right, exactly. With basically short range is just this crystalline structure. The unit cell forms over a few atoms, and anything beyond that is long range. And that's when you start to get into the money. Crystals, I guess, is what you call them. Yeah. You want to take a break? Sure. You feeling okay so far? I'm all right. Yeah, me, too. Ma'am. We will be right back, everybody. We're going to go breathe into a paper bank. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, we're back. We went through three paper bags, it turns out. It's so funny, after eleven years, we still care enough that we can feel like we're hanging on by our fingernails, but we still push through and generally get it right. I'm good with generally correct, right? Yeah. Most of the time we get it right. There's that little bit of impurity. And those impurities give the individual podcasts. They're brilliant. Hughes that make some very nice so there's a little more to talk about, about how crystals form. Right. Again, when we're talking about crystals, I guarantee you the thing that's coming into your mind is an amethyst. Or maybe even you're savvy enough to know that precious gems are also crystals, like sapphires or rubies or something like that. That's probably what's coming into your head. And what you're seeing there, what you're imagining, this brilliant, beautiful, translucent, perfect shape with a bunch of different facets that are on display. That's a kind of crystal. But what you're talking about is a kind of crystal that formed under ideal conditions. And those ideal conditions are very rare, which is why gemstones tend to be pretty rare more often than not, what you will see in nature or just on the ground or in some kids backpack, I don't know, I'm grasping at straws right now. What are called poly crystals, where the conditions that the crystals formed under and we'll talk about how crystals form in a second, but the conditions that they formed under were not ideal and there were a bunch of different kinds of atoms present. And so rather than forming one beautiful single crystal, because again, when you have this giant beautiful tetrahedron of Amethyst in your hand, that's considered one single crystal. It's one giant crystal. If you have a big rock with a bunch of pyrite in it just kind of sparkling back at you, what you're holding is a countless number of individual crystals that all kind of grew together. And rather than forming one beautiful crystal, they form one big lump or mass, and it's still a bunch of crystals and it still has crystalline structure. It's just multiple crystals and it's called a polycrystal. And that's what you see much more frequently because again, conditions for crystals to grow under are infrequently ideal. Right. And this is where I step in and make the one joke that I thought of during that which The Tetrahydron of Amethyst was the best. Yes album. Yeah, that's a good one. Yes. I have to say yes. The second to Iron Maiden and beautiful album covers. They were pretty good. They had great ones. So polycrest, contrary to what you might think or hear or read, are not stronger than single crystals because it's like, it kind of makes sense if you're assembling a model from 100 pieces. It's probably not as strong as something that's made from one thing because where they join, it's going to have weak points. That's a million percent right. Because again, if you realize that a beautiful giant crystal is just one solid piece, all those little smaller crystals, they're going to break apart much more easily because they have weak spots. They're not joined together with these amazing covalent or ionic bonds that are holding that single crystal together. Right. So it makes sense in that respect. Sure. So let's talk about how crystals are formed. Do you want to? There's really basically just three ways that they form. Whether they're human made or made in nature, they basically come about three different ways. Yeah. And I'm going to skip out of order here because for the kids out there, you can actually grow a crystal at home. Yes, you can. In pretty short order, and it's pretty neat. So if you are a kid, or if you're a parent with some kids, here's one kind of fun thing that you can do. And this is how to make a crystal out of a solution, which is one of the three ways you can actually grow a sodium chloride salt crystal. Oh, yeah. In just a few days. It's not the kind of thing you need to wait around, like, a year for or millions of years. That's right. So to do this, kids, you need whatever kind of salt you can, but you can just get regular sodium chloride, table salt, some distilled water, a glass like bell jar, any kind of glass is great. And then a spoon. You stir salt into boiling hot water until no more of it will dissolve, and you're going to start to see some crystals start starting to appear at the bottom of this thing, and make sure the water is as close to boiling as you can get. Then you're going to pour that solution into that clear jar, and you put the spoon there just to make sure the jar doesn't break. That always helps. Okay, we've got to do a short stuff on the physics of that someday. Yeah. I remember that was an old waiting tables trick when you made ice coffee, which is just what we did, was just pour hot coffee and a big thing. Ice. Sure. Well, this was pre hot coffee crate cold brew, right? Yeah. So then you suspend a string, that string that I told you about, into the jar from a spoon and just laid across the top of the jar so it's hanging down in that solution. And then just don't touch it for a while. And you will literally see crystals forming on the string over the next few days. Yes. It's really cool. It is very cool. I saw another experiment you could do at home. It's got a couple of extra steps, but you can make a beautiful kind of magenta colored crystal with just straight up alum and a couple of things. You grow a seed crystal, and you use that. You dangle it, like on a string, like you're saying, but it actually grows more crystals up to it as well. So you can grow this stuff at home. And both of those are crystal grown from solution. Right. And crystal grown from solution is like you were just saying, you put in salt in the hot water until you can't dissolve it anymore. That means that the salt or the water has become saturated with salt. It cannot hold any more salt. Right. Sorry. TS. But that salt has got to go somewhere, and it will eventually be forced into a solid state, especially as that liquid cools, because water that's warmer or anything that's warmer means that the atoms and molecules are further apart, which means there's more space for salt. But as that water cools down, that space shrinks, and that salt's got to go somewhere. So it turns into the solid state and forms crystals. And that happens with salt at a relatively cool temperature, at a relatively low pressure, basically sea level pressure on Earth. But that same thing can happen under water and hydrothermal vents. It can happen with magma. Inside the mantle of the Earth, the conditions can change. So you have different temperatures, different pressures, different types of atoms, and they'll form under those different conditions, different kinds of things. But crystals can form anywhere. They can form on the surface of the Earth, again in clouds and inside the Earth itself. Yeah. And if you're going to grow from a solution like that, like you do in your kitchen, you can produce crystals much, much faster and produce bigger crystals than you can with a vapor deposition, which is snowflakes, which we've talked about a lot on the show, which is basically vapor deposition is basically the same thing. Instead of a liquid solution, becoming supersaturated with a gaseous solution has become super saturated, and so that the water vapor, the air, can't hold anymore, so it pushes it into a solid state and form snowflakes. Yeah. Then there's a third method from growth, from melt, which is really kind of interesting. And there's a few different ways to do this, too. But basically what you're doing is you're cooling a gas until it's a liquid and then chilling that liquid until it starts that crystallization process. And there's a few ways. There's one called crystal pulling, or the here we go, Zacroski method. Yes. And this is a human made method of creating crystals, right? Yeah. It was named from a polar scientist by the name of Zara Skye, Kazmir Funk. All of these involve actual machines. And when you hear about superconductors and stuff like that, these are manmade things or human made things and methods and processes that people figured out a long, long time ago. Right. Crystal polling is pretty not so amazing. Do you see any videos on it? Yeah, I watched some videos and looked at some still images of the machinery. It is pretty cool. So it's like that science experiment that I found where you create a crystal and then you tie it to a fishing line. You basically just hang it over the solution. This is a very simple version of what they're doing with crystal pulling. You're using a seed crystal that is basically providing the structure for the solution below it, and you just touch that seed crystal just to the solution and it basically sets off an attractive chain reaction that creates a crystal. So you slowly raise the crystal upward, that seed crystal upward, and the crystal follows it out of the solution. It's like something from a Marvel movie, essentially. Yes, it is. That's another reason why I love crystals. The way that they form is so astoundingly awesome. And with crystal polling in particular, this is kind of an old technology. I think it's from the early 1900. Yes. 1915 was when it was first invented, and since then, they've gotten so good at it and it's so perfectly automated that they can calculate how fast a crystal forms under crystal pulling. And so they will have the machine raise that seed crystal at the rate of crystal formation, and now they can get to places where they're forming crystals that have, like, there are a foot around in diameter that are just perfect, absolutely perfect crystals. Because also, the solution that they're using, that they're dipping that seed crystal into has been purified. So it's the absolutely pure version of whatever you're trying to make a crystal out of. Say that you could make diamonds out of this. You would have pure carbon in a solution, usually melted, and then you would have a diamond dangling down as the seed, and you would grow a seed diamond. That's not how you can make diamonds, but that's what they do with silicon, actually. Yeah. And there's another method, the melting method called the bridgeman Stock barger method, named for Percy Bridgman and Donald Stockburger. I guess it's hard g, right? Sure. He's Stockburger. He's the art garfunkel of the crystal manufacturing world. And from what I got, this is used when the crystal pulling method isn't so great for certain materials. Right. And in this case, you take it's sort of like take an ice cream cone shape, a conical shape, and you lower it, fill it with molten material, lower it into a cooler area so it cools from that very bottom tip, just the tip, just the tip upward. And it just kind of the same way. It just sort of works its way up, joining the party, saying, this looks good. I like the way you guys are shaped and ordered. I'm just going to jump right in. Yeah. So as the tip of that cone goes further downward into the colder temperature, that crystal grows upward in the tube. Right? Yeah. And then eventually you have a whole tube that's just one giant crystal. That's right. And then you think, how am I going to get that out of here? Yes. I hadn't really this out all the way. I just got a beautiful crystal trapped in a canonical tube. I'm sure it opens, don't you think? Well, maybe that's where what was the second name of that? I can't remember. Donald is his first name. Well, maybe that's where Donald that was his big contribution, was having a hatch on the back. Yeah, I imagine there's something like that. So if I were going to put my money down on the best humanmade synthetic crystal process, it would be epitaxy, and in particular, molecular deposition. Molecular beam epitaxy, yes. And this is one, again, where you're growing all of these kind of start with a base crystal and it grows from there. And in this case, the base has to be just like Atomically Flat. Right. That's a good band name, too. Atomically flat is pretty good. Not bad. Math rock. Yeah. Of course, the reason it has to be Atomically Flat is because you want to build from a pure crystal structure and again, if you introduce atoms, especially like previously sorted atoms, like the kind of atoms you want to build this crystal structure out of, they will fall into this arrangement when they're introduced to the crystalline structure that's already there. And then they, layer by layer, atomic layer by atomic layer, will form a crystal that's built out and with molecular beam in particular, you're shooting a beam of atoms across this perfectly flat substrate, and they're introduced in a way so they don't collide with one another. They just click right into place. Yeah. Again, there were a couple of decent examples in here, and this one, they said if you think of a rack of billiard balls, and if you just throw a ball on top of that, it will come to rest somewhere. Who knows where, but somewhere between those other balls. It would be pretty amazing if it just sat directly on top of one of the balls. But that's not going to happen. It's going to find its place where it fits best. Right? It gets in where it fits in. Yeah. That was from roundabout. Right. Then there's chemical vapor, depth, position, which is the same thing, but instead of a beam of molecules that you're sending over that substrate, you're shooting vapor. You're just blowing vapor over it. And that way the atoms kind of link up, too. Yeah, that's faster, right? It's faster. And that's what they use for synthetic diamonds. Do you need a crystal now, right? No, I needed it yesterday. Remember the diamondique from the don't remember diamondique? I remember diamondoid and diamels. It's all the same, I'm sure. Yeah. Or cubic zirconia. Yeah, those were probably just all trade names, right? I would guess so, sure. Diamond inque just always stuck with me. It just sounded so fancy. That's a nice name. And then lastly, there's liquid phase epitaxy, which is pretty awesome. So imagine a solution, and you have that perfectly flat atomic substrate crystal, and you just lifted up out of the solution. And as it comes up out of the solution, a crystal just forms out of nothing. Amazing. Oh, my goodness. I can't take a chuck. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take another break and we'll talk about gemstones and then crystal healing and what that's all about right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can. Get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, dude, I should say I was at the Smithsonian the other day. Oh, nice. I went up to DC because to hear Jeff Bezos deliver his news about Blue Origin landing on the moon. How was that? It was awesome. Yeah, it was really cool. Like, he was up there on stage, and it was probably a room of 150 people, maybe. And behind them the curtain comes down and there's a full scale model of the lunar lander he's going to send up in, like, three years. Oh, wow. It's pretty cool. Did everyone gasp? Yes. And clapped cool. Appropriately so. While I was there, I killed some time at the Museum of Natural History. It's easy to do, and I was just entranced. As a matter of fact, we're doing this episode because of the crystal display there. I was like, have we never done one on crystals? And I thought, no, we haven't. And then I thought, well, we really should. And then I thought, well, let's go get a sandwich in the meantime. And I wasn't there to knock you over the head with a rubber mallet to knock me out of the loop and be like, what happened? I don't know, man. You just passed out. He had a sandwich in his hand. But the mineral and crystal and gem collection they have there is just amazing. It's just so beautiful. It's like just a little wonderland. And you're just wandering around from case to case staring at crystals. It's really neat. And there's one in particular that really caught my fancy. They just look like ordinary dumb rocks or whatever. And then the light goes out in a black light comes on in this little display case, and they're fluorescent crystals embedded in the rocks. And then the light comes back on, and then it goes back out and then back on, and it's really amazing to watch. And then the light came on and your pants were down. Through no fault of my own, everybody. I'm just selling this whole thing. So, Jim, stones, like we said a couple of times, they are crystals. And here's the deal. Depending on the type of we're not calling them imperfections or, I guess impurities. Flaws. Yeah, flaws. Shameful flaws. Yeah, that's where they get their color. So, like a ruby and a sapphire, they're both corundum, but rubies are red because of a little bit of chromium that replaces a little bit of aluminum in the structure, whereas sapphire comes blue because of iron and titanium instead. Right. Otherwise they're kind of the same thing. Yeah, just somehow some of those, some chromium or some iron or titanium atoms got sucked into the mix and they said, hey, I kind of like this crystal structure thing. I'm going to hang out here. And they did, and they said, I'm going to turn this thing blue. Watch this. Yeah. And even the name crystal, doesn't that come from the Greek? From quartz, yeah, that's what they called. Quartz was crystallos, which is cold drop, which we take to mean as ice. Yeah. And I read in this article, I didn't see it anywhere else, that apparently the Greeks thought quartz was ice that had frozen so solid it would never melt. It sounds a little dumb to me for the Greeks. I think the Greeks are a little hipper than that, because, I mean, just think for a second, Greeks, and they would say, yes, you're right, this is something else entirely. But that's where crystal came from. Was that Greek word? Crystallos. Yeah. And quartz, amethyst is a kind of quartz. It's just quartz with the right kind of impurity that gives it color. Yeah. And apparently they have not figured out exactly what gives amethyst its purple color. There's a debate over whether it's iron oxide or manganese or some sort of nonspecific hydrocarbons, but if you take amethyst so remember, crystal is just the chemistry can be exactly the same, like diamonds and graphite, but the conditions are different under which they form, and so they form different crystalline structures and appear to be totally different from one another. Same thing happens with amethyst. If you take amethyst and the conditions are different in that the temperatures are much greater, it doesn't form purple amethyst, it forms yellow citrine, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. I love crystals and I mean, we could probably go on and on with different types of gemstones, but I think everyone gets the point. Yeah, I think they do as well. Like, you could take any gemstone and break it down and explain exactly what gives it, but I think it's all here. Right. So that is how crystals form. And for a very long time, people just kind of appreciated crystals for their beauty or their shape or something like that. One thing we didn't say, that I think we should say, Chuck, is a crystal that forms under ideal conditions will take one of those seven shapes you mentioned. But since the conditions are rarely ever ideal, they'll actually form other shapes under different conditions, things like plate shaped or table shaped or needle shaped. So there's other shapes they can take. And people have appreciated these things all the time. If you've ever looked at a crystal, it's just like a shock of what looks like incredibly sharp needles or just a tumble of perfectly shaped cubes growing out of some lumpy rock or something like that. There's a lot to appreciate. There and if you subscribe to crystal healing, which has become a thing again, this has been going on, this idea that these things are not only beautiful, but that they contain some sort of energy that humans can harness to maybe straighten our own energy out or overcome disease or something like that, that this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah. So just a quick shout before we get fully into crystal healing and what that's all about, I want to encourage everyone to go look up some images of the Queueva delos cristalis, the cave of crystals in Chihuahua, Mexico. Unbelievable. If you want to see some of the most beautiful stuff you've seen in your life, that looks like something from a movie, like it looks like the Fortress of Solitude, right, in Superman. Just unbelievable, these images of spelunkers and like these caves where some of these crystals are believed to have been growing for like half a million years. It's really something else. Yeah, that was one thing. So we talked about how fast that they can grow. They can also take a very long time. Those are the big ones. Yeah, they're the big ones. But also some crystals form just by nature, slowly, whether they're big or small. So, like, garnet in particular forms atom atomic layer by atomic layer, year by year. It can take 10 million years for just a two centimeter garnet to grow over time. Amazing. So like I was saying, with crystal healing in particular, Chuck, these things are not only awesome or amazing or beautiful, they also supposedly contain some sort of energy. Yeah, this is where it gets a little hanky, because this is one of those things that Western medicine, for lack of a better term, has pretty much generally poo pooed as pseudoscience. But the idea is that these crystals can carry and transfer energy that can facilitate healing of disease, let's say. So you would book a session with a crystal healer and we'll get into whether or not those people are credentialed at all here in a minute. And they will let you down on a table and they will put different crystals. Some crystals facilitate some sort of energy, others facilitate another sort of energy. And they don't all agree on that as well. We should point out that's kind of a big red flag. It's a big red flag. And then these crystals are placed on your body in various points and they will tell you that that will bring in good healing energy and channel out bad diseased energy. Yeah, those points on your body are actually pretty specific and they follow the Buddhist or the Hindu chakras right. So you've got one on the top of your head, you have one on your forehead, on your throat, your chest, somewhere around your heart, your stomach, your gut, and then around your groin for your root. Chakra sure. And there's a different color stone that's supposed to be associated with each of the chakras. And there's different stones that can be roughly of that color that you could use for that chakra. And then like you were saying, they free up energy. According to this idea, energy can get kind of gunked up and if you have a bunch of negative energy hanging around, it's going to just do you wrong until you get rid of it. With crystal therapy, that kind of stuff, some crystals you can just put in a room and they'll help direct energy better. I can't remember what crystal I saw, but it's known for its properties of facilitating communication. So really we should have one in here for me and Jerry. Like if people are talking to one another and they don't understand what the other one is saying, this crystal will kind of cure that. Well, that's me. And so you are your pink termline, Chuck. This is the idea behind crystal energy. And as I was saying a minute ago, if you follow this kind of stuff, there's a whole crystal lore. And supposedly this dates back thousands of years to the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks all use crystals for healing. The problem is there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case at all. People have been writing about crystals since the classical Romans, but they didn't talk about the energy properties they had. They just described them and tried to classify them. It wasn't until like the that the idea that they contain energy really seemed to catch on. Yeah, and there haven't been scientific studies really done because mainstream science just kind of doesn't study stuff like that. But they have done some other kind of studies. Notably, almost 20 years ago there was a study done at the University of London where they got how many people is it? 80 people together. And they said, here's what we're going to do, go meditate for 5 minutes, hold this quartz crystal in your hand. They don't say this, of course, but some of those are real crystals. Some of them are completely faked, but they all believe that they're real. They were lied to. They were blatantly lied to. Half of the participants, 40 of them were primed beforehand to say just think about any effects and see if you can notice any effects that these crystals are having. And so after meditating, they did a Q amp, a session and a questionnaire and said basically like, how do you feel the crystal affected this healing session? And they found out that the effects reported by those who held the fake crystals while meditating were no different at all than people who had the real crystals. Both reported feeling like a warm sensation in their hand holding either the fake or the real crystal. And both reported feeling an increased overall feeling of well being. But the people who have been primed those 40 to basically like think about how you're feeling and how this crystals making you feel they reported stronger effects than those who had not been primed. So it all sounds like placebo. Well, yeah, that's what they attributed to the whole thing is placebo, which as far as Western medicine is concerned, placebo is great. Sure. If you have some sort of ailment that this can help you get over through the placebo effect. Fantastic. They seem to kind of walk a fine line with that though. And that they are worried that people will say, oh, just use crystals to cure cancer rather than chemotherapy and that probably won't work. Placebo effect can't take on absolutely everything that ails you. If crystals are based on placebo, that's one way they could be dangerous. But for the most part it's considered pretty harmless. Yeah. Just know that you're going in to see someone who is not licensed or certainly not medically licensed. But I think generally in all states there is no licensing of crystal healers. There's no organization looking over that. No, I think there are some organizations that do accredit individual healers, but those organizations aren't accredited themselves. Exactly. So it's like at some point down the line, the accreditation is just being pulled out of the air. Yeah. And then there's this other thing that's a little more troublesome when it comes to babies. There's this belief by some that Baltic amber necklaces will help your baby's teething. Have you heard of that? Or your toddler's teething? No, I haven't heard this. But the idea is that something called suckinic acid is released. It's pain relieving and it's released from the Baltic amber because your child is wearing this necklace and the skin of the child is heating up this Baltic amber and it's being released and gathered into the bloodstream and making your little kids teething better. Right. And there is acidic acid in Baltic amber. It's true. But apparently it's just one of those kernel of truth things because it's not been shown to be able to be released from the Baltic amber by saliva or by the heat. And it's dangerous because you should not put a necklace around your baby or toddler's neck when they sleep. Right. Or stones in their mouth. Yeah. Do they put stuff in their mouth? Well, that's what for them to teeth on. Are these little necklaces made of these stones? I didn't think they were supposed to chew on them. I thought it just laid against their throat. No, I think they're supposed to chew on them. That's what I got. I'll have to look that up. I thought the idea was that laid against their skin and it was absorbed into the skin through body heat. I think that's part of it. But I think it also they chew on it too. That's what I got from it. Oh boy, you're really doing it wrong if you give your baby necklace to chew on in their sleep. Right. I have no issues with that though. I should say. I used to carry around a crystal in my pocket all the time. Oh, yeah? All the time. For years and years and years. And I don't recall really thinking it contained any energy or anything. It was more like just a neat thing to just kind of rub. Kind of like a fidget spinner, but much prettier to look at. Okay. Just something to have in your hand or whatever. Keep it in your pocket. What ages was this? Like twenty s. All right. I think that explains a lot. Yeah, sure. So what age is appropriate for carrying a crystal around your pocket? Twenties. Okay. That's when that happens. That's when you listen to the doors. Sure. And you burn incense and stuff like that? That's right. So, yeah, more power to you. If you're into crystals, just don't shun medical advice if you have a real big problem. No, definitely don't. Oh, I have one more thing about crystal. Chuck, you got a second? Yeah. Okay. Remember how I said that graphite and diamonds are the exact same thing, they're just arranged differently crystal wise? Yeah. I saw in a couple of different places that a diamond, since they're formed under tremendous temperature and pressure, when they're taken out of that environment and brought up to Earth, they will, over a long enough time period, melt into graphite. Amazing. It's just too long of a time period for humans to ever witness it. So that's crystals get you to the Smithsonian. Whenever you get a chance, go to the Museum of Natural History and just gaze and wonder. And also wonder how your pants got down when the light came back on. And the fluorescent mineral display. As I said, that it's time for listener mail. Yeah. Which one should I do here? How about nicknames? Hey, guys. Really enjoying the short stuffs. And the nicknames episode was no exception. But I was surprised that you didn't go into the origin of the term nickname. I didn't think about that. I didn't either. I felt pretty shame. Yeah. I'd always assumed this might sound silly, that the first true nickname was Nicholas, shortened and Nick, so they call them nicknames. But she did a little searching and said, that's not quite right. Looks like the term started as a Middle English word in the dashname pronounced ickname, meaning additional name. So over time, as people said, an ick name became a nickname and it's nickname. We didn't have time to look this one up, but I'm assuming trusting Liz. Yeah. Liz. I hope you're not steering us wrong. Yeah. She said, my husband's name is Nick, which is what got me thinking of it. And I jumped to that conclusion. If you could give Nick a shout on your show, it'd be great. His birthday is next week, which means by now it's probably a couple of weeks ago, so happy birthday, Nick. Happy birthday, Nick. And they are counting down the weeks until their twins are born. Oh, boy. Liz is expecting a baby girl and a baby boy in late June. Their first children, she said. We've listened to a lot of your show while pregnant. Forget Mozart and Beethoven. I'm convinced that listening to stuff you should know in utero makes babies smarter. Of course it does. And that's from Liz and Nick and babies that will be named Josh and Chuck and Jerry. That's right. Yeah. They need to have triplets. I think Chuck and Jerry is a good name. Okay. And Josh the outsider. It could be Josh and Jerry or Josh and Chuck. What if both of them is middle name is Jerry? Josh, jerry and Chuck. Jerry. I think that sounds great. I think it does too. Well, thanks again, Liz. I hope you're right on this one. Because if not, we're going to have follow up listening mail from other people who are pointing out how you're wrong. Either way, best wishes on your new expanded family and happy birthday, Nick. If you want to get in touch with this like Liz did, you can go on to Stuffyoushouldnow.com, check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We're we make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
10 Odd Town Festivals | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-odd-town-festivals | The world is full of festivals, some of which are really odd. Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a playful look at ten unusual town festivals in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | The world is full of festivals, some of which are really odd. Tune in as Josh and Chuck take a playful look at ten unusual town festivals in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:06:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=17, tm_min=6, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=323, tm_isdst=0) | 25638259 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Light as Meringue Bryant. I've never heard that term, light as meringue. You just said it before we recorded. I think I made it up. It is light. Oh, yeah. It's light as a feather. That's old. Yes. Kidding me. So, Chuck, do you remember when you started a podcast with Punk and Chunky? Punk and Chunky. Pumpkin chunkin. I do remember that. We've been talking about that a lot. And I don't know exactly when this podcast is coming out, but I imagine it's going to be right around the time that the show Punk and Chunkin and the Road to Pungent Chunkin premieres on the Science Channel, which is the day that was formerly known as Thanksgiving. Sure. Until the Science Channel took it over with punk and chunky. Right. Now it's Punk and Chunky Day, right? Indeed. Do you have a clue what pumpkin chunkin is? I do. Well, let's talk about it. Well, let's talk about a lot of unusual town festivals, Josh. That's fine with me because I got a whole list of them right now. Let's do a podcast where you don't hear words like hippopalamus and hypocalamus and hippopotamus. Okay. Let's do a fun one. Okay. Or Clovis Police. Or Clovis Police. I got into Clovis argument with a guy the other day, by the way. Did you really? Did you decimate him? Yes, sort of. And he was kind of like, no, but I thought people came over from the Bering Land Bridge and I was like, well, they did, but not before homeboy came up from South America. Exactly. Idiot. Did you thump his ear with your forefinger? I did. Good. So punkin chunkin Josh takes place in Sussex County, Delaware, right. Am I right? Yeah. Okay. Why are you looking at me? Well, I don't know. You looked at me like I had it wrong. No, I just zoned out for a second and I believe it's a benefit for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital there. Yeah. I didn't know that before, and I was glad to find that out. Sure, me too. And they've been doing this since 1986? Yes. And they've gotten pretty serious about this, actually. Yeah. And I was staggered at how far these things go. Well, actually, the world record for a chunked pumpkin right? Yeah. Is like 800ft shy of a mile. Yes. 4483 ft. Dude, can you imagine seeing a pumpkin going that far? Well, you wouldn't. It'd go out of your field of vision, like, halfway there. I don't think you can see a pumpkin or a pumpkin go a mile. Well, if you're out in the middle of the desert or something, you probably could. Maybe then there's some pretty cloud fields around there. Yeah, it depends on how big your pumpkin is. Right? Or what you're using. And there's actually, I think, seven different categories or seven different contests in three different categories. Right. There's centrifuges, which spin around really fast and then release them. Okay. There is the catapult. Sure. Tried and true. And then there's the air cannons. And the air cannons are the ones that everybody shows up for. Those are the ones that win. You want to shoot a punk in a mile, you use an air cannon. Right. Have you seen these things? Go into the DMC and check it out. Yeah, I watched those. Pretty cool. Yeah, there were some that are what would that be called? Vehicle based. Okay. So you drive these things up and they look like howitzers. Right. And they will shoot a punk in a mile. Wow. It's pretty cool because you think like, okay, well, they're going to shoot a pumpkin out of an air cannon, and it's going to go a mile, and then we'll all break for 20 minutes and go get a drink while the next guy loads up. Now, this year at Wheatley Farm, they shot 2000 pumpkins. Yeah. So there's nonstop action, I would imagine. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And there's all kinds of other stuff they do. They're like pie making contests, of course, and music. Most of these festivals that we're going to talk about have music and food ingestion as part of it. Yes. Because what's a festival without music and food ingestion? I don't know. It's not a festival. I don't know that we should spoil who won because we've got the results right here. Yeah, sure. We probably shouldn't now, so let's just not talk about that anymore. What was it they flung on? Did you used to watch Northern Exposure? What did they fling on that show? Poo? No, they flung oh, a piano. Yeah. They use, like, a catapult or something, right? Yeah, something like that. Awesome. I forgot all about that. That one was almost as good as one where Chris grabbed all the lamps in town, strung them up downtown. Yeah, just lit the whole down. It was awesome. He's a great character. I wonder what happened to that guy. He was he really could have gone overboard with it, but he didn't. Okay, so that's pumpkin chunk, and it's held in early November every year, right. In Delaware. In Delaware, right. Let's go elsewhere. Chuck, where would you like to go? Because we got a bunch of these I know that you're going to stone me for going straight to Nederland, Colorado, but why not talk about the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival? This is so weird. Yeah. It's an actual festival in March in Colorado. So it's already cold. Right. Started in is that right? Oh, no, 2002 is when the festival started. Right, but its roots go back to 1994. Well, actually, it goes back to 1989, when Grandpa Brado Morsel right. Died. Sure. And Grandpa Brado was a member of a family that was very much proponents of cryogenics. Yeah. So they shipped Grandpa off to California, where he was entombed cryogenically for four years. Right. And he, I guess, got a little homesick. His family got a little more confident that they could maintain him. Right. And so they shipped him back in 1994, and he's been in a tough shed, T-U-F-F brand shed since 1994. Yes. And now they have built the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival around him and his frozen body. It's been described as cryonics. Marty Gras. Hi. Frozen body. Yeah. Nice, Josh. And what goes on there, Josh? Besides clearly some drinking is probably happening. There is a Grandpa's blue ball, which is the dance that they have every year, the Catalan, if you will. Right. They have antique hearse shows. Yeah. They have coffin races. Yes. That's kind of fun. Which I take to be, like, toboggan races. Is that what that is? I think so. I mean, it's frozen. There's lots of snow. It's Colorado in early March. Sure. To just throw some blades on a coffin and go at it. Do they have some, I guess, non death events, too, like salmon tossing? Although if you're a salmon, it's a death event. Yeah, I guess so. And frozen beach volleyball, too. Yeah. I'd like to see that. Yeah, it's just an all round odd thing. Yeah. And they also do a polar plunge, which is if you're brave enough to jump in the lake there. I am not. You don't do that? No. Have you? I've done that before. I did a frozen lake jump when I was really in high school. That's insane. Yeah, it was. And it's one of those deals where you jump in and you can't breathe and you run back out and warm up and tell your friends about it for the next 30 years. I'm never going to be one of those polar bear guys. I don't get that. Okay, so, Chuck, where to next? Let's go to Montana. I like Montana. One of my best friends, Rad Smith, lives in Montana. Well, hey, Brad Smith. Rad what? Rad is short for Radford. Okay. Hey, Radford Smith. I think he listens, too. Okay. Rad was the OG. He was my best friend when I was, like, 15. Cool. And we're back in touch again, which is nice. That's all Facebook. Yeah, originally. But then immediately when we found each other, we were like, let's just email, like normal. Sure. Yeah. Emailing over Facebook is weird. No, I don't do that. So, Chuck, we're in Montana and we're at the Rock Creek Lodge in Clinton, Montana. Clinton? I think that's how you pronounce it. Is it Clinton? I think it's just Clinton. Okay. I was using the kang and coda pronunciation. President Clinton. Right. And every year in September they hold the testicle festival. Yeah. Rocky Mountain oysters, as most people might know this by, or Montana tender groin. Yes, I like that, too. This is one of the funniest festivals I've ever heard of in my life. It is. Chris Paulette probably goes every year. Everyone knows that the Rocky Mountain oyster is a nice way of saying that you eat bull's testicles. Right. And it's a real thing. It's a relay on the menu in a lot of restaurants. Apparently, it came off of the trail, off of the cattle drive trail, where I guess Cookie would take recently castrated bulls testicles and toss them in a fire. And I guess they're really easy to cook because they just pop open when they're ready. Wow. Yeah. I just got to chill. I have a confession to make. You've had them. I have not. Okay. You really want to get them? I am definitely going to this next year. I want to try this. Plus, Montana is awesome. Yeah, it looks like a great time. What else can you do there, Josh? I know you can have there's music, of course. There is a hairy chest contest, which is I'm not sure what that has to do with bull testicles. I guess they put hairy hair on your chest. Yes, I guess that makes sense. A wet t shirt contest, which is always fun at a bullet school contest. And a bull chip throwing. So I guess like a cow pie sometimes can flatten out and harden like a frisbee. Sure. I guess it's the same thing. We can only hope so. It's a big one. There's 10,000 people that eat about \u00a34000 of bull testicles. Yeah. I'll be one of them next September. That's great. And it's not the only one, though. It's not the only Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival. Oh, yeah. There's another one in Texas, right? It is Rock Morton in Clinton. Rock Morton, Texas. They do the same thing there. Josh. I know. The one in Throckmorton actually has a if you don't like bulls testicles. So if you're like 99% of the human population, there is a taste like chicken cook off competition where you can cook any weird thing you want. Yeah. But if you're not into bolsters goals, you're probably not going to you're not going to be in Throckmorton in May. No. You're not going to be eating out of the taste like chicken line either. Right. Because I guarantee you any chicken. No. Although that would be delightfully ironic if somebody cooked chicken for the taste like chicken competition. Does it taste like chicken? Yes. Because it is. Yeah, exactly what I would say. So that's the testicle festival and the world championship. Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival. I want to go overseas now to Spain. Do you? Espana. Okay. Because this one is something that we podcasted on recently. The near death Experience. Yeah. There's actually the festival of near death Experience. Yes. Which is crazy. Chuck. This one is held in Fiesta de Santa Marta de Valente. Nice one, Chuck. Thank you. Which also translates to as Chuck said. Actually, it doesn't translate to it, but you can call it the Festival of Near Death Experiences, the way Chuck said it would be the Festival of St. Martha of Rebarame. Actually, I think I pronounced it wrong, but you got it right. Yeah. Rebar tami it's in July, july 29 of the year. St. Martha is actually the saint of death. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And this festival is actually four people, specifically, who have had near death experiences. I'm glad we talked about the frozen dead guy days. It's not like that. No. Although the people who are, I guess, the celebrant or the center of this festival, the people who've had near death experiences are carried into the main church in the town what is it? Las Nevas. Yeah. And in coffins. Yeah. They're carried in coffins to a service, a church service, from what I gather, where they get up and they tell their stories to everyone. Right. Which apparently also sound very much alike. There's that light at the end of the tunnel. All that stuff that we talked about in the Near Death Experience podcast. But I guess if you want to go meet a bunch of people who died and come back yeah. This is your chance. I think if I went as an imposter, which I'm known to do, I would be one of whatever small percentage of the people were that had the hellfire experience. Just to spice things up. I think that's a good idea. 1%, according to that 82 Gallup Poll. Yeah. Because everyone's like oh, yeah. White light. Now we get up there and say, I saw fire. You get up there and go, you don't want to die. You're all doomed. And get me out of this coffin. Right. So that is the what's it called? Say it again, Chuck. The Fiesta de Santa Marta de Rebortema. Nice. Thank you. Was that Italian or Spanish accent? They're close. Where do you want to go next, dude? Well, we can't not talk about wife carrying. This is a lot like the healthcare podcast. The last one we went all over the world. Yes. And a balloon. Yeah. But this one is far less informative and educational in nature. Yeah. Let's talk about wife carrying. So that would put us in squarely in Finland, specifically. Somka Jarva, Finland. Yeah. They have letters that don't even look like letters. They have letters that don't even exist. And it is exactly as it sounds. There's no weird play on words here. There are races where a man picks up his wife and carries her in whatever way you choose, whatever way you think is the best way to get across the finish line, the quickest. And the one that's held in Finland is the World Championships. But these have popped up elsewhere, including in the United States. Yeah, but the one in Finland, dude, 8000 people attend this thing. No, it's like the one like people who win in the United States or Hong Kong or Australia go to finland to compete for the championship. Championships. So you would think the finish are the best at this. And actually, a couple did win the 2009, but I am want to point out they were not married. Really? As far as I know, they weren't married. The 2009 winners were I'm about to butcher this Taisto Mick. So sorry, Tasto. And Christina Hannah? She's won to happen. And girl. So no different last names. And it said there are cities, two different cities. There aren't many rules to this. Right. But there are a couple, and one is that she must be over 17, right. Over \u00a3108. Meaning that she qualifies in the weight weight class. And if she doesn't weigh that much, they actually tie things to her to make her weight that much. Right. If your wife comes in at \u00a3100, will put an eight pound weight around her waist. She's got like a set of silverware around her or something. Let's talk about the methods. Actually, as I was saying, that you would think the finish are the best. The Estonians are so good that they have their own method of carrying named after them. The Estonian method. Yeah. And I've seen pictures. Have you ever seen pictures of this? It looks like clearly the way to go, because you can do the piggy back, but everyone knows that's not the way to go. No, because the center of gravity is lower, the weight is towards your back, the carrier's back. The Estonian method is upside down, like that, right. Well, yeah. Your wife would put her legs around your head upside down, so her face is kind of around where your lower back is. And then she'll wrap her arms around your waist. Right. So the bulk of her weight, like the trunk and the bottom, are up on your shoulders. Yes. It's like a human backpack. Very much, yes. And that's clearly the way to go, because I believe wasn't that the method used when they broke the world record? I believe so. So Estonian is definitely the style, if you're intend on winning and you should intend on winning, because this one actually has a nice little prize attached. It does. You get your wife's weight in beer. I love it. I love it too. I would love to drink that much beer. And I imagine if she weighs less than \u00a3108, they don't give you the weight of the silverware that she had around her waist. If she weighed \u00a380, they'd probably give you \u00a380 of beer. I guess so. But if I were in Finland, I would beef up my wife to a cool like 220 and see if I could win and get \u00a3220 of beer. I'd ask if I could trade the beer in for an equal amount of vodka instead. They might do that, maybe. That's a lot of vodka. Chuck we are exiting Finland now. Goodbye, Finland. Let's go back to Spain. We probably should have just stayed in Spain while we were there, right? Yeah. But we're racking up frequent flyer points here. We're going to La Tomatina in Boonyal, Spain. Yeah. This is a cool province of Valencia, aka you probably know it as the largest tomato fight in the world. Right. And that's what it is. Exactly what it is. It began in 1945, and not everyone's entirely certain why. Yeah, there's different theories that, like, these two friends got in a fight and escalated to a food fight, and then everyone around them said, this is kind of fun, let's food fight with them. And then that escalated to the next town over. But that doesn't sound likely to me. No. Isn't a fairly brothers comedy. Right, exactly. But whatever it's origin, it's been going on every year as far as I know. And for an hour on the last Wednesday of August, everybody grabs as many tomatoes as they can. Apparently 140 tons are trucked in these days, and everybody just starts whipping tomatoes at one another. I want to do this one, man. Oh, yeah. I would turn on you like that. Are you kidding me? Before they said, go, you would have a tomato in my face. I would not. Or you would bring in your own rotten tomatoes. I would not. Yeah, you would. I wouldn't. I would. Oh, that's me. I was thinking of okay, I would do that. And it sounds like a lot of fun. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a huge tomato fight that lasts an hour, so that is a lot to atteen. Which takes place when chuck the last Wednesday of August. Right? Yeah. And it's pretty dang popular. 20,000 strong. It's a lot of tomatoes thrown. Yeah. Check our last stop. You could call a whistle stop. Yes. If you were a jerk who like to make stupid jokes, you would call it a whistle stop, wouldn't you? Yeah. What is it? Laguna Niguel, California. Yeah, laguna Niguel. It's in Southern California. Well, not all of us have lived in California. I'm sorry, Chuck. Ever since 1980. Once a year, and I think it's in July. Right? Yeah. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this. Once a year people line up along the railroad tracks along the side. Not actually on the railroad tracks. That would be Hands Across America. Sure. And the moon passing Amtrak train. Yes. And for those of you who don't know what mooning is, that is a practice of pulling down your pants and showing somebody your butt, your bottom. It is an old tradition. I wonder where mooning started. I have no idea. But at one point or another, if you're growing up in high school, you probably moon somebody at some point. Press ham. Would you like to hear my mooning story? I figured you had one. Yeah, let's hear it. So in 6th grade I was a crossing guard, as most 6th graders were. Okay. And I was at one post bored, and my flask was dry. At the other end of the block were a couple of girls, both of whom I was friends with and liked. And I was like, Kelly Joel. And they looked over and I moon them, and they started screaming and pointing and telling everyone who would listen that I just moon them. And I'm like, no, shut up. Shut up. Yes. Mooning is private. Long story short, I end up in the principal's office and I lose my right to go to Cedar Point as the 6th grade class trip that year. You're kidding me. No. And I got kicked off the crossing guard, which is actually my point, because I was tired of being a crossing guard. You know what? That's a crappy punishment. Your principal is a jerk. They should have just kicked you off the crossing guard but did not let you go to Cedar Point. No, I agree. That's cruel. It seemed a little much. This is the same principal, though, who was about to paddle me once, and as she was getting the paddle down, I was like, I think you might want to call my parents first. Oh, really? Yeah, and she was like and called my parents. And my mom was like, you do not hit my child with the paddle. Yeah, see, you're a little younger. I was like, I'm indulged. Capital punishment was kind of on its way out. When you were coming around, she had the paddles. Yeah, well, my dad was my principal, as you know. I know. He paddled you relentlessly. He peddled me one time in school as principal. Well, yeah, I guess it kind of had to do that just to say I'm not above doing this. Yeah. Isn't that crazy to think about now, though? The principal actually hitting your child with wood? Yeah. It seems like something from the 18th century. And they even had manufactured paddles with the air holes drilled in them so that there was less drag. That's what he had. Yes. This is all taped up, too. What is wrong with the older generation? I don't know. They're all nuts. It is weird to think. And they're about to put a huge strain on our health care system. Thanks a lot for that. So back to mooning every year since 1980, they do that for some reason, and the police have good humor about it. They let it go as long as you don't take it too far and you don't, like, expose other body parts. They say you can moon the trains and they moon every train that goes by. Is that right? Yes, as far as I know. And the cops are there just to make sure it's peaceful. Well, in 2008 no, to make sure people don't show their genitals well and make sure it's peaceful. In 2008, the party got broken up because apparently people were like, it's not enough to bear my bottom well, just get naked. Hey, man, it's Lagoon in the go. California. Yeah. I'm stripping down to nothing but my TIVAS. Yeah. When was that? 2008. That they said enough. Yeah. And I like their website. There's a series of questions, like when, where, why? That kind of thing. And there's one that says, who's in charge? And the answer is no one. Right. No one organizes or is responsible for this annual event. You just show up and pull your pants down, right? Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So if you happen to be there in Laguna Nigel, not to be confused with Laguna Niguel, it's sister city elsewhere on July 10, 2010, you just ask where the Amtrak Mooning party is. Yes. So boy, this is a good one. I feel like we're all just a little smarter. I've got some places I want to go. Yeah, me too. Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival. Do you want to go? No, I'll just drop me off in Laguna Gal and I'll be moving trains. Okay, sounds good. So, that is unusual. Town festivals. And actually, if you type in festivals in the churchbar@houseofworks.com, it will bring up all manner of stuff. Yes, some pretty good stuff on there. We're anticipating a million emails about your town's festival, too. Yes, we are. Which you just saved me. The ending. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's get this right in the listening now, shall we? Josh, I'm just going to call this what am I going to call this? I'm going to call this boarding school email. And it made me laugh. Gone wrong? No, gone right. This is from Natalie in Massachusetts. And sometimes you just get these emails, it's just kind of cute, and you just think I'll just read it back. Okay, guys, I'm a boarding high school student in Massachusetts. I sent an email a few months back about listening to podcast at camp, and now I listen during silent study at my school. I have silent study. Wait. Is this your natalie? Impressive. Yeah, sure. Okay. From 739 30. And to make things interesting, I listened to your podcast and it is the highlight of my day. I'm currently listening to the podcast that came out today and I feel so much cooler than my roommate who was listening to the Pussycat Dolls. Oh, yeah, good for you. We are definitely cooler than the Pussycat Dolls. I assure you. You guys are way cooler than them. Yeah, see, she just said so. I really enjoy your podcast on science, history and music, but the economy and politics are not my favour. Something you seem to enjoy. Josh, why do you want to chew on babies? Sorry for the interjection there. He clearly doesn't really want the chew on beat. It's just that gnaw like malama. Yeah, that kind of thing. Whatever. Now I supply my English teacher with extra credit questions with things I learned from the podcast, and I got the chance to teach the class and taught them about MKUltra. Awesome. Pretty cool. Could you give me a shout out on the podcast so I can show the girls in my dorm how awesome I am. This is the shout out, Natalie. That would be the highlight of my life. Yes. Which is kind of depressing other than the time I saw a ghost. Gadget full of stuff, isn't it? Yeah, I'm going to tell my ghost story at some other point, but I did see a ghost one. Okay, I'm going to save that one for our ghost. All right. The weekend activity a few weeks ago was a ghost hunter who uncovered a ghost and a history wing suggestion. Ghost hunters is what she says. Yeah, we're not going to do ghost hunters. We'll do ghosts. I have a ghost story, too. And then she just followed that by saying, that was spontaneous. This girl is adorable. I do not know how that train of thought went. Thank you for reading my rambling. You have won. Twinkie points. Natalie from Massachusetts. Nice, Natalie. Natalie clearly has a firm grasp on her stream of consciousness. She does. Well, if you have a firm grasp on your stream of consciousness or you've ever seen the film Drugstore Cowboy, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Howstofworks.com home page, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are." | ||
4386aa1e-53a3-11e8-bdec-53e1fed28fff | Hummingbirds: Ornery Helicopters of the Animal Kingdom | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/hummingbirds-ornery-helicopters-of-the-animal-king | If you didn’t already know how amazing hummingbirds are, prepare to learn. Not only do they count among their numbers the smallest bird species, they are also lightning fast and have the endurance of a marathoner and a telethoner put together.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | If you didn’t already know how amazing hummingbirds are, prepare to learn. Not only do they count among their numbers the smallest bird species, they are also lightning fast and have the endurance of a marathoner and a telethoner put together.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 26 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=147, tm_isdst=0) | 44562496 | audio/mpeg | "Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Splitting around here? There darting to and fro like a little ruby throated honduran emerald. And this is stuff you should know. I saw Jerry. I know. I heard Jerry. It's all with my own two eyes. How's she doing? Is her hair just completely white now? Well, I mean, we were 15ft away from each other, so I couldn't tell. Did you try squinting? I did, and I shaved, so she didn't even recognize me. I know. I saw that picture. Man, you look great. Yeah, thanks. So nice. It's just luxurious. Well, the beard's coming back already from the second I shaved it. Technically, it started coming back. That is true. Are you one of those people who say, like, yeah, from the moment we're born, we start dying? No. God, I hate those people. I know. They're the pits. Now I'm growing it back out. It was just a little change of pace. That's good. It must have felt really weird. It does still feel pretty weird at times. Four days later. Yeah. So, Chuck, I want to talk about something else that's weird besides the feeling of having just shaved off a beard after 15 million years. Which, by the way, if you want to see that picture, you can go to the Movie Crush page on Facebook and see that. Absolutely. And now continue. The weird thing I want to talk about today, Chuck, are hummingbirds. Great hummingbirds. Yes. So they are weird, but they're weird in all of the most delightful ways. I love hummingbirds. Love them. And I love them even more now that I know more about them. Yeah, good eating. You just grab them out of the air and snap the wings off and pop like you think a quail doesn't produce much meat. Hummingbird got to have, like, 40 of those for dinner at least. That might just be an appetizer. Good luck catching them, though, right? They are hard to catch. But I have a story. There was a hummingbird once that got into my house, and it was for reeking out. It was basically just smacking its head against the ceiling. I know, it was very sad. So I got a chair and I just held my hand up just right by it, and it stopped freaking out and perched on my hand. I had a hummingbird perched motionlessly on my hand, and it stayed there long enough for me to stick my hand out the window, and it flew off. How many years ago is this? It was a while back. Were you a child? No, I was a man. I must have smelled great, too, because the hummingbird chose to trust me. But I thought that was just one of the coolest things ever. That's pretty amazing. A guy in our neighborhood yesterday got attacked by an owl. So that's on the other end of the bird human interaction spectrum. Yeah, an owl or the Jersey Devil. Apparently. It's not uncommon to get attacked by an owl. Yeah, I mean, we've got a big one that makes an almost every evening fly over our backyard to the big forest behind our yard from across the street. And we love this thing, but I didn't know that they attacked people like this. But it happened. Is your neighbor a talking rabbit? I don't have a neighbor to where it goes. It's an empty house, so maybe that's why they like it. No. Who was attacked, though? Your neighborhood? Not a neighbor, but just I saw it on the neighborhood Facebook page. Some guy was attacked. Like, the owl came down and talented his head. That's crazy. Can you imagine what that kills? I wonder if the guy was like, because that's huge. I wonder if he's like, man, look at that thing. Hey, he's coming at me. And then all of a sudden, you've got talons in your skull. Oh, my God. All right, stop diverting attention from hummingbirds. Yeah. So hummingbirds, they are with the family. I had it earlier, and it's really not hard. Tricadilla. And they are related to these swifts and, you know, hummingbirds. These are the little bitty fellas. They weigh between two and 20 grams. They have those long, pointy noses that they love to stick in flowers, and they have these wings. And, boy, when we get into the fascinating facts about the hummingbird and is those little wings, it gets pretty amazing. But one of the things I'm going to go ahead and spoil from later in this stuff you put together was that what's so remarkable about hummingbirds and how they fly is that usually when you see a bird fly, they flap down, and that provides their lift. A hummingbird is like, no way, buddy. You got to get that thing working in both directions. Double your pleasure up and down. That is how a hummingbird is able to hover and go in reverse and do all those crazy things, is because it's not just flapping, it's flipping and flapping. Yeah. They're the only vertebrae animal that can hover like a helicopter. It's like the blue thunder of birds. Wasn't that a Roy Schedule movie? Yeah, it was a good one, I think. I wasn't allowed to watch that because there's some sexy stuff in there. There is? Yeah. The blue thunder peeks in some windows, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And it came out at a time when I would watch movies with my mom, and she was like, you need to leave the room. Yes. I don't think I was allowed to watch it at first either, but I think I might have snuck it. Oh, I see what you mean. So one of the things that makes hummingbirds so well known, aside from their incredible agility and being the only vertebrate that can hover in midair, is just the look of them, because if you've ever looked at a hummingbird from afar, you're like, oh, that thing is okay. It's just kind of a normal looking bird. And then it just moves and catches the sunlight just right, and all of a sudden, this splash of metallic, jewel like color just crosses its throat and chest. And you say the hummingbird is truly great. Yeah, it's amazing. It's sort of like the butterfly wings, and that if you catch it at the right angle, you get that metallic, sort of shiny color. And it's sort of for the same reason those gorgets, which is that reflective stuff on the upper chest of the hummingbird and, like, the throat area, it's not actual pigment. It is the structure, the physical structure of those feathers. It's little air bubbles inside there that reflect that light. Right. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure we did an episode on butterfly wings. Yeah. Iridescence yeah. And I'm pretty sure it is the exact same thing in butterfly wings, is in that gorgeous that clutch of feathers in the hummingbird. Pretty cool. Yeah. So it not only reflects it, but also bulk it up, too. Pretty neat stuff. So man, sorry. I guess I'm kind of Fleming today. I don't know why, but my apologies for being flemy. That's all right. So, one thing I didn't realize about hummingbirds is there are 338 species that we know of, and all of them are found in the Americas. Did you know that? I don't think I did. But they are found, like, all throughout the Americas, from Chile all the way up to southern Alaska and Canada. They've got a pretty wide range. But the thing is, the things are so small, so tiny, and so unable to maintain a decent body temperature that they basically follow the summer when they migrate. Yeah. And they all diverged from a single common ancestor about 22 million years ago. And kind of the cool thing is that they keep changing, and their rate of speciation is really pretty incredible. It's supposedly going to outpace their rate of extinction, and we're going to see well, we won't see it because we'll be dead in the next 40 years. Okay. But human beings, if we're still around, that is, are going to see the number of species of hummingbird double to what we have today. But it's going to be a few million years, so don't expect anytime soon. Yeah, but it is pretty cool just to think that they're still in the midst of their evolutionary history and, like, right in the middle of it. Yeah, totally. I like that about them. So being that multivariate species all the way from Patagonia up to Alaska, they have learned to adapt to a bunch of different niches and habitats. Right. So you can find hummingbird species in, like, sub sea level deserts. You can find them up in the Andes. There's actually a lot of different species that live in the Andes mountains. You can find the bulk of them in tropical forests around the tropics of the New World. And they've adapted really well to their different environments. Some migrate, some don't, but all of them are very tiny. Yeah, they're cute little things. If you look up a picture of the Bee hummingbird, just prepare for one of the cutest little I mean, it looks fake. Yeah, it does. It doesn't look like a bird could actually be that small without becoming an insect. Collapse into insects form at any moment. But look it up online. The little B hummingbird from Cuba weighs about 1.95 grams. We don't get those here in Georgia. The only kind. And I think how many species are there in the United States? About 17 or 18. Yeah, that's what I saw. But only that ruby throated is the one that we're going to get here on the East Coast. Yes. And just to double that up, man, 1.95 grams. Somebody did the math and you could mail 14 of those things with one postage stamp in the United States. Just smash them down flat. There's not a single species of hummingbird that breaks an ounce in weight, which is to say that the largest hummingbird species there is, the giant hummingbird, which is kind of a contradiction in terms. It's still smaller than an Atlantic canary. Wow. The giant hummingbird is still canary size. So this is a very tiny group of birds. Well, and this is the stat that gets me. And this is the one I texted Emily, because we love our hummingbirds like all normal humans. Sure. The eggs of the ruby throated hummingbird that we have here in Georgia are the size of eight p. Can you believe that? Did you look up their nests, pictures of their nests? Oh, yeah, they're gorgeous. It looks like something you'd buy on Etsy. They look kind of like made of felt, because hummingbirds use spider silk. They take old spider webs and use them as thread to weave, like, their nests, along with plant fibers and leaves and twigs to give it kind of this spongy, velvety, super cush feel for their little babies. Velvety mouthfeel. Exactly. So we're going to talk a lot about the hummingbird flying, because it's pretty remarkable. It's one of the most remarkable things in nature. I think it's right up there with, like, the chromatophores of the octopus. And I was about to spoil our live show that maybe I should are we ever going to be on stage again? I don't know, but let's just hold on to it just in case. All right. We're going to keep that in our back pocket. Yeah, but the wing muscles of a hummingbird account to about 25% to 30% of its total body weight. So this thing is all like it never has legs day at the gym. It's always doing upper body. And the legs are tiny and weak and they really don't walk. I mean, they can perch, but if you see a hummingbird, they're going to be moving. If you notice, you never see a hummingbird just kind of strolling around on your deck or something. Yeah, they kind of have legs similar to David Crosses character in that Titanica sketch from Mr. Show. Yeah. Do you remember? I do. So he's kind of hummingbird like in that respect. But yeah, if your legs are that weak and your wings are that strong, you're going to spend most of your time in mid air. And they basically do although they nest on branches. They sleep on branches. They do perch. They made on branches, as we'll see perch on your finger, apparently. Palm of your hand. Oh, it was palm of your hand? It was the palm of my hand, yeah, I gave it plenty of space. Okay, I got you. And then they also sometimes will sleep upside down, just kind of dangling from a twig or something with their spindly little legs, like a bat. Oh, wow. Yeah. So just some amazing stats about their ability to fly. Like we said, they're the only vertebrate that can hover in place. They can also fly upside down backward. They're real show offs. They really are big time show offs. They can get up to speeds of more than 45 mph, god knows how many kilometers per hour that is. That's a lot on some of their dives. But even like an average speed for them of just flying around where they're not just going from flower to flower, but they're like, say, traveling from place to place, it's 30 plus miles an hour. That's pretty impressive. No, it's super impressive. And if you think, man, a, how fast are those little wings going? And B, what is their little cardiovascular system doing? It's doing exactly what you think it is. Their heartbeats about 225 times per minute when it's hanging out and doing nothing. About 1200 times a minute when it's flying. And those wings range from 70 up and down strokes per second. Or I wonder if that counts as one or two. I was wondering that myself. And I'm not sure that that is answered. At the very least, we're not going to answer it because we don't have that answer. Well, how about it doesn't matter because either way it's a ton. It's 70 times per second when they're just flying normally around to get some good sweet stuff. But that Court ship dive, which we're going to talk about a little later, that you mentioned about 200 times per second, those wings are flapping. Yeah. And actually, now that you say it, if they're kind of doubling up what a flap is, then maybe hummingbirds aren't so impressive after all. Lazy. So Chuck, when you're flapping your wings 100 or 200 times per second, depending on whether you're counting the upbeats and the down beats as a single flap or not, you need, like, a lot of energy to do that. And as a result, the hummingbird typically eats about two to three times its own weight in food every day. Yeah. Like if that was a human let me see here. It's the equivalent of about \u00a3285 of hamburger. Is that and \u00a3370 of potatoes? No, I think each of these okay, so take your pick. If you want to eat just hamburger, it would be \u00a3285 a day. That's a whole cow, I think, a little bit. I think cows weigh more than that. Right, well, but as far as usable beef, I don't know. There you go. I'm sorry. For any vegetarians out there by me saying Usable Beef, that's a band maybe wretch in your mouth. Maybe it's an album name, now that I think about it. Usable beef by the band. What, Jungle X Ray? Yes. They eat a lot because they need to. And it's like 4 July for them every day. Yeah. Pretty much two to three times their own weight and food. Yeah. And we're talking about just on normal days. Can we talk a little bit about the migration and what they need to beef up then? I think we should. So they migrate like we talked about. They're not exactly sure what triggers that. They think maybe they see the change in daylight like some other animals and birds do, or maybe just the fact that flowers, what the flowers are doing. I think that's the big one, because they can't go for more than a few hours without food, so they need to go where the plants are flowering. They just kind of follow that. And I guess they're always connected to those subtle changes in the flowering. Exactly. So during this migration, their heartbeats about 1260 times a minute, and they have to gain because they're trekking. I mean, sometimes they're flying over the Gulf of Mexico in one shot over the course of a few days. So they need to bulk up big time. They gain about 25% to 40% of their body weight before they start this migration. And if we're going to do the human equivalent again for this, if you were a person that weighed \u00a3170, that means you'd have to gain up to about 255 in a few weeks time. Right. Like Christian Bale esque. I know. In just a few weeks. Man, that's crazy. So one of the things that's so impressive about the hummingbird is just how far it can fly in a day, especially for how small it is. They average something like 23 miles a day when they're migrating. But the ruby throated hummingbird, the one that it's the only one that you'll find east of the Mississippi. So if you see a hummingbird in your east of the Mississippi, you can be like an orentologist for once in your life and be like that's. A ruby throated hummingbird. They actually can travel for extraordinarily long stretches and they do because their wintering grounds are in the Yucatan. But they hang out in Florida during the other part of the year, I guess, during the summer. And so they travel over the Gulf of Mexico, they think. And when they do that, they do it in like a straight 500 miles stretch within 18 to 22 hours without stopping. That's incredibly impressive. It really is. But then there was a study in 2016 that found they could go even further, right? Yeah. They said physiologically, in theory, they could fly close to 1400 miles without stopping if they needed to. Crazy. That'd be like flying from Atlanta to Albuquerque. That's nuts. If you want a reference, that means nothing to nobody. So if you're wondering when they rest when they finally get down to that sweet soil in Mexico, they can enter Torpor, which we've talked about before. It is sort of hibernation light, really deep sleep like state. Their metabolic functions are really slowed. I think they can drop their body temperature by 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. They lower the heart rate from about 1200 beats per minute to as few as 50. And they do this after they migrate, but they can do this any time they need to. And they do. Yeah, they do. And also, I think it depends on where they live because hummingbirds, like I said, a lot of them live in the Andes, like high up on the mountainside. And even in the summer, it can get kind of cool there. So when the temperature cools enough that it makes no sense for them to keep up their metabolic rate to try to meet their 105 degree Fahrenheit body temperature, they'll intertwper. And that's just what they do for sleep. And one of the other things that I want to point out about them living in the Andes, chuck, this is all really just a segue for this amazing fact. They live in the Andes despite the fact and there are some species that are native to the Andes not just like, migrating through that's where they live in the Andes, despite the fact that they have these high metabolic rates and they need more oxygen while there's just inherently less oxygen in the air up in the mountains and it's harder to hover because the air is thinner. And yet they are so successful there in the Andes that up above a certain line, there's no insects. And so it's up to the hummingbirds exclusively to pollinate all the flowering plants up there. Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably why they have the market cornered up there. Sure. They're like, all right, well, let's adapt so we can kind of own this area. And not only that, I don't think we mentioned that sometimes if you're a small enough hummingbird and there's a big enough insect, the insect can win that battle. In hummingbird world, the insect eats you. All right, Branson, Missouri, let's take a break. Okay. I figured that was going to trigger a break. All right, we'll come back right now to talk more about hummingbirds. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking more about hummingbirds. One of the things that I really feel like we just need to underscore here is that they are metabolic wonders. They live on this edge of survival where they will die if they go a few hours without food. Do you know how many days you, a human being, can go without food before you die? As long as you have water and maybe access to a couple of vitamins or whatever. I think we did a podcast on that at some point. I'm pretty sure we did. Yeah. Angus Barber or Barbier? I can't remember. They die within hours. So they constantly have to search for food sources. Yeah, that's why you see them flitting about constantly. They're always looking for food. But it's also one of the reasons why they're known as potentially the most unsociable and most territorial bird in existence. Yeah. They don't like hanging out with each other. There are some exceptions that we're going to talk about, but they generally don't like hang out together. They don't like hanging out with other birds. At the end of the day, when everyone's just sing songs by the shoreline, hummingbirds are like, no, screw you guys. I got to eat. And not only do I have to eat, I got to make little hummingbird pea eggs. And we talked about this courtship dive. We kind of teased it out. This is pretty incredible. And this is a lot of times in mating rituals, you'll see the males doing these kind of big fancy shows to try and do card tricks. Yeah. Dogs Playing poker. That was all about photographer was a female dog. That's right. I guess it wasn't a photograph, was it? Was probably a painting, now that I think about it. In style, no world. It was a photograph, but it was a tin type, so it was very old, so it was funny. I was telling my daughter today about my bed. She always loves hearing stories about me and my brother as a kid. And I was telling her about my teenage bedroom, and I was like, I'll show you a picture one day. I've got pictures. And she said, you had a phone when you were little. And I was like, oh, boy, that's what it's like these days. She is so proud. And I had to explain that this camera on a phone is kind of a new thing. Like they used to be two different pieces of equipment. Yes, they were two very bulky different pieces of equipment. And the phone used to be attached to your wall in your kitchen. Yeah, that's true. But if you were super wealthy you have one of those really long courts. You can't say that because that's exactly the deal. So the courtship dive is when the male is trying to attract a female for a little loving that will fly up in the air really high, about 50 or 60ft, and then dive bomb toward the female as fast as it can go. And they are flying the whole way. They don't tuck the wings back like you're parachuting or something. No, they're flying as fast as they can right at this lady's face and within inches of her head going full tilt. They just pull up real quick and they hit her on the arm twice and say two for flinching. They put on the brakes and she flies right by. But that's what they do. It's crazy. They fly right at their face and then stop. If the female gets a little turned on, she might flit about in the air with them and then that's where people might think oh, look at those two hummingbirds are up in the air having sex. Not true. No. And maybe your mom would tell you that you need to leave the room because hummingbirds are doing it near there. But that's not what they're doing. They actually copulate perched on a branch. The female lands on the branch sometimes, like you said, she'll join them in the air. Other times she'll just be like come on down here, you win, let's go. And the mail mounts her from behind on the branch. And just like with everything else, the hummingbirds are super quick at sex too. Apparently it takes about 4 seconds and then that's it. Like wham bam, thank you, ma'am. Yes. And the male flies away. He doesn't hang around and see if it took. He goes on to have sex with another female. And the lady goes like what is this, a fern bar? Who are you? Jack Tripper. So she goes off and builds a nest and does all the parenting. Like I said, they don't mate for life. They don't even stick around after they mate at all. It's just they're in, they're out, they're gone. And I mean, you might think, well, that's a pretty big bummer. Poor, poor lady. Yeah, poor lady hummingbirds. That's exactly how they want it. Because like we said, the species is known as or all of the species. The hummingbird is known as the most territorial bird. So it seems, at least as far as natural selection is concerned, females prefer this arrangement. No mating pair and printing to where they just do all the work themselves because that means that they can also have their own access to their food source to where no matter what the male hummingbird is going to bring to the table and say, child breathing or whatever, it's not worth the food that the female would have to share. And that's where their territoriality comes from because remember, hummingbirds live on this edge of survival where if they go for hours without food, they will die. So they're really protective of their food source to the point where a female hummingbird would preferably raised young on her own than share her food source with the male. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of cool, actually. I get the picture that the female hummingbird is like, I need you for one thing. It takes 4 seconds. And believe me, if I could go to a sperm bank, I would prefer that. Honestly. I thought you're going to say, believe me, you're going to have the time of your life. But those 4 seconds will be a wild ride, my friend. That's right. Come meet me on this bridge over here, baby. Wait. It's going to be a stone gas, honey. Hey, babe, come here. So those gorgeous that we were talking about, those really colorful, iridescent, sort of fluffy chest and neck feathers of the male, like with many animals, the more brightly colored and showy that is, the more the female might be attracted because that might indicate that male bird's fitness because it takes a lot of work to keep that hairstyle up. So he must be pretty strong and have pretty good at organizing his day to day list to do effectively the exact same signals that Joe Dirt put out with his hair. He was obviously very genetically fit and ready to go. I never saw that. You should. It's definitely it's got a lot of heart. I think I say that every time you say you never saw it, but it's worth checking out for sure. It's one of those ones, you know, some don't age very well. I think it came poorly aged right out of the production facility. But that's one of the great beauties of it. It's definitely worth seeing. Chuck well, speaking of aged right out of the shoot, that's kind of the deal with hummingbird babies, too. There's not a lot of teaching and like, here, let me show you the ropes. It's kind of like, all right, this is the world you've been hatched from your little pea sized egg. Now go out there and be a hummingbird. Learn it all on your own, kiddo. But what's amazing, though, is that they do learn this on their own. They have astounding memories to the point where when they migrate, people who put out feeders, which we'll talk about in a little bit for hummingbirds, note that the same ones or what they believe is the same one come back year after year. And what's even more astounding. Frequently on the same day of the year, the same date, the same hummingbird will come back year after year on his or her migration. Right. And they just understand this. They know this. And part of it. Yes. Is following flowers and the blooming patterns of flowers. But they also think that they might have some sort of magnetic compass built in that possibly part of their pineal gland. Which is light sensitive. Manages to use the sun as a compass. And that they have astounding memories somehow. Some way. Because apparently their brain is about the size of a grain of rice in most cases. Yeah. And the other thing they'll do, too, is if they have, speaking of coming back to the buffet, if they have a patch of flowers, let's say, on your property, that they just love, they'll be like, all right, this is mine, I'm just going to go ahead and claim this. I'm going to come back here because you've got all the good stuff. My beak fits that flower just perfectly. And we'll talk here in a minute more about what they eat and why, but they will fiercely protect that little patch of flowers that they love so much and go back to it time and time again. Yes. So that's where their territoriality comes from, is protecting food sources. And not just food sources, like, I've been growing this patch of flowers all summer, stay away. They could stop somewhere for a half of an hour, or colloquially half hour, and we'll still protect, like, that flower patch that they stopped by if somebody comes along and tries to get it. And the whole reason that they do this is because they eat nectar along with some other stuff, and it takes a really long time for a flower to produce nectar. So the hummingbird would love to just have to go to the flower once and get the full dose of nectar, but they can't just wait around because other things will come and eat the nectar they've been hanging out for. So they've developed this secondary behavior, which is territoriality, where they'll chase off other hummingbirds, they'll chase off other birds. They've been known to chase off hawks, even if the hawk comes a little close for their comfort. Yeah. And I think early on in the Hummingbird council of 1915, they said all the socialist hummingbirds got together and said, hey, if we all relax, just let that nectar build up, it'll be a lot easier to eat. And all the other I don't want to get political here, but there were some hummingbirds that were like, no way, man, I'm not playing ball, I'm going to get in there and get that nectar whenever I feel like it. Right. Didn't work it out. No. And the other ones that wouldn't go along with it fired all the air traffic controlling hummingbirds. That's right, yeah. I think we should take a break. I think so. Let's take a break and we'll finish up about what they eat and all about those little feeders that you have in your backyard right after this. Okay, Chuck. So everybody knows that hummingbirds eat nectar, and that's definitely true. And they're very well adapted to eat nectar. They have this tube like tongue that apparently uses a wicking action to soak up nectar from a flower on a plant. And they do this this tongue can actually carry a load of nectar into their mouths, like 13 times a second. That's super fast. Not that surprising that they're doing this super fast, too, but it's still pretty impressive. But it's not just nectar. It's not the only thing that they eat. And actually, people found out the hard way that they didn't just eat nectar because captured hummingbirds who were studied in captivity died pretty quickly when all they were given was like a sugar water solution or even a nectar solution. And so they came to realize that they actually eat a lot of insects, too. And that's one of the great things about hummingbirds. In addition to being pollinators, they're also really big at insect controls. And one of the insects that they eat are blood sucking mosquitoes. Yeah, mosquitoes. Little spiders. And this is in addition to, I don't think we mentioned the 1000 to 2000 flower blossoms that they will go poke every single day when we talk about these hummingbirds or food scavengers up to 2000 flowers a day. That's pretty intense. It really is. So that makes them very important pollinators. Like we said in the Andes, where you're above the insect line, it's just up to hummingbirds to pollinate flowers. So when they're going from flower to flower, getting that nectar, if you pretend that evolution is a living, breathing thing, evolution has created this arrangement where the flower produces a nectar tree in exchange or to attract the little hummingbird. And then when the hummingbird is getting its little nectar treat, the flower just kind of goes, here's a little pollen on your forehead. Go find another flower that looks like me, and you'll find another nectar treat. And then transfer this pollen while you do so. They pollinate a lot of important stuff, and in addition to eating lots of bugs, so they're just all around great animals. Yeah, and they love that nectar. If you're thinking about flowers in your own garden, if you want to attract some hummingbirds, they want a sugar content of about 26%. It can't be like a Wendy's frosty because they're using that tongue. It acts sort of like a straw. So you got to get that spoon with the frosty. You can't suck that thing up. If you try, you're going to pass out in your car while you're driving. Yeah, so that sugar concentrated. It can't be too sticky because like I said, they're sucking that thing up. Oftentimes you'll see red or orange petals or bracks. They're often long and tubular because that long tongue and beat can get in there when others can't. So that kind of gives them the market cornered on that particular flower. It keeps out posers. It does. And this is the cool thing. Those flowers that you see that sort of trumpet downward, unless you can hover, you're out of luck there. So they love these things because they can hover. Actually, there's a lot of plants that have flowers that kind of fit this bill, and most hummingbirds aren't really fit the bill. Man, that was an unintentional, I guess, fit the beef. They don't have bills. Well, ducks bill and ducks are birds, right? Are there? But they're not super specialized. They'll eat just about anything that they can get nectar out of. But there are definitely kinds of flowers that have kind of coevolved with hummingbirds to kind of give them what they're looking for more easily. But one of the problems with human development, as with all things, is we kind of have supplanted a lot of those kinds of flowers. The good news is, if you have heard all this and you're like, I want to encourage hummingbirds to keep living, you can plant these flowers pretty easy. Yeah. I sent this list to Emily, actually, because our garden is very much built for use, for use in Emily's budding interest in herbalism and use for the insects that we know and the birds that we know inhabit our area. Right. So it's not just like, oh, that's pretty. Like, we want it to be a real thing that works for our local environment. I can't remember who said it, but there's a famous quote that nothing useless can ever truly be beautiful. Oh, interesting. And I found that that is one of the truest things ever said. Nothing useless, useless can ever truly be beautiful. I think that broke my brain. What does that mean? It just means that usefulness, like, the ability for something to have a purpose is an important part of its existence, and so just beauty alone doesn't justify the existence. Okay, that's what I thought it was saying, but something felt like a double negative in there that kind of broke my brain a little bit. You overthought it. So Beebomb, the old trumpet creeper, which was Miles Davis's nickname for a little while when he was drilling holes in bathroom walls, the cardinal flower, the columbine and the coral honeysuckle are all very hummingbird friendly flowers and plants that you can put in your yard. And I sent that to Emily, and I think we have a couple of these. We used to have columbine and dump. She's going to bring that back, and we're going to see if we can get some more hummingbird action in our backyard. That's awesome. Some hot, sticky hummingbird action. 4 seconds of pleasure. So you can also just go get yourself a hummingbird feeder, and a lot of people put red food dye in there, and that is actually a controversial move. There's some concern among hummingbird enthusiasts that the dye actually can be harmful over long periods of time. Maybe it can build up because, again, hummingbirds have very tiny organs because they're a very tiny bird. So introducing this artificial red dye might not be the best idea. Other people say that's totally unsubstantiated, there's never been any proof that it actually harms humming birds. And then the other people say back, it's totally unnecessary. The bird's going to find the sugar water either way, so why add the red dye just in case it is harmful if it's just unnecessary? So most hummingbird enthusiasts say, don't put red dye in your hummingbird sugar water. Yes, and that solution mixture is important. You can't just, don't just dump a bunch of syrup and water together or a bunch of sugar cane or whatever it is, four parts water to one part sugar because they need specific sugar content of about 26%, and that four to one makes about 25%, if my math is correct. It does. It's close enough. So one of the other ways you can help hummingbirds, too is in the most delicious way by choosing coffee that has grown in a situation that allows hummingbirds to thrive. Yeah, I didn't know about this. This is really cool. There is certified bird friendly coffee because we were talking about the Andes and the fact that the birds travel great distances and elevations up and down these mountains. And coffee is grown about halfway up these tropical mountains, and they have a lot of great flowers under the shady canopy there. And it's a really nice home for hummingbirds there. And if you drink bird friendly coffee, that means that they have these flowers and they're making sure they take care of these flowers, right? Yeah, it's grown in a kind of like a simulated forest, as closely simulated as possible. So you want to look for something that says it's bird friendly, rain forest alliance, and or shade grown. And that probably means that hummingbirds are thriving on those coffee plantations. And I went and looked at my beloved Batdorf and bronson. Coffees are all bird friendly, of course, and shade grown. Is that what you use? Yeah, same here. I'm crazy for that. So I've got a great blend for you. Trader Joe's decaf beans. Half okay. And the other half, Batdorf and bronson. Whirling dervish. It's the most amazing combination ever. Let's give that a shot. I'm not drinking coffee now because it's not winter, but Emily still has her latte every morning and she just has their espresso beans. Coffee is a 365 day a year activity check. I know, not for me, but I get it. That's okay. I'm not going to yum your yuck. Very well done. So that's it for hummingbirds, right? That's it. Well, if you want to know more about hummingbirds, get one to land in your hand and study it up close and personal. But don't mess with it because it's protected under the migratory bird treaty act of 1918 in the United States, and you could land in jail and pay up to a $200,000 fine for harmonic. Good. And since I said $200,000 fine, everybody, that means, of course, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to talk about the exploding birthmark. Hey, guys. Big fan of the show, which I listen to while I'm cooking breakfast, doing laundry, and staring. Oh, boy. I get this. And staring at 100,000 row Excel spreadsheets for work. Oh, man. My soul just shuttered. I know. I recently listened to the episode of Birthmarks and thought you might like to hear the story of my birthmark that exploded. I was born with two birthmarks, both of which have since been removed. One of those birthmarks was dark, brownish red, and a circle on the inside of my right thigh. I didn't think much of it. It wasn't very visible. And like you said on the show, lots of people have birthmarks. However, when I was in the third grade, my family and I were about to leave for my aunt's house to celebrate Thanksgiving when I realized my pants kept sticking to my leg. Oh, man. I went to the bathroom and removed my pants, and I saw blood running down my leg. As a third grader who had not yet even learned about menstruation, I assumed I was dying, so I freaked out. Turns out my birthmark was the result of a vascular malformation the size of a small bouncy ball in my inner thigh. Oh, my gosh. The tangled up ball of veins had ruptured that Thanksgiving morning, and I had to go to the Er, where they stuck a tiny piece of foam on my leg and probably charged just about $2,000 because hospitals. A few months later, I had it surgically removed, but now I have a three inch long scar instead of a birthmark. But because of my surgery, I wasn't allowed to run for a few weeks, and I got out of running the mile. So who's the winner now? Lucky. Thanks for helping me seem really knowledgeable on very specific topics. And that is from Bailey. Nice, Bailey. That's a great story. Pretty good. Bailey left out that, ironically, both the birthmark and the scar were in the shape of Satan. By the way, Bailey says in the PS that the other birthmark was humangioma on the bottom lip that was removed. Man, that's interesting stuff. Yeah, very interesting. And what was the fact that I kept saying over and over again about hamagiomas that they're a tangled cluster of blood vessels? I don't think so. Okay, so maybe they were two of the same kind of birthmark. Maybe so. Well, thanks a lot, Bailey. And if you want to get in touch with us like Bailey did and share an amazing story, we're always up for those. You can get in touch with us via email these days. At stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
3ff44f4e-121b-11eb-ba6a-d7d25ace7e6e | Short Stuff: Jackalope | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-jackalope | Jackalopes aren’t real, right? Wouldn’t you like to know, city slicker. | Jackalopes aren’t real, right? Wouldn’t you like to know, city slicker. | Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=237, tm_isdst=0) | 13232625 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarkson. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And this is short stuff, the shortest stuff of all about Jacobs. Do you hear that siren? No. Do you hear it now? No. Do you hear it now? Now I do, yeah. All right. Do you remember, Chuck, there is a period of time where the fire department would layer down the street every time we recorded. It was weird. Like, there was either somebody who kept faking a sprained ankle at the same time on the same day every week, or they were testing something out that we're not familiar with. But it happened a lot. Yeah, that was when we just started podcasting, and they were like, Go in that closet, and then it got to be a little bigger. And they were like, Well, I guess you guys should at least be in that dumb office. And then after a little while longer, eventually they're like, okay, I guess we'll put up a studio. Yeah, they said it's just like that, too. They're so upset. And now look at us. Yeah. Now we're podcasting from home, speeding towards 20 years in our basement. Yeah, that's right. All right, so, Jackelopes, if you listen to our taxidermy episode, it was rogue Taxidermy. No, it was regular taxidermy. Well, we've done one on Rogue Taxidermy, too, haven't we? We covered that in taxidermy. I don't know if we did a standalone. We may have. All right. Okay. But you go ahead. I'm sorry, but either way, it was in both. Then. This might be take three, but if you've never seen a jackalope, just pull your car over. Or if you're at home, just type in jackalope. They're fairly familiar here in the United States as sort of kitschy art that you can hang on your wall. Jacobs are not real. It is a combination, a taxidermy combination of a rabbit or a hair with antlers. And I grew up seeing them here and there at roadside diners or if you travel out west or something, like under, maybe a hotel lobby wall. And the whole thing with Jacobs is always that you try to convince somebody that it's a real thing. Yeah, it's very annoying. That's a really annoying, unnecessary part of the whole thing. But it's a Wyoming tradition, from what I understand. Yeah, it's the snipe hunt of wall art. That's exactly right. And there's lots of legends and tall tales about the jackalopes that they have really nice singing voices. And in particular, if you're out on the range and you have a campfire going, you start singing cowboy songs. That from out in the bush, in the underbrush. They'll start singing in they'll join in on the chorus and everything, which is kind of adorable. They're also supposedly cousins to Bigfoot. They're pretty great and probably the cutest mythical creatures there are. But they actually, as far as The New York Times, I think, reported in 1977, there's actually like a real life origin story to them that we may or may not have discussed before, but we're definitely going to again here. That's right. The origin story is, I think, very well vetted. This is the kind of thing where it seems like it could be because there's just so many tall tales surrounding jacobs. It seems like the kind of thing where the origin could be very highly suspect, but it seems like this is totally real. And the harrik brothers, H-E-R-R-I-C-K in wyoming, and we should mention wyoming is very much into their jackalopes because of this, because they were where it all started. Yeah. If you look at the wyoming lottery's logo, there's a jackalope on there. Really? Yeah. It's a big deal in wyoming. As a matter of fact, at least five times the wyoming legislature has tried and failed. For some reason. I don't get it. To make the jackalope wyoming's official state, mythological creature. Maybe they're trying to really govern and do something that matters. I guess so. I suspect liz cheney is killing this every time. I don't know why, but I do. So, the harris brothers you know what? Maybe we should take a break and leave a cliffhanger as to what they actually did. Yeah, okay. It's short stuff. Why not? Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from josh and chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. All right. Quite a cliffhanger. I know about the Harrack brothers. Right. Douglas Haraki was born in douglas, wyoming, in 1920. He was in the air force during world war II and then worked as a pipe fitter and was a big hunter because he is in wyoming, and there's a lot of people that are into that there. And his brother ralph, they got into taxidermy at an early age and had their own taxidermy shop. And as legend goes, one day, one of these brothers and the year is kind of debatable. It could be 32, 34, 39, or 40 is what I've heard. One of them came back from a hunt, had this jack rabbit, slid it across the table, and his little dead head slid and perfectly met a pair of antlers. And one of them said, hey, check that out. And the other one said, that's awesome. And that was it. That was it. They said, well, we're taxidermists. We might as well make this happen. And they did. It's a very sad origin story because of the dead rabbit, but other than that, it's pretty cool. They made one. They actually just made one, I guess, from that rabbit and those antlers. And there was a guy named roy ball who had a hotel in douglas, wyoming, who got wind of the brother's little invention, and he bought it off of him for $10 back in 1940 at the latest, which is substantial. And he put it up in his hotel, and it became basically a little legendary piece of, like, you call it wall art. And it stayed there for a good three, maybe four decades, and then someone actually stole it off of the wall and never found out who did it. It was never recovered. The original Jackalope may be in somebody's garage or attic or even maybe on their wall somewhere out there, and they may not even know that this is the original Jackalope that the Harris brothers created. So this is where I have to confess, because every time I was researching this, when we got to this part, I kept thinking of the story. In college, I stole something with my friends and I in college. One time when we were out doing bad things and a night out in Athens, we took a stuffed porcupine from a bar that was hanging on the wall, and that porcupine lived in our apartment for about six months before we returned it. Oh, you did return it, huh? Yeah. Well, when we moved out, we were like, what do we do with the porcupine? What bar was it? I want to say it was Gus Garcia's. Do you remember that place? No, I remember it. Was that the same thing as Gusses? Maybe? I think so. I've only heard of it referred to as Gusses. Yeah, it's probably one of those things where you knew the cool kid name, and I was older and more square, so I called it by giving name. So how did you guys return it? We have to know. I believe it was, like, the fine, upstanding thing that you do when you go and throw it at the front door and run. Got you with a note through one of the quills that said, we took this six months ago. Sorry. Signed anonymous. At least you gave it back to Gus Garcia. Yeah. So somebody stole that original Jackalope and did not even have the forthrightness to throw it on the front porch of that hotel, so it remains gone. Man. Do you remember Uptown Lounge in their happy hour with fishbowl margaritas? I don't remember going to the happy hour there. It was insane. Athens is a lot different now. Yeah, I know. When's the last time you were there? What? We passed through there for about three, four years ago. Okay. Not too bad. I still go occasionally. And, yeah, it's a lot different. Screwed up a lot. Can't steal Porcupines Willynilly anymore. No, there's no college shenanigans. Everybody's, like, an activist and interested in important things, and we're, like, basically like Animal House or something. Yeah, pretty much. Buffoons. That was what we were like. And call it Chuck Buffoon. So, yeah, this original Jackalope was stolen, and like you said, they never caught the thief. But this kind of kick started a thing for the Harrick family, and they started making and selling these things. I tried to find out if they held any kind of weird patent or not, or if they were knockoff jackalopes. But they sold tens of thousands of these, which I really have to point out here. We're talking about tens of thousands of dead rabbits and dead deer. Yes. Some of which may never have been otherwise dead had it not been for the jack. Lope craze. Yes, I think it's worth remarking. I don't want to be a downer here because I know it's all sweet and cute and hot. They like to put the hurting on tourists brains with talking about it's real or whatever, but a lot of rabbits and deer died because of this whole idea. Like it's real dead is what it is, exactly. Just for this rogue taxidermy. No, I agree. I love those rabbits. I don't want to see them hanging on a wall with antler sticking out of their heads. No. Let the rabbits live. But Douglas, I think wall Drug in Wyoming, which has a giant jackalope. There no Wall drugs in North Dakota. Oh, it is. Okay. They became a distributor and they have a giant jackalope. So eventually, when Douglas Harris, the initial jackaloper, died in 2003, I think his son was interviewed by The New York Times and said that they were selling, it looks like 15 to 2000 of these a year. Just a wall drug. Yeah. That's a lot of rabbits. It is. A lot of it. I feel like we've really kind of taken this thing on a nosedive, but I feel like we could also take it on an even bigger nose dive in a second. Chuck, let's do it with the show papioma virus. It's so sad to look at these pictures. It is sad, but it's also fascinating. It's much more gratifying to look at, botanical or not botanical? Biological. The botanist just plants biological or like nature illustrations of it. Yeah, it's related to HPV. It's an affliction that can cause rabbits to develop these horns, their tumors, basically, and they can come out of their face looking like a little horn. So there are pictures of rabbits with all these horny spikes thrusting from their face and heads. And it's just they look a lot like heartbreaking warthogs. Yeah. Sort of like a rabbit warthog. And what's interesting to me, there's actually one in the Smithsonian's collection, their animal collection, dead animal collection, I should say. And that doesn't seem to have informed the Harris brothers creation of the jackalope. Those are two different things. But there was a period of time, I think the first sightings are described in the 16th or 17th century that people wondered if there was a species of rabbit out there that had horns or antlers. And it's just totally tangential to the invention of the jackalope. Nothing to do with it. Not even tangential, not even connected in any way. And that's jackalopes. That is jackalopes. If you want to get to know Jacobs, you could do worse than traveling to Douglas, Wyoming, which is the official as proclaimed by Wyoming Governor Ed Hirschler in 1985, home of the Jackalope. That's where they hail from. And again, you could go play some scratch offs in Wyoming with their lottery and see jackalope. Yeah. And you can even buy a little fun fake jackalope hunting license. Yes. I thought that was kind of adorable. Yes, which is not real, obviously. I think they grant hunting from sunrise to sunset on one day a year. Yeah, but it's a day that doesn't even exist. June 31. But it coincides with Douglas Jackalope Days festival, which I think is held in June as well. Right. So if you're all about the jackalopes yeah. Killing rabbits. They do. And we also have to give a shout out, which we probably did in the taxidermy, episode two, to our friend Van Nostrin, who once had a band called the Jackalopes, remember? That's right. And also shout out to one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in on our Australia tour on our down days, the Jackalope Hotel. Oh, is that right? Yeah, it was amazing. I could see Australians loving the Jack globe, but it's probably actually real in Australia. That's right. I guess that's it. Chuck doesn't have anything more, I'm assuming. I don't either. So that means, of course, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-18-sysk-hang-gliding-final.mp3 | How Hang Gliding Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-hang-gliding-works | It’s a super 70s thing, sure, but hang gliding is a thrill ride for the ages. So strap in with Josh and Chuck and learn all about the earliest method of human flight, originally created by a German man who flew over 2000 times before dying in a crash! | It’s a super 70s thing, sure, but hang gliding is a thrill ride for the ages. So strap in with Josh and Chuck and learn all about the earliest method of human flight, originally created by a German man who flew over 2000 times before dying in a crash! | Thu, 18 Jan 2018 15:51:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=15, tm_min=51, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=18, tm_isdst=0) | 39914758 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. What if you are a gigantic snack food maker who needs to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to manage your supply chain with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Rowland. And as I said, there's me, Josh Clark, which makes this stuff you should know the soaring edition. Wow. Soren soaring. It's the Sorto edition. I don't know what that means either. It doesn't mean anything. It's just kind of a sore toe is kind of the opposite of soaring. It really drags you down to earth. Got you. Because you think, like have to go to like an urgent care center and get this tow checked out and probably take some pills that make me throw up. And it's just not like soaring high above the earth on a hang glider, I imagine. I've never hang glided. Have you? No, but I've had a sorto do you have any desire to hang glide after this? Because I got to tell you, man, I got kind of jazzed about the idea of trying it. From researching this article. No, not really. No. So if you were somewhere on vacation and they had, like, hang gliding lessons as part of the place you were staying, would you, like, go over and try it, you think? Or you just absolutely aren't enthused by it at all? Yeah, kind of depends, I guess, on my mood and what else is going on. I mean, I can see that. I think that's fair. I wouldn't seek it out though. But if I was literally within 50ft of someone doing this, right, and somebody picked you up and put you into the harness, then I might do it, but I'm not afraid of it or anything. I don't really care. Yeah, no, I get that sense that you're not afraid of it. I am terrified of heights, as you know. But this still sounds pretty appealing to me, actually. I think I might try it. Yeah, I mean, I used to do repelling and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, with your dad, right? Yeah. Downstone mountain. No, they don't let you do that. Yeah, I thought they might. So hang gliding is what we're talking about, Chuck, and it turns out this article, this is an old school, old school House stuff works article, which really weird in a lot of different ways, but once we kind of dug in, we found that the topic is actually a little more interesting than the House stuff works article would lead someone to believe. Yeah, for sure. It's a little dry. Just bone dry. And this is a Freud and Rich joint. He knows what he's doing. He's got a PhD after his name, but I think it was the culture of the age. Sure. Like, for example, in the article, he talks about a personal experience, hang gliding. You know exactly what I'm going to say, don't you? No, I don't, actually. So he said that the place that he was taking this hang glad and lesson is called Jockeys Ridge, and it's a public park. So he writes that before they took off, the hang gliding instructor checked to make sure that our intended flight path was clear of obstacles and people because it was a public park. That's like such a 2001 era how stuff works thing to mention in an article. You know what? Yeah, I kind of found myself skimming that part once I started reading it. There's some good info in it, but yeah, the whole personal experience thing, it just doesn't click with me. So hang gliding. Should we do a little history? I think we should do a little bit of history because, like I said, it's kind of interesting. Yeah. And this is one that you would not I was a little bit surprised to know that NASA had anything to do with hang gliding, because it seems like obviously those two things would be opposite of one another. Sort of like toe gliding. Toe no, sore toe. And soaring. Yeah, like toe soaring. It's like a sat question. It is. But there was an engineer for NASA named Francis Rogalo, so he kind of had an idea in the 1940s to use his Regalo wing, which was, I guess, sort of a crude hang glider to help return spacecraft to Earth instead of a mere parachute, which is what I guess had been used for a little while. Yeah, like, you know those famous images of the Gemini capsules coming back to Earth and splashing down the ocean, and they have, like, a drag chute that they're hanging from? Originally, they were like, what if we tried this other thing that will be one day the predecessor of the hang glider? And everyone said, what's the hang glider? And the person said, Just wait a little while. So Regalo and his wife actually were amateur aviation enthusiasts, and they were just kind of doing this on the side. But when he started working at NASA, he said, hey, I've got this idea, and it didn't pan out. But the pictures of these tests that made it into magazines, captured the imagination of some people around the world all at once. Different people who weren't in communication with one another saw these pictures and thought, you know what? I could do something with that. I could turn something like that into like a personal, non motorized flight machine. And they did. Yeah. But he was not the first person to ever do stuff like this because everyone, I think, has seen images of weirdos in the 19th century jumping off of buildings with all manner of winged suits and things like that, and one such guy, and that's just the human's obsession with literally flying themselves. Like not in a plane. There's also that. It takes a certain type, though, if you think about it, even today. Like somebody who says, wow, I'd really like to fly, and someone who says, wow, I really like to fly, so I'm going to spend ten years creating my own personal flying machine. Those are two different people. Yeah, for sure. Like the Wright Brothers versus this guy. Right, exactly. You've never heard of because they didn't do anything. Auto Lillianthal, is that a good way to pronounce that? Oh, yeah, not this guy. This guy did a lot. Yeah, you're talking about the crackpots, right? Yeah, he was a German engineer, obviously, from that name, and he was crazy about this stuff. And he literally did over 2000 successful flights with these, what they called weight shift hang gliders. So hang gliders, where, as you will see, like the modern hang glider, you shift your weight to steer the thing. And he was doing that in a kind of a crude way. Yeah, he basically I mean, like, Leonardo DA Vinci had some design for a hang glider. I don't know if it's ever built. And the Chinese used to make criminals hang glide for fun. But this is like the guy who actually went to the trouble of figuring out how to make this right from his own designs. And like you said, 2000 successful flights. That's proven technology. Sure. And I don't think it's just us, but Auto Lilienthal is basically known as the father of hang gliding. The OPA. Yeah, I guess. OPA's grandfather. Yeah. But is that German? Yeah. I thought that was Greek. Well, it may be Greek, too, but I know opaz German for Greg. Okay, got you. But he did a good job. Then the Regalo Machine, or whatever they call it, the Regalo, the Fantastic Flying Regalos came on the scene. Yeah, but they apparently were not inspired by anything Lilienthal did. His stuff really kind of fell to the wayside once the Wright Brothers started. Yeah, I could see that. A motorized flight. Right. Everybody's like, why would you want this thing when you can just fly in a plane? And the Wright Brothers themselves experimented with hang gliders first and then moved on to planes from their hang gliders. But by this time, the idea of hang gliding was dead. And from what I understand, unknown to the Rigalos. Yeah, we should totally do a Wright Brothers show at some point. I can't believe we haven't. I know. There's a lot out there. We will so flash forward some, though, to the very hot party, the auto Lillian Thal anniversary meet up in California. So he still had his people, I would guess, these sort of early extreme stunt enthusiasts who held people like Lillianthal in high regard, and people came from all over the place to hang out and hang glide, I guess. And that's where I think everyone sort of points to that meet up that year is when the reinvention of modern hang gliding came around. Is that fair to say? I think so. You've got Autollenthal, you've got the Regalo's, who may or may not have been influenced by Lilienthal, and then you've got a guy named Bruce Dickinson. No, it's not Bruce Dickinson. He's the guy from John Dickinson and Australian. Not quite Tom. No. Well, this is Tom. Were there two of them? Doug Dickinson? Was it Tom Dickinson? I mean, that's what this one article says. Okay, well, I'm sure that one's right. Tom Dickinson, I think he was one of the ones who was inspired by those photos of the Regala Wing from NASA and built his own hang glider. And he created what you would call what's it called when you're on your parasailing and you're being towed behind a boat. Parasailing. Okay. So he invented basically that which later, to confuse things, was reinvented in the 80s or rediscovered in the became basically a separate but related sport to hang gliding. But his designs for this early paraglider was based on the Regalo Wing and basically improved it enough so that other people said, hey, you know what, you could turn this into what we call a foot launched hang glider. And by the early nineteen s, seventy s, the design had been improved enough that, yeah, you could have like an invitational meet up of the crackpots who are into this kind of thing back then. Right. And then a couple of years after that, a couple of brothers named Bob and Chris Wills started manufacturing, actually formed a company called Will Swing. And by all accounts, those dudes really grew the sport in the early to mid 70s because it's a very I mean, I know it's kind of been reborn now with these what do they call not solid wing or I guess you could call them solid wing. Rigid. Yeah, rigid wing. But those early hang gliders, it's a very 70s sport. It totally is, you know, and they're so pretty in the 70s way too. Like the colors they use for them. Yeah, for sure. Love looking at hang gliders. Looks like a catamaran sale up there. Yeah, like a hobby cat or something. I'm sure there was an episode of Chips where one of them handglided it made its appearance it had its fingerprints all over 70 spot culture. Totally. Do you remember back in the day on Price is Right? One of the standard prizes was a hobby cat with a personal sailboat. Yeah, like anyone like, what am I going to do with that? Right? I live in Texas. Right. Well, I guess Texas has a shoreline now. Look at me. Yes. There you go. How about Nebraska? Yeah, no short line of Nebraska. No. So by the 70s, this thing kind of taken off, if you will forgive the unintended pun. I don't have the impression that it's like nearly as much of a craze today, even though there have been major improvements, like the rigid wing design. Yeah, it seems like it's the maybe the 80s were the heyday. Right. I get the feeling that today it's sort of in that extreme sports category, especially with these rigid wing. But back in the dudes, like, my dad would probably go out and give it a whirl. Right. And it's Jeep. Yeah, absolutely. Like my dad glided or para sailed on one Florida trip one time, I remember. And in true, like, my dad's fashion was he was like, I'm the only one doing this. I'm not going to pay for you guys to do it. Oh, really? No way. The one behind the boat? Yeah, yummy. Did that once. It got stuck up there for some reason, they couldn't get her. Like her and the friend she was with down for a while. She was stuck floating aloft. Yeah. Well, don't they just stop the boat and you come down? I don't remember what the problem was, but there was an issue that they couldn't like her turn or her ride or whatever just kept going on and on and on for some reason. Sounds like the boat couldn't stop. They're like, I can't take my foot off the gas. You don't steer gas pedal, by the way. Sure. Well, and some you do, probably. It's usually with the hand. I can't take my hand off the gas. Yeah, exactly. There you go. So you want to take a little break and then come back and get into hang gliders themselves? Yeah, we'll suit up. Okay. The world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Shard. The Martha Stewart chardonnay. That's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish framed by a distinctly sweet oat character. Martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowdpleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard and drink. Martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on 19 Crimes.com. That's one nine Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. Okay, man so hang glider is, at its core, an extremely simple machine. And it's actually a pretty clever one, too, to tell you the truth. I'm not quite sure I can't really put my finger on why I'm so jazzed about the idea of trying it, but it's somewhere in here. Okay. Okay, so you get the hang glider, which is basically an air foil, right? Yeah. And are we going to differentiate a lot between the old school and the new ones and the rigid wing? I looked up the difference and I didn't see a terrible amount of difference. I saw that the rigid ones, they glide a lot longer, I think, or they have less of a sync rate, but other than that, it's more of like a matter of personal preference. And then you would train on the flexible one, for sure. So they still use flex wings. Oh, yeah. Okay. I, for some reason, thought reddit is sort of like the rigid wing took the place of the flexible wing. No, I think it did not, actually. It's a modified design, and if you're really good at hand gliding, you may prefer the rigid, but you may also prefer the flex. You wouldn't necessarily graduate from one to the other, and then the rigid didn't replace the flex wing. All right, just so people know for sure what we're talking about, the flexible wing is sort of that old school hang glider. You think of that. It looks like a modified parachute, and in fact, it is like a nylon parachute that you can hear kind of flapping in the wind over some sort of aluminum frame. The rigid wing is sort of the same, but the fabric, the wings themselves, it's just stiffer. Right. It's not like it's made out of wood or anything like that. It's just like a stiffer like the Exoskeleton. I'm not describing this very well. Once you bring the exoskeleton in, it's all downhill from there. Yeah. How would you describe the Rigid Wing? It was, like you said, the Flex Wing. It kind of flaps in the wind. It covers a skeleton. But the Rigid Wing is virtually the same thing. But it has, like, strut, say, woven into it that keeps it from flapping as much. It makes the fabric rigid. Yeah. And it's like a prefab wing that you would load out of your car. Yeah. They're really tough to travel with it from what I understand, as far as like, if you're flying somewhere on an airplane, you would have to take your Flexible Wing hand glider. Oh, like on an airplane. Yeah. They disassemble really easily. All of the joints are hinged, the tubes pop out of one another. The actual fabric folds up and comes off and the wires snap off whenever you're going to hang glide. You want to put your thing, you want to assemble it, and then you disassemble it when you're done. All right. Yeah. And they're like somewhere between 40 to \u00a370. And from what I can tell, the ones that weigh less are the much more expensive ones because they might not even be made out of aluminum. They may be made out of something even lighter, like carbon fiber or something like that. Got you. The whole point. Whether you're talking about and I don't really think we need to get into Rigid Wing just because it is just a modified version of the Flexible Wing. And the Flexible Wing is the one that everybody's familiar with, but with the Flexible Wing, it's basically just a triangular skeleton made of hollow aluminum, aircraft grade aluminum tubes or carbon fiber tubes. And you've basically got three tubes coming out of one point. Did you ever take an art class or drawing class? No. This could not make sense to you then. Well, I've seen a hang glider, though. Okay, well, so if there's a point, if there's the very front tip of the triangle that is the hang glider. Yeah. The stabber. Right. The widowmaker. That's the nose. Yes. Out of the nose, going directly back away from you is a piece of metal, a tube called the keel. Yes. Going at angles out of the nose backward away from you as well. Those are the leading edge tubes. And then about halfway back from the nose, crossing the leading edge tubes and the keel connecting them all, that's the crossbar. You have those four bars put together. That's basically the basic skeleton of the hang glider. Yeah. Okay. And if you haven't seen one of these just crawl out from under your rock, go to your laptop, look at a picture of it. You know, when I was researching this, especially when Freud Rich started to get into the wires, the front wires and the landing wires, I was like, now I fully understand what they mean when they say that a picture is worth 1000 words. Like Freud and Rich could have spent 5000 words explaining all this and he still wouldn't have nailed it like a picture would. It's just impossible in a situation like this. Well, you've already explained more than I would have. I would have just said a series of tubes and wires. Okay. So a series of tubes connected, and then you've got the fabric covering that. You've got wires, like holding, connecting everything and stabilizing it. And then the key to all of this, there's a couple of keys, but this is where it starts to get fascinating. There's something called the control bar. Right. And the control bar is like a triangle that dangles right in front of you when you're hanging from the hang glider. And this is the thing that you have your hands on. It's how you control the hang glider, which is why it's called the control bar. And then the next really essential piece, and I'll stop after this, I promise, is the harness, which is suspended from the keel above you, right behind where the control bar hits the keel. Right? Yeah. And so you are prone, you're lying on your stomach when you're flying and you're hanging on to the control bar and you're dangling from the hang glider above, which is why it's called hang gliding, because you're hanging from the hang glider. Fascinating. It is. And I imagine in the 1970s it seemed like a fun idea when you're in Hawaii, had a couple of rum drinks to get in a suit, throw on the helmet, strap into that harness and run off the side of a cliff. You can still launch like that, but it looks like it's gotten a little more like that, has fallen out of fashion a little bit. The run off the cliff version. I don't know if that's true, man. I think that's like that you're an advanced hang glider. That's probably how you're going to try it. Yeah. Although you can do like a dune or something like that. It's really good for training or whatever, but they have like, I don't know if you call it like a launch ramp or something like that, but like some sort of launch that they build onto the edges of cliffs to run off of for hang gliding. And they're just terrifying to even look at pictures of. Yeah. I mean, I'd say I'm not scared to do it, but I imagine I would have some butterflies when you go and run and jump off that thing. Right. I would too, man. So don't feel bad, but you see people do it. And my immediate thought is, I'm going to nosedive. But you don't nosedive thanks to physics. Right. And do you want to take a break and then get into the physics? Yeah, we might as well hang gliding. The world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Chard, the Martha Stewart Chardonnay that's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes, it's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, Martha Shard, is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish framed by a distinctly sweet oak character. Martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowdpleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard and drink. Martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on nineteencrimescom. That's one nine crimescom. Please drink responsibly. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K Twelve. Compodcast. And start taking charge of your future today. All right. Physics. So the reason a hang glider works is because of its elegant, lightweight design and the way the air moves over these wings and then all of these other forces acting in concert with one another to make sure you stay up there for as long as possible. Yeah. So the first one we're talking about is lift. The air goes over the surface of that wing, and that's going to generate that lift when you run and you jump off of that platform. And it's going to counter the gravity. But gravity in this case is not bad. Like gravity is actually going to be while it does want to pull you to Earth, it's what's making you go forward, continuing that airflow. Yes, that's a good point. So gravity is your friend in this case. Yeah. And then you've got drag, which is really the other one. Those three factors together are what really applied to hang gliding. And drag is what ultimately slows you down. It's you running into air molecules. And the faster you go, the more drag you have, the faster you get slowed down, which then brings in the sync rate, which is the speed at which a hang glider starts to descend toward Earth. It's measured in, like, feet per second in still air. Okay. That's right. And the distance it can travel is determined by something called the glide ratio, which is the ratio of the forward distance to the vertical distance dropped forward distance you've traveled to that drop rate. Yeah. So like say every 24ft you move forward, you drop like 1ft downward. Right. So that's really basically it for physics. But the hang gliding would be like an entirely different sport if it weren't for the ability to catch air currents. Yeah, it's kind of all about that. Otherwise they would just be pretty quick rides. They would be. I mean, it'd be pretty awesome still, especially if you launched off a cliff and then just kind of glided slowly downward toward the Earth. It'd still be pretty cool. But you can catch air currents if you know what you're doing and stay aloft for hours and go across entire parts of the country. As a matter of fact, the record for the longest distance traveled is like 472 miles. That's crazy. I think it's like 700 km. Well, these two dudes went from Lubbock, Texas to Nuevo Laredo over the course of, I think, like 11 hours, maybe something like that. Wow. And the way that you do this is that you go find these air currents and there's a couple of places you can reasonably expect you're going to find upward lift from air. Right. Yeah. Hot air is one way thermal lift and that's like over a desert, like hot sand or pavement. I would prefer the hot sand over pavement or if it's super sunny. I get the feeling that the more experience you have, the more you know how to look around your environment to feel and see where this might be happening. Yeah. Supposedly one way that they do it is to look for birds that are just sitting there kind of soaring. You can just go catch the air column, whatever it is that they're soaring on. Right. That's one of the most like, relaxing things for me to see. Yeah, it's a hawk, almost motionless, just sort of floating. Now imagine doing it yourself. Yeah. Doesn't that seem relaxing? I think it sounds great. Yeah. No. I would enjoy it, I'm sure. I'm just not going to go through a lot of effort to make it happen. Yes. Apparently I've made it my mission to get you hang gliding. For some reason. In the chips episode, you will have rigged my hang glider to crash. Right. Poor Robert Pine. And then who's? Robert Pine. He was the captain or the second sergeant. Yeah, great actor. I can picture him immediately in my brain. Yeah, me too. And then you've got something called ridge lift and that's air that's deflected up by like a mountain or a ridge and basically the topography of the ground beneath you and around you. You can learn to read that stuff and you know where these swells and columns of air are going to be. Right. And when you find these columns of air, these lifts, you don't just fly into them and all of a sudden you're up. Because they're actually usually fairly small. So you would basically fly right through, maybe get a little bit of lift, but then you just keep going and start descending again. If you're going to catch an upward air current, you basically want to enter into a tight spiral, basically an upward corkscrew spiral. You're following the error current upward. And to do this, it's all just basically based on simple movements of your body. That's the whole thing with steering and controlling a hang glider. It all has to do with the different adjustments to the weight you're putting on the control bar. That triangle that's in front of you that you're hanging on to. Yeah, exactly. So you go left and right by, I think, literally shifting your body as it's hanging and you go up and down by tipping. And it may seem counterintuitive or who knows, once you're up there, it may seem like the right way to do it, but in order to go up, you tip the nose down. And then vice versa. Yes. And to tip the nose down, you pull the control bar towards you. So you're shifting your weight forward. And when you put that nose down, you're trading in some of your altitude. You're basically creating a nose dive, but just enough to speed up. And then to slow down, you push the control bar away from you, which tips the nose up, which basically stops the glide of the glider. It turns it into like a piece of fabric trying to go forward through space rather than something just cutting smoothly horizontally. It's now vertical in some way and it slows it down. And that's actually the way you land too. Apparently. You can land on your feet very gently. Once you're close to the ground, you start to stall by pushing the control bar away from you. That lifts the nose up, it cuts your speed off and then you just kind of in a nice gentle trot, hit the ground and you say, I just hang glided. Yes. I think what I would worry about for myself is that some of this stuff may not be intuitive or instinctive and I would do the wrong thing and then panic. So that's actually a really good point. This group called Kitty Hawk Kites from North Carolina, which are actually cited in the House of Works article, they had a really good Tips for Beginners article as well. And they say one of the things that you have to learn is to remain calm because it takes a bit of finesse. From what I understand, you have to be able to very smoothly move your weight around. And if you're anxious and you're hanging on to the control bar too tight, your movements are going to be kind of herky jerky. And it's not a good way to hang glide. So you want to be relaxed and controlled. And they say that the best way to do this is to have a few tandem lessons first. I thought you'd say have a few drinks. I don't know if they would recommend that or not. Maybe one drink. Maybe, yes. It may be one for when you're up there, too. Spring erode. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. They're like, Where did you get that? But they offer like, tandem lessons. Right. So you're on there next to somebody who is an experienced hang glider and they're controlling and then they can hand over control the control bar to you by saying, okay, now let's go left or let's go right. And all that is just shifting your weight left, shifting your weight right, shifting your weight forward or backward for up or down. It's as simple as that. But I think remaining calm is a huge part of the whole thing. That's a good point. Yeah, for sure. So if you're an experienced pilot, you might also have some other gear up there with you, like a variator. And this is what a lot of these you can hear so you don't have to look at it. I guess it barks out your climbing and descent rate, which is pretty handy. And then what's the other one? The altimeter altimeter, yeah. That's the one that just tells you what your altitude is called. The Altimeter altimeter. And you're going to want goggles and obviously the helmet. And I think if you do these more the higher up extreme things, you're going to also have a parachute. Yeah. When you're hitting thousands of feet. Yeah. They say that most of the accidents that happen, happen on takeoff or landing, that it's rarely does somebody just fall out of the sky. Even when they hit turbulence. You're not going to just drop out of the sky like a stone. That's just not how aerodynamics work. But you'll have a bumpy ride. It's more like you hit a tree or you fall off the cliff. Like your hang glider doesn't catch air. Right. Or something like that. That's usually on take off for landing when you have a crash. Although I did see it might have been 2016 because I just, of course, looked up hang gliding deaths and this one guy fell out of his hang glider entirely. Oh, man. And went to the ground. Yeah, that would be one way that it could happen, too. And I don't know if we said or not, auto Lilienthal died in a hang gliding crash. That's how he went. Oh, I don't think I knew that very appropriately in reading Kitty Hawk kite's description of what it feels like when you're learning how to hang glide. So they hang glide on sand dunes, which is virtually the same area that the Wright brothers tried their stuff out on. And the reason why they use sanded is because there's a gentle slope, for one. But number two, if you fall, you fall into sand, which is much more forgiving than, like you said, pavement. Right. But when you're hang gliding. When you're learning how to do this, the whole point is, man, they did such a good job describing it. Basically, they said, imagine you're running down a hill, right, and you don't have a hang glide, or you're just running downhill. Eventually you're going to pick up enough speed that your legs can't keep up with it. Gravity is pulling you downward and you're going to start tumbling downhill. So you just crashed running downhill, right. They said with a hang glider, what you're doing is you're running downhill and you're picking up that same speed, but you're using the hang glider to stabilize yourself so that your legs don't get ahead of yourself. And if you can find that balance and it just takes a few times to practice this. Probably several times. But if you can find that balance to where you can trust and stabilize yourself with the hang glider as you're running down the slope. Eventually the weight of your body and the hang glider that you're holding. Because remember. It weighs up to about \u00a370. The weight of the two things starts to be transferred as lift is produced under the hang glider from the bottoms of your feet to the straps of your harness. And little by little, that weight is transferred. And eventually your feet are no longer making contact with the ground. And I'll bet there's a cute few seconds where your feet are just going through the air and it's now the straps holding you up. So it's the hang glider through the straps holding you up, and you've just taken off and now you're soaring. But I would be like, I'm not ready yet. Then you just pull back on the control bar or push no, I'm sorry. You push forward on the control bar, the nose would go up and you'd land after just being a couple of feet off the ground if you had your head about you. Exactly. But what they're saying is, even if you never do catch air, as long as you don't hesitate, and you just keep using the hang glider to stabilize yourself, at the worst, you're going to just end up at the bottom of the hill, having run down there and never caught air. At best, you will have caught air and you'll just take it off. But the whole point with them is that you're training on sand. So even if you bite it, you're still just in sand, so it's fine. Right. All this explains, though, why they don't just say, okay, here's a cliff with a launch ramp run off. You have to know what you're doing. And eventually you want it to go from a gradual transfer to a very sudden transfer of weight from your feet to the straps of the harness. Correct? Yeah. And then there's one other way that you can do this, too, and it's being towed by a machine like Paris Sailing. Right. You're being towed by a boat well, I was reading this article from, I think, like, 1988, and people in Kansas, they have nothing to launch off of, but they were still in the hang gliding. So they were using tow trucks? Not tow trucks, pickup trucks. They just sit in the back of pickup trucks with, like, a little cable attached to them. And as the pickup truck gains speed, their glider would start to be picked up, and they eventually disconnect themselves and hang glide around Kansas. Launched via pickup, of course. It's Kansas. Awesome. It does not surprise me. Now that makes sense. I think I might even feel a little better about automobile doing the work for me. Oh, really? A pickup truck? Well, maybe. Do they just tell you around literally parasail style? Do they tell you toward a well, they don't have any cliffs in Kansas. No, they don't. They don't have anything. You're golden in that respect. The only cliffs in Kansas are delivering your mail. Nice one. I have one more thing. You got anything else? No, I got one more thing. So the earliest, earliest hang gliding designs didn't use a harness. It was like a hang glider, like you have, right? But you would run, and then eventually the hang glider would just lift off, and you'd be dangling like a rock from the control bar, hanging on for dear life. Rather than being connected by a harness in a prone position, you would just be hanging downward from the control bar. And that worked? Yeah. I mean, it was nothing like the hang glide experience that we have now that they didn't last very long and they didn't go very far and get very high. But I think it's kind of like a zipline thing. Wow. Yeah. So that's it. That's hang gliding, man. There you have it. We're going to go do it this spring. We are? Yes, we are. All right. If you want to know more about hang gliding, go take a lesson and try it yourself. And in the meantime, you can go check out this ancient house stuff works article. It's hilarious. And just type in hang gliding in the search bar. Bring this up. And since I said that, it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this just a really nice email from a nice dude. Oh, no. Hey, guys. Just recently finished my second run of every episode. How about that? Hats off to you, dude. After hearing the simpsons podcasts and understanding how it shapes so many lives, want to let you know the stuff you should know is helped me just as much, if not more. Just as you said, the simpsons pointed me, you guys, into the direction of pop culture. I think you said that your podcast shared and shared knowledge have done the same for me and many other people who listen. I've been listening since 2009, when I got my first ipod at 16. That's adorable. And at that time, I did not have many friends, suffered from depression and was dealing with a stressful life at home. When I first found the podcast, I was immediately hooked because it seemed like an audio version of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, which I was already an avid fan of. Man, this kid's got it nailed. I know he mentioned Mad magazine then. I'll know it's you. He hit the trifecta. As I continue to listen, I grew more and more attached to the comforting feeling of two intelligent guys having a friendly talk about interesting information. The show managed to give me a mental safe haven during rough times at home. Your nuggets of wisdom throughout the show provides subtle life lessons that were crucial to my formative years. The constant awareness of guiding listeners to have an open mind and warm heart is a needed reminder to be the best person I can be, to be more like Josh and Chuck. After high school, I joined the army and was isolated, often in different parts of the country. Knowing that I could hear the witty, friendly banter of you too, whenever I wanted always made me feel right at home. Right now, I am finally going back to college with a rifle aged 24, and it's mostly thanks to you guys. You are my academic heroes. Stuff you should Know may not have changed the world as much as The Simpsons yet, but it has certainly changed mine. Man how about that? That was a great email. Thanks for picking that one, man it was thanks for always being there. It means more than you can ever know. Christian Stanley P. S. If you read this for listener mail, it would be one of the highlights of my life. There you go, Christian. Highlight achieved. Yeah, level up. Thank you very much for that. That was a really great email and thanks for listening all these years. We appreciate it. Yeah, Christian, we super duper appreciate it. And if you want to tell us high and that you have been listening all these years, well, we appreciate you too. You can let us know via Twitter at joshmclark or S-Y-S Kpodcast on Facebook. Comstyshano. Charleswoodchuck Bryant you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetopworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotics for digestive of health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | |
20ff5df4-121b-11eb-85ed-63ab7c5b053a | Short Stuff: Squarer Than Wombat Poop | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-squarer-than-wombat-poop | One of the cutest animals on the planet is also the only one that squeezes out cube-shaped poop. Find out why today. | One of the cutest animals on the planet is also the only one that squeezes out cube-shaped poop. Find out why today. | Wed, 05 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=125, tm_isdst=0) | 12352418 | audio/mpeg | "Ahoy. And welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's, Chuck. And this is short stuff about wombats. Is that the sound they make? No, but it is for people who live outside of Australia. Yeah. Okay, well, this short stuff came about just from our recording two days ago. Which one was that in? Was that in the appendix? Yeah, appendix. Because we talked about digestion and pooping. Yeah. And you said something about wombats having square poop. And I was like, what? And you were like, yeah, because you're in front of my face. You showed me a picture, which was amazing. Maybe you texted it to me, too, because you're so used to doing that. And I said, we should do a short stuff on this. And here we are two days later, by God, and we're doing it. We are. We're talking about square poop. Square poop. Square poop started to say yes and something else, and it came out weird. What's going on with that? I don't know. I will say this, though, after researching this, this really clears up that old saying that I'd heard since I was a kid that I never got, which is, that guy is square is one battle. I guess I've not heard that before. Have you really heard that somebody say that? Yeah. You see some nerd, that guy is squares wambat. I was like, what does that even mean? You just keep saying that. I love it. I think we should start it. I just made it up today. Okay, so regardless of all these phrases, there's really only one animal on the planet that poops in cubes, and that is the wombat. And I think in particular, the bear knows wombat, which are, by the way, Chuck, about as cute as they come. Yeah. Australia has got two things. They have animals that will kill you dead and animals that you only want to hug. Yes. But sometimes that will kill you dead, too. Yes, exactly. That's the great thing about Australia. So the wombats are usually described as stout. They're very thick, they have short legs, but they're really powerful. And they use them to dig. They have long claws that they used to dig subterranean burrows in. And they're cousins of the koala. And they kind of look like they look a bit like a cross between a koala and a little tiny bear, a stuffed animal, if we're getting on it, basically. But I suspect that because of the sharp claws, you don't want to get between a mama wombat and her baby wombat. You know what I'm saying? Yes. And they're also bigger than I thought, for some reason. I thought wombats were fairly small, but they weigh up to \u00a377 or 35 kg if you're in Australia. And they're pretty territorial, but they do share their space with their friends. This is very cute. They will mark their trails and stuff with scent. And those little cube shaped poops, which I don't think we even mentioned yet. They poop out 106 sided turds every single day. And you use the T word. Is that a bad word? It's not bad. It's one of my most hated words of all. Well, it looks even gross or spelled out for some reason. Everything about it is terrible. The word itself even looks brown somehow. I'm not sure how, but it does. Everything about it is wrong. I don't know if I should say this now. I'm not going to say this. Go ahead. Okay. Are we going to leave that in there? Yeah, let's leave it in. And people would be like, oh, man, you got to tell us. But you said it's six sided keywords, right? So it looks like they look vaguely like dice. And even if you're just like I mean, I guess it's a cube. It's not a perfect cube. Look at your poop and then look at combat poop and see which one is closer to cube like and you're going to say, oh, yeah, definitely the wombat. And then if you stop and say, oh, wait a minute. The wombat is the only animal on the planet that poops cubes. This is kind of weird and maybe worth investigating. And for a long time, no one wanted to kill a wombat to dissect it and figure out what was going on in there. So we just basically walked around and said, it must have something of a square shaped rectum. I guess that's it. That's going to solve the thing. Well, yeah, but I think the very first thing that someone did was look on the hind quarters and say, no, that is round as round can be. Yeah. I think they were expecting one of those playdoh squeezed through shapes. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. But they're like, it's a star. It's an octagon. It was just a normal size round bottom hole. Yeah. Nanus I think a researcher even put his finger in there just to make sure. He's like, no, it's round. Oh, gosh, there we go. I think we should oh, yes. You're the guy who said turds and now you're suddenly grossed out. Well, you say bottom hole, then you got to put his finger in. Right. Put his finger in the wobble. That's bottom hole. After 13 years, I never know where you're going to fall. So that's great. I like to keep you on your toes. And here's another one for everybody out there. This is going to keep you on your toes. We're going to ad break. All right. The first study was looking under that tail, and they said, no, it's round and it's an anus. Yeah. Not a plato machine. The second test they did, like you said, they didn't want to kill him. In 2018, they found one that was hit by a car at the University of Tasmania. And Dr. Scott Carver said you know what? I'm treating these or. I'm looking into treating mange disease in Wabats. Anyway, so let me dissect this thing. Let me look at the intestines and holy moly. They have a couple of grooves in their intestines where they're a little more elastic than the rest. And that was in 2018, and I think a couple of years later is when they did a further test, right? Yeah. At our own Georgia Tech down the street. Was that a tech? Yeah. David Hugh or Hugh, biomechanics researcher at Georgia Tech, led the second American group into wombat intestines. And why wombat poop is square. They don't mention that David Who and his team waited for a wombat to get hit by a car. Like the Australian researchers, it just says they dissected two wombats, so probably best not to ask too many questions around that. Well, also, how did they get a wombat in Atlanta? Exactly. Maybe they had them shipped in and then they just kind of pushed them out towards 75. Let nature take its course. Yeah. Or they just picked up the phone and called any Australian number and some guy said, I'll get you two warm bats. What's your address? Or whatever they call an address. That's pretty great. So regardless, they got their hands on a couple of Mombas may have been alive, may not. We're not quite sure exactly what happened there, but they really focused on the intestines and that elastic part. And they found that not only is there a region that's more elastic, that's less constricting in the intestines of the wombats than other parts, they also found one part that's stiffer than the rest, and that all of this weirdness in the intestines takes place in about the last 17% of the Wambat's intestines. And that's here finally figured out that the square poop starts to take its shape. Yeah. And it happens because I think the stiff portions like a stiff rubber band. Basically, the whole thing like a rubber band. The stiff portions are like a stiff rubber band, which isn't a thing. I hate to break it to David u. And the softer regions are more droopy and kind of hang down, so it creates, like, this wavelike action. And the whole key to me seems like how slow these 40,000 contractions happen to get this poop out. It seems like it's just a very slow process and just kind of molds it into a little square. Yeah. I mean, we have a pretty long digestive tract, but the wombats intestines are ten times longer than the wombat itself, and its digestion process takes about four times longer than a human. It gets every bit of moisture and water out of it, every nutrient it can possibly get. So it poops out these very dry cubed poops. And it does that because the digestive process takes so long. But the other key to it, too, Chuck, is that the contractions of moving the poop through the intestines, basically every other animal on Earth, the contractions of the movements are the same everywhere around the intestine. Right. The wombat is, as far as we know, the only animal that has different sections that move differently at different times, and that's what produces the edges and the squares in the shape of the square poop. They finally figured it out. It's one of those things where it helps a lot if you're a biomechanics researcher, because they are not the best at explaining things, so it's kind of hard to get. It's one of those things that you just have to say, the intestines move differently than other intestines, and it has the time to create these sides and shapes. Yeah, I mean, it's almost like a perfect little square compression machine. It's set up to be that way, which sort of lends itself to the question, like, well, why is this happening? Then? If it's this perfect little machine making these little square poops that frankly look quite delicious and edible because they're so dry, it looks like a little candied treat or something. It's just sunk in, what you just said. What? You just said one bapt poops look delicious. They do. It looks like a little chocolate confection to me. Okay. I mean, if you put one on a bunch of them on a plate at a party, I might actually mistake one. Did you just make air quotes when you said mistake? Jerk. All right, so it lends itself to the question, like, why is this happening? Why is it making these perfect little cube poops? And who has an idea that, hey, maybe these things poop on rocks and tree logs and branches and stuff to mark their area, and obviously something square will sit better. And maybe, evolutionarily speaking, that's just what happened over the years. Yeah, and I mean, his guess is as good as any. He's the one who dissected the wombats and found the whole intestine thing. And actually, it makes a lot of sense. I haven't heard any rival explanations, I should say. No. I mean, he got an IG Nobel prize, right? He definitely did. And he's saying, like, I'm a biomechanics guy. He published, by the way, the article in the journal Soft Matter. For real? And he's saying, like, biomechanically speaking, we could probably use how the wombat intestines work as some sort of model or inspiration for shaping other things. But really, the most immediate practical application it has is that the drier and square wombat poop is the healthier the wombat is, so it can be used as a measure or standard for kept in captivity. Well, that's good. Yeah. So woods, like I'm contributing. I'm not just a wombat murderer. I'm contributing to the greater good. They're just those two. Let's not talk about them. Yeah, you just take a bite, you go super dry. That's a healthy wombat, right? Pass it around the orders tray milk, by the way. Very dry. It must be pale in season. So Chuck just laughed. There's a pregnant pause of awkward silence, which means everybody short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Monty Python Worked: SYSK Live from LA Podfest | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-monty-python-worked-sysk-live-from-la-podfest | Things get awesome when Josh and Chuck do a live show on Monty Python at the LA Podcast Festival. Hang out as the duo dives into the "Beatles of Comedy," what made them tick, what made them so funny, the whole bit. Plus, Kevin Pollak crashes the stage. | Things get awesome when Josh and Chuck do a live show on Monty Python at the LA Podcast Festival. Hang out as the duo dives into the "Beatles of Comedy," what made them tick, what made them so funny, the whole bit. Plus, Kevin Pollak crashes the stage. | Thu, 10 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=315, tm_isdst=0) | 50671459 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's. Not here. But we are here live in beautiful Los Angeles, California for the Los Angeles Podcast Festival. Very nice. This crowd is massive. Yeah. Sounds massive. Yeah. You were asking for it, too. Yeah. I find that when you turn and point a microphone oh, man. Just drive them crazy. They make noise. Good old trick. Walter Cronkite taught us that. First person I could think of. The first guy with the microphone that came to mind. Yes. So how are you feeling, man? You feeling good? I'm good. I'm a little sleepy, but I'm not supposed to be honest. I'm supposed to say I feel great and charged. Right. A little sleepy. So if I'm not funny, that's why. Yeah. We have a thing took, and I have a thing literally now, because we've encountered so many of them, of these kind of table cloths that are like pantyhose, and to get anywhere near the microphone cable right. But made of nylons. Right. So you have to be, like, right up on it. And it has this weird kind of give, but it's a little off putting, kind of feels a little, like, sexy. So if we're, like, sitting here during the show, it's weird. It's this thing. I'm all over the place emotionally right now. You're in a tail spin. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. So we're talking today about Monty Python. Right. And if you'll go back with us, we're going to head back to Swing in London in a group of English boys, got together and started a little television show called how to Irritate People. And it was actually a television special, and it was hosted by a guy named John Cleese. Yeah. Written by a guy named John Cleese and a dude named Graham Chapman, and also starring a guy named Michael Palin. And those were the only three members of what would become Monty Python. Did I spoil it already? But it was written by Cleese and Chapman, and the sort of a goal here was to do a special and to get Americans primed for this thing called British humor and sell it to American audiences. But it sort of failed in that respect. It didn't generate a lot of interest among American, I guess, TV executives. Sure. Yeah. Well, it was funnyish. It wasn't quite Monty Python, but you could see the seeds in it. Right. It was starting to grow from this. And about a year later, the BBC went to John Cleats and said, hey, we like what you did with how to Irritate People. Do you want your own show? And Clee said, sure, I'd love to have a show, but I don't want to be the star. I want to be part of an ensemble. And the BBC said, Go put your team together. So he spoke into his wristwatch and said, Python, assemble. And they all came from different corners of the earth and came together and formed a giant robot with a sword. The first time Monty Python ever came together. That would be amazing. Yeah. So he said, all right, I have this friend, Graham Chapman, and we went to Cambridge together. He's my writing partner. He's definitely in. And we just worked with this guy, Michael Palin. He's really funny, so he should be in. But he was doing a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was a kid show, and Cliff was a fan of that. And he said, well, that's wonderful. We would love you to come on. He says, Well, I have these other guys on the show I really like working with, so if you want me, you have to take this Welshman named Terry Jones and this other guy named Eric Idle and this other weird looking American that's just weird looking weird all around, named Tara Gilliam. And Cliff was game, and he said, Fine, let's just get all of this together. And then there were six. Yes. So they came together, and Terry Gilliam was definitely the odd man out. He's from Minnesota. The other five had gone to what's called Oxbridge, right. Oxford and Cambridge. Yeah. Where they kind of have, like, a lockdown on TV writing in the UK. So if you went to Cambridge or you went to Oxford and you want to get into TV writing, especially TV comedy writing, that's a pretty good place to start out. Yeah. Like here in America. It's Rutgers, right? Right. Yeah. Or San Jose State. I can't ever always get those too confused. No, of course it's Harvard. Everyone knows that. But, yeah, over there it's Cambridge and Oxford. And it turns out if you go to one of those schools, you're probably a pretty smart, clever person, which is a good start if you want to be the world's greatest comedy troop of all time, in Chuck's opinion. Is that all right? I think you can share your opinion on this one. We probably won't get any angry listener mail on that. How could you say that? Right? You should help homeless people. How dare you say that? I do agree. Monty Python is pretty great. You should probably explain that. We did an episode on homelessness, and we released it around Thanksgiving or Christmas to really kind of, like, stick it in people's heart. Right? Yeah. Our position was that you should help homeless people. Yeah. I mean, we took a stance on that, and we got probably more angry listener mail than we've gotten for any other episode we've ever released. Pretty much about homeless people can all go to hell. You shouldn't be telling people they should give them money or all sorts of stuff. They made decisions that led to that. Right. They got what's coming, too, but everyone agrees Monty Python's great. That was the overall point. So they were divided up into sort of naturally divided into writing teams. They already had Gleeson Chapman, who had known each other, and Michael Palin and Terry Jones worked together. Eric Idle was the lone wolf. He wrote by himself. And Terry Gilliam has always been in his own world doing his animation. So he was sort of in his own space as well. Right. So they were getting primed and ready, and the BBC said, all right, we'll give you a run of 13 half hour episodes. And by the way, I've spent the past two weeks non stop watching Flying Circuits. It's been amazing. It's like when your job is to sit around and watch Monty Python and then come and talk about it live, you're doing pretty well in life. So very lucky guy. And so they had to come up with a name, and Flying Circus was kind of always part of it. And the BBC, as legend goes, supposedly even said, Guys, we've already printed except they said it was a cool accent. We've printed Flying Circus already, so you can't change that part. But if you have a front to that, then think of it quick, right? And I think Cleese said, what about a python? Like something kind of slimy and weird. So they said Python. And then apparently, Monty is just like sort of an English guy in the pub would be Monty, just sort of a tired English thing, like todd here in America. So Monty Python was born. They liked the ring of it. It literally means nothing. There's no significance, right. Other than they just thought it sounded cool. Yeah. And they had other ideas besides Monty Python's Flying circus first, too. They had a horse, a spoon and a basin. It's pretty funny. Owl stretching time. I love that. The Toad elevating moment. Bum Wacket, buzzard stubble and boot. I think Monty Python Flying Circus is the best of the bunch. Well, then they had a couple of things before Flying Circus. Even El Moist's Flying circus. Right. And Will strangler's flying Circus, which that's pretty good too. Yeah, but that sounds too legit. Everyone would be like, Will Strangler, right? But then once you know it is Monty Python, you can't imagine anything else. Right. So far. So it's called, I don't know, the Explainer, actually. Not bad. Jot that down. Sorry. I got lost with the explainer. So I went to a place. So if you ever want to get confused, research British television, because they don't call season seasons, they call them series. Right. So Monty Python had their first series, and then the next year they had their second series. And I'm like, what is this person talking about? And then I finally looked it up after a couple of days. Did you really not know that until recently? Okay, yeah, I knew from context what they were talking about, but it was kind of confusing because by the time they get to the fourth series, they actually changed the name right to just Monty Python. That's what got me. They actually had four seasons, and the first season, it was pretty much what you would expect. Right. This is really brand new, cutting edge stuff. And they actually were not the first to really kind of experiment with sketch comedy. There was another show called Q Five that was done by a guy named Spike Milligan, who is like, this legendary radio surreal comedic genius, right? Yeah. And they followed on the footsteps of Q Five, which had started just a few years before Flying Circus. But these guys took it to a whole other level, and the BBC had no idea what they had on their hands. So they would shuffle it around late at night some weeks. They would just not show it at all. Some entire regions of the UK didn't receive it. It was just treated pretty poorly. Yeah. And the deal with Q Five, you can go watch some of this on YouTube. It's really good. And actually, the Pythons were kind of upset because when they saw Q Five, they're like, man, it's being done. That's what we wanted to do. We wanted to take comedy and give people something unexpected and turn it on its ear and subvert it and basically be weird. And so I went and looked up a little bit of Q Five, and the one schedule that I saw was literally, like, 15 seconds long, but it gives you a really good idea of what Spike Milligan was doing. And it just opens on a shot of a man with a Mona Lisa paint by numbers. So half of it is finished. Half of it has the big white areas with the little numbers in there. And I think, well, that's funny. That's the joke. And so the guy goes to paint and he puts on the canvas. He paints another white section and writes a number. I was like, It got me. I was like, Man, I didn't see it coming. So that's what Spike Milligan was doing and that's what Python was kind of shooting for, was just to do something that people hadn't seen. Right? Yeah. So even though they were not being treated well, it wasn't a lot of marketing or PR or whatever behind it. It still kind of developed a bit of a cult following, like word of mouth following among, I would guess, people taking acid in the 60s in London. Yeah, it was 1969 in color, which was kind of a different thing. Yeah, that was a big deal. Yeah. Especially when you think about Terry Gilliam's animations. Like, to see that in black and white, it'd still be great. But to see it in color late at night on acid right. Must have been something else. Sure. So if you watch Flying Circus, I mean, did anyone ever watch these episodes at all? They're all on YouTube. I encourage you. Like, they have all 50 I think 45 episodes. Yeah, 45. And it's really amazing when you watch it, you see the seeds of everything from Mr. Show to Tenacious D to Kids in the hall. Like Children's Hospital would not be a TV show if it wasn't for Monty Python. And Flying Circus, like this sort of absurdist silliness. Sometimes they make a statement, sometimes it was physical comedy, sometimes it was clever wordplay. It was really all over the map with what they were doing. Right. And as we'll see, they really kind of permeated pop culture, as everybody knows. But a lot of this stuff was just, like a one off thing, like the Spanish Inquisition. Everybody knows the Spanish Inquisition, right? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. And they were on one episode that just took place on one episode in season two, and yet it's, like, basically one of the backbones of comedy pop culture. And that's a really good point about Monty Python, that they were just packing episodes with great idea after great idea and, like, basically zero filler. And that was definitely part of one of the reasons why they were the seeds that grew. All of these other things, too. Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're often called the Beatles of comedy, because they weren't together that long, but their ratio of great material to stuff, and I guess, like, Saturday Night Live is probably the standard in the United States for years. And half of those sketches each week aren't great. Let's be honest. That's what sketch comedy is. It's like a risk, you're throwing it out there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But when you look at Flying Circus and, like, the Beatles, their ratio of great stuff, the things that didn't quite work was just astounding. Yeah, it was amazing, right? You sure? So one of the other hallmarks of Monty Pipeline is that they played almost every character amongst themselves. Terry Gilliam played the fewest characters because most of the time, he was off doing animations. That ended up proving really important to every episode and then the show overall. So he usually played the least. But he also played, like, some of the most memorable ones, usually just the dirtiest ones, like the character in the back. What's wrong with that guy? That was Terry Gilliam. Yeah. And he felt very much like, out of his world. He was in all of the other guys he knew. He was, like, nowhere near you, dude. So I'll do my weird animations, and if you need, like, a crazy leper in an episode, I'm your guy. I'm the leper. Michael Palin is probably my favorite, but that's kind of, like, low hanging fruit to say Michael Palin your favorite Python, because pretty much everyone agrees that he was probably the best actor on the show. Yeah, he was probably the most broad and accessible comedian with raw comedic talents. And who did I say last week? Graham Chapman was your favorite yeah, I think you did. Yeah, I think I've changed my mind. Okay. But when you watch enough Monty Python, and I think that's kind of the point, that you're going to get through this whole thing. There's an all star in every episode and every sketch, and you kind of end up changing your mind a lot. But I'm on Eric idol right now. Oh, are you? Yeah. He's muttering. Man, he was good. Still is. So they're very famous for playing, like you said, all the characters playing the women. Some of the best laughs you will get watching Flying Circus are when Terry Jones plays like the Craig, the old English lady. Right, like Brian's mom. Yeah. In Life of Brian. Did you finally watch it? I did. I watched it again this morning. Yeah, it's a good movie. I woke up at 730 and watch Life of Brian. You went, I could pay for this. Yeah, I did have that moment. Actually ordered room service. It was wonderful. So they all kind of fell into their specialties a bit, though. Like Terry Jones, he could play like, the middle class gentleman and the great old English bag lady type. Cleese and Chapman were the tallest. John Cleese was 65. Graham Chapman was 62. So they often played like authority figures or barristers or policemen or sort of the tufts. They were a little more imposing. Palin could do anything he wanted at any time. He was probably the most versatile. And then Eric Idle, he did the feminine ladies really well. Salesman. He's good at salesman. Yeah. For me, when it comes to wordplay, he was kind of the best. But they all had their strengths. And who was it, Gillian, that said they were like a molecule? Yeah, they fit together like a molecule if you take any one. And as we'll see, actually a couple have been taken from the group here there over time, it's just not the same. It just doesn't quite work. And it's not because there was a star or a leader, and that's probably one of the strengths of Monty Python, is there wasn't a star or a leader. It was just this random assemblage of guys, including an animator, who would have guessed, like, yes, we've got to have the animator, too, that came together to form this thing that had never been seen before and really hasn't been seen since. Yes. So the Flying Circus ran for four seasons. Only Cleese left after season three. And like we said, the fourth season was just called Monty Python. I think it only had about half a dozen episodes. And for Python fans, everyone kind of says, like, yeah, that fourth season, you take place away. It's just not the same. But it didn't hit in America until later, thanks to syndication. And in Dallas, Texas, of all places. On Kepa. Is anyone from Dallas? No, I didn't say kepa. I can't read my own handwriting. Get away with it. That's where it debuted in the United States. And then it got picked up all over the country here and there. I remember on Georgia, on GPTV when I was a kid, I was like 1011 years old, and I was exposed to British comedy by watching Hill and Flying Circus. And then later on I got into other things, like faulty towers and black hatter and all that good stuff. But, yeah, all of a sudden, Americans caught on. And so they said, well, we should make movies then. And Americans caught on. You said 1974, right? Yes. That was the last year that they had a TV show. They've been trying to crack the American market for years and it just wasn't happening. And they've basically given up hope. And then once it started to catch on in America and they already had a pretty good cult following in the UK. Once that American component came in, they were like, yeah, we should keep doing this. Let's try a movie. They already had one movie under their belt. It was called. And now for something completely different. Right? Yeah. It was a little weird. What they did was they literally took sketches that they had already done in front of the live studio audience for Flying Circus. They recreated those sketches on a studio stage and it was a sketch movie. It was like Kentucky Fried Movie or something like that. And it didn't work so great. I think their best movies were the ones where they actually had a story to the thing. Well, we'll get to the movies, everyone knows what they are. Sure, it didn't do very well. No, it wasn't a huge hit. And it was made, again, for America. It'd be like, hey, American audiences, check this out. So it was yet another reason they'd kind of given up on America. So America comes into the fold and they're like, yes, let's try to make a movie. Yeah. And Cliff had left, but he was obviously in the movie, so he didn't leave bitterly. He said that he was I'll go and read his quote here. He said that he wanted to be a part of the group, but he didn't want to be married to them because that's what I felt like. I began to lose any kind of control over my life, and I was not forceful enough in saying no. And he also had a couple of things he wasn't wild about in the show, and he felt like he wasn't being listened to. So he ended up leaving, but was still, like, friends with the guys and wanted to do the movies for sure. He also said that he was the one who had to work with Graham Chapman during Graham Chapman's alcoholic phase. He said that he was writing with Graham Chapman, who I didn't know this. He was gay and he was out. And this is like 1969, early 1970s. It hadn't been very long before that the UK had chemically castrated Alan Turing for being gay, and this guy is out for gay rights, even. Actually, yeah, graham Chapman. That was part of his philosophy. He was like, you know what? Let's put it right in their faces and see what they think about it. Yeah, exactly. So Clece is like Graham Chapman. He had a huge problem with alcohol during the time that they were making Monty Python, and Cliff was the one who had to work with them because they were buds from the Cambridge days. And he said that combined with the group not listening to him and feeling like it was taking over his life, he's like, I'm out. So after the third season, Cleese left. But that was about the time when they decided that they were going to go try to make the Holy Grail. That's right. On the Holy Grail. Yeah. Anyone ever seen that little movie? I think joke for joke, like Blazing Saddles and Holy Grail are in an eternal race to see Pound For Pound, what the funniest movie of all time is? Sure. In my opinion. Yeah. So you like Holy Grail more than life. O'Brien. Yeah, same here. I mean, I love life. O'Brien. But just the sheer amount of laughs and jokes in Holy Grail is astounding. Yeah, it's astounding. So they had a tiny little budget for Holy Grail. They didn't have money being thrown their way, and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam co directed, which is a little weird. And Terry Jones later would say that I think kind of annoyed Gilliam. So we ended up alternating days. Like. Monday Terry Jones would direct. Tuesday, Terry Gilliam would direct. Sort of a weird way to go about things. It's terrible, terrible way. But it's directed moving. And they filmed in Scotland and it was just a problematic shoot. The weather in Scotland, if you've ever been there, it's just like it is here. It's wonderful. It was very much a hardship shooting in Scotland. They had a bunch of problems with the budget. They didn't have what they needed. No, but that led to some pretty awesome jokes. Oh, yeah, go ahead. So the idea of King Arthur riding around on an invisible horse while his squire follows them, clapping together coconuts, that's because they didn't have any money for horses for the movie. So they're forced to come up with this awesome joke, which, I mean, it's funny when you first see it, and then it's funny when you're, like, sitting there eating spaghetti two days later and you think about how nuts that would be in real life. But that came out of these budget constraints that they had. They were also had trouble kind of raising money and I think finishing funds. So they had some very famous bands invest in the movie. George Harrison had always been a champion. He later would invest. Actually, he created a production company to make Life Of Brian. But for Holy Grail. Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd. Yeah, right. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Genesis all invested $20000. Why is Genesis getting a laugh? This is like Peter Gabriel Genesis, not invisible. Touch. Hey, there's nothing wrong with Phil Collins. Genesis, man. Nothing wrong. Sorry. I can have you thrown out. I'm up on stage. I knew you were going to say that. I was like, I bet I've offended Josh with that. I think he gets a bad rap unfairly. Sure he does. He's not like Sammy Hagar. Well, you want to know something funny? My wife Emily loves Van Hagar more than David Lee Roth. Van Halen and she's proud of it. She's like, oh, man, put on that song right now. World issues and like, the world's not right. Or we could I hear Janet Varney laughing in the background. Best laugh in the world. Yeah. So, anyway, Van Hagar and never mind. Yeah. Genesis, quick. Starring Silk Calling I think that's where we left off. That's right. It was Phil Collins who got everybody else to invest. Probably. So it's just a made up fact. In the movie, Michael Palin plays the most roles. He plays twelve different characters. He plays for Galahad played the soldier who argues about swallows. Remember that great scene? He plays Dennis the Peasant. He plays a mud villager singing Camel at night. The righthead of the three headed night. The king of the swamp castle. A wedding guest at the swamp castle. Brother Maynard's assistant. Brother Maynard, he was the main knight who says, me. And he played one of the French taunting knights. Terry Gilliam played the I'm sorry. Graham Chapman actually played the fewest because he was King Arthur, and as in Life of Brian, they didn't want to overuse him as the lead character. Sure. So he played King Arthur, the voice of God, the hiccupping guard and the middle head of the three headed knight. So that's Holy Grail, their next movie from this point forward. Holy Grail is just like a hit, right? Everybody loves a grail, right? Exactly. So they're like, okay, we'll go off and do our own things. Because one of the things that characterized these guys as individuals was they always had their own work and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with comedy. Like Eric Idol, all he does is comedic acting, but he's got his own stuff, too. Michael Palin got into making travel documentaries for the BBC. That was his thing. Terry Jones opened a brewery, Penrose Brewery in Hertfordshire, which I'm saying how it's spelled. So in the UK, it's probably like Channingham or something. And then John Cleese strangely formed a company that created training videos for business. Not funny ones from what I understand, either. Was he in those? I don't know. There's no way if he was in those that they weren't funny. Even if he was trying to be. If he's like, Please stop laughing. I'd love to see this. Very serious. It's about industrial safety, the emergency exits all behind and across. Well, he was kind of deadpan like that. That was sort of his thing. Yeah. Whether he liked it or not, he was funny. And of course, that's much later, I guess their third movie, their second narrative film in 1979 was The Life of Brian, which I watched this morning. To me, Terry Jones kind of steals that movie as Brian's mother. Yeah. Every scene he is in, he just walks away with. And that movie came about from a press conference, from Holy Grail. People were asking like, what's your next thing going to be? What's your next movie? And as a joke, Eric Idle said Jesus Christ, lust for glory. And that sort of got the seed started, that they should maybe go to biblical times since they did medieval times. Right. So when they started writing this movie, jesus actually became a smaller and smaller and smaller figure character, I should say, in the movie. And it became about Brian, this guy who's mistaken for the Messiah the same time he's born on the same day as Jesus, but he's most decidedly not the Messiah. If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth seeing. It's still hilarious. It's just Holy Grail. Life of Brian, in my opinion. Full frontal in that movie, too. Yeah. Nothing more to be said about it. So because it was about Jesus, even though it wasn't at all about Jesus, of course, it got banned in several places by people who hadn't even seen the movie, had no idea really what it was about. That's what we do in America, right. And Norway. Norway and seven American states banned it. And you can probably take a pretty good stab at which American states banned it's. Like the south and then something random like Idaho and then featuring Norway. I bet Georgia probably sadly banned it. Yeah, I imagine. For sure. Well, anytime you do a comedic take on biblical times, you're going to be in trouble. Sure. But if you watch the movie no, it's not offensive. I'm not very touchy about stuff like that, but I was watching it and I'm like, this actually isn't offensive at any point. Really? You're not easily offended, though? No. Unless you talk about Phil Collins. Unless you bring up Phil Collins. That's my button and I love to push it. So the final film they made was called Monty Python's the Meaning of Life. Oh, wait, hold on. I'm sorry. There's one other spectacular fact about the life of Brian. It won the jury award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. That's right. I have an arrow, an asterisk, and three exclamation points pointing to that sentence. Well meaning of life did too, then. Or did you mix it up? Oh, no, I'm sorry. The asterisk didn't work. You needed one more arrow. In 1983, they released Monty Pumpkins Meaning of Life, which won the jury prize at the Ken. Thumbs up. Can you believe it? And by this time, these were like financial and critical successes. Like, everyone was on board the train and it was another sketch movie. Very funny. I like The Meaning of Life, but to me, still, the other narrative films were a little better. But of course, the very classic Every Sperm is Sacred, which is very funny because if you watch Monty Python, nothing was sacred about anything. They would take on Hitler and Cannibalism and race and gay rights, and nothing was sacred except Every Sperm, apparently. There's this really great article a lot of this is based on. It's called the Beatles of Comedy by a guy named David Free. And he points out that it's sad that the word irreverent is overused these days because the literal sense of irreverent is the best way to describe Python, that they didn't have automatic respect for anything, which is a pretty good description, if you ask me. So Meaning of Life was the last official project they ever did together for a while, I guess in the late 80s, they got together and did a couple of live shows. They did one at the Aspen Comedy Festival, and then a couple of years ago, finally did one. Well, they owed money for Spamalot, the great Broadway show. They were sued by one of the producers of Holy Grail because of Spamalot, and were very famously owed about \u00a3800,000. They owed him \u00a38000. They lost. And they came out and said, we're going to get back together and do some shows for the money so we can pay off this lawsuit. And everyone was delighted that they were going to do these ten shows. They were one of their first reunion appearances in Aspen. They were being interviewed by Robert Klein, and Graham Chapman wasn't there because Graham Chapman died in 1989, one day before the 20th anniversary of the debut of The Flying Circus, which is kind of cool. Yeah. He just couldn't hang on for one more day. Yeah, very sad. And so Grandchildren is not there, but they actually brought his ashes in an urn, and he's on the table during the interview. For those of you listening to this in the future at home, the ashes were kicked over. Oh, yeah. And Ted Danson thought it was really funny. Yeah. I was like, Is that Ted Danson? Totally. Ted dancing. That guy's good. Have you seen Fargo? Season two. Yes. It's amazing. You get money for that or anything. You're just plugging it. Oh, I'm just a fan. I got you love dancing. But that kind of like typifies Monty Python. Like nothing was sacred. They would take their dear, dear friend and well, obviously, they weren't his ashes. Let's get real. But they would pretend like they kicked him over on stage for a joke. Right. And it worked. It did. So they performed at the Two Arena in England two years ago. They did those ten shows to get out of debt, and that was the last time they performed together. They say, that's it, they're not going to do it again. And they were together four short years on TV, the Beatles of comedy. I know, it's pretty amazing. So we're going to talk a little bit about how they worked. There have been a lot of interviews with sort of the inside story with the guys, and they kind of all roundly say it was a very democratic process. Palin comes out and says, Cleese was a little bit of the leader. He's a little forceful, his presence. He was a large man, he could be very convincing when he wanted something, but he said but in the end, it was very democratic. Like, no one really wanted to be the leader. Right. Terry Jones kind of considered himself a bit of a leader just because he directed so much like, he directed he co directed The Holy Grail, but he totally directed Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. So even still, I don't think he actually saw himself as, like, the leader of Monty Python. He was probably just the one who could get the attention of the other ones long enough to direct them. Right. Yeah. And they would fight and argue, like, get any group of creative folks together and you're going to argue. But they said it was never about big things. They would argue about, like, the size of the chair and sketch, but not, like, the big picture stuff, which is pretty cool. And then everybody kind of had their own little niche that they brought to the table. Like, John and Graham were funny, but also very angry and kind of bitter. Like, you could tell that they were like the traditional English schoolboys whose parents had sent them off to school at age like eight and hadn't seen them since, kind of thing. And then Terry Jones and Michael Palin were a little more, like, surreal, a little more whimsical. And then Eric Idle was very verbal. They said, yeah, he's my guy. Yeah, he's good. So good. So one of the big factors in their success was the freedom that they had with the BBC, but it was sort of a mixed bag. They had a lot of freedom to do what they wanted, but it is the BBC and it is on television, so they would often battle them about words they could say with the censors, of course. And they were famously censored for using the word masturbation. Yeah, they were. What was it? Masturbation. Well, Josh, explain. In the summarize proust competition, there was a game show that was you had to summarize a proof poem or proof short story in, like, 60 seconds or less. They had this whole game show and so they said, Strangling animals, golf and masturbation. Hobbies. Right. And so originally, the BBC is like, you can't say that. Well, they recorded it anyway. And then the BBC went behind them and edited it out. So in the original version that was aired, it was strangling animals, which they left in golf like a dead air for a second and then a big laugh. And they said when they went back and watched it, they were like, this doesn't make any sense. What's so funny about golf? So as far as their aim, it kind of depends on who you talk to. Terry Jones very much said that they were trying to subvert the establishment and they were trying to make a statement and try to make some noise. Michael Palin said, I think that's kind of overrated. We were just trying to be funny as we could be. So I think it was probably, as always, the truth is sort of somewhere in the middle there with what they were trying to get accomplished. Yeah. They also said that radio was a big influence because they were from the generation where none of them they didn't have TV until they were like twelve or 13 years old. So that theater of the mind that you get when you would listen to the radio as a kid, and I know that not many people in this room can probably imagine that, but now we have podcasts that do that, right? Yes. Which is wonderful. Now, that really struck me that that was one of their big creative inspirations was being raised on radio, that they were forced to use their imaginations and that they managed to figure out how to translate that into TV. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. And I mentioned like Tenacious Tea and Kids in the hall and these shows that would come along that would mr. Show especially, where each show would have sort of this weird theme that ran through it, but it was never like a statement. I mean, it would be like, I watch an episode the other night of Flying Circus where the theme was just a pig. And in the very beginning, Graham Chapman just sits down and you hear this, and then they cut to a chalkboard of a bunch of pigs drawn and they just x out another one. And then just randomly through the episode, there would be a pig here or there, or someone else would sit on a pig and they would cut it and do another one. Meant nothing at all, but that in the animation, like then a pig would drop on Jesus head and there would be a fart noise in the animation. And so they had this weird kind of theme. Like that one was the Pig Show, right? Or whatever, and you very much see that, like Mr. Show, they sort of had these little thematic elements that tied it together. One other thing Mr. Show did very well, that you can kind of say Python started was blending one sketch into another one would not end before the other one began. They just kind of crossed path. I think pretty much they pioneered that. Yeah. And it could be done in a lot of ways. Sometimes they literally ran into each other. Like, you would have a thing with medieval knights, and he would walk to the next set, which was like a modern day living room, or it would end like, I saw one where they did a little snapshot to close the sketch, and then they would pull back from that snapshot, and it's just a picture on the wall in the next sketch. Right. So they just had really clever ways of sort of tying it all together. It was very cool. They'd also sometimes run the credits in the middle of the show right. And then not run them again at the end. Like that's where they went in the middle of the show. Yeah. Or John Cleese. The show would stop if it had been canceled, and Cleese would come on as a supposed member of the BBC to apologize for the content of the show in the middle of the show. And then someone would just come in, like, lasso him off stage. They go right into the next sketch. Yeah. Very cool. So there are also Anachronisms masters at Juxtaposition, everyone who's seen Holy Grail. It ends when modern day police show up and arrest not only the actors in the big battle scene, but the cast and crew. And they would shut the movie down. So they would throw weird things like that in there. Like the Picasso thing. Yeah. Picasso painting a painting. Riding a bicycle while he's on the highway. The A 29 highway. Just randomly. Yeah. Or the Spanish Inquisition being in a modern day household. Right. And they were extremely smart, very well educated dudes. But if they were doing a project, they would also do more research. They didn't just automatically know everything. And some of their best jokes came out of that research. Like, when they were researching for the Holy Grail, they found that one of the common tactics during medieval siege was taunting the people who were trying to siege the castle. Right. So that was actually done, apparently verbatim in history. The other thing they learned in the research was that they did used to launch animals. We actually covered this in, I think, our Castles episode many years ago, where they would launch animals. The idea, of course, they didn't cover this in the movie, but the idea was that they would be diseased animals. So it would actually have an effect other than just being really weird and disconcerting to see a cow come flying. But it would be like a cow that was very sick and would get people sick when it exploded all over everyone. Really gross. And lead to a plague in the castle, ending the siege. You know, Josh, starting your own business can be really difficult, but developing your online presence doesn't have to be. Right? Right. Because Google and Squarespace have teamed up to give small business owners what they need to succeed online. Checkers, accustomed domain, business email and a beautiful website all in one place. That's right. With Google and Squarespace, you can stand out, look professional and increase your team's productivity. When you create your Squarespace business website or online store, you're going to receive a free year of business, email and professional tools, all from Google. It's that simple. All you do is just visit Squarespace.com, google and start your free trial. And while you're there, be sure to use our special GWiz offer code. Works. Works and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Google and Square space. Make it professional. Make it beautiful. They felt no social dread. They were often described as little boys. This article from The Atlantic said they not only weren't afraid, they didn't know they should be afraid. So they kind of had this sweet, naive quality about them. What's wrong with doing a sketch about Hitler and the Pope? Should we not do that? I don't think it ever occurred to him that was off limits. There's a really good example of that in the sketch called The Undertaker Sketch, which I think is probably the funniest sketch they made. Let me set it up, though. John Cleese is this dude whose mother has recently died, and he comes to the funeral parlor where Graham Chapman is the undertaker. And Graham Chapman kind of runs down the list of things they can do to John Cleese's mother, right. Like, they can bury her, but if she's not dead yet, she'll be eaten up by worms and beetles and it's quite shocking. Or they can just toss her in the Thames or something like that. Right, yeah. And then John Cleese, he's a little shocked, but it turns out he has his mother in a burlap sack next to him. Like he dragged her body to the funeral, partly. Right, so what they're playing there is God Saved The Queen and everyone is reverently standing around. They stopped rioting because they started playing God Save the Queen, and any good Britisher will just immediately stop whatever they're doing and kind of piously stand there. The reason that they did God Save The Queen was because Monty Python, all the guys in it had this deep fantasy that one day the Queen would turn on the BBC and accidentally watch their show. And so they really hoped that the one thing that she tuned into was the undertaker sketch, like the foulest sketch that they ever came up with. So that's kind of a nod to that desire. Yeah. And if you watch that sketch and you're uninformed, you hear people start to boo and hiss a little bit and let's have something decent. That's disgusting. And you're like, oh, my God, the audience is turning on them like they've gone too far. It was all planned, of course. Look how it is, everyone. It's Kevin Pollock. Thank you, Kevin. Wow. Did that just happen. Something's in the water. What's he doing here? I don't know. That's a really good question. He's in the wrong place, clearly. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Kevin Pollock. I've been waiting to say that for years. So the BBC hated the undertaker sketch for obvious reasons. They did not want it to air. But they said, all right, we'll let you guys air it if we can put these plants in the audience to boo and hiss and yell and eventually come down and riot very awkwardly at the end. So that was the compromise. Pretty awkward. Long as the Queen watches, right? Yeah. Sorry. Where was kevin Pollock? Really threw me on. When they got to movies, they never were allowed to cuss on the air. And when they got to movies, they could obviously do what they wanted to. But for the most part, they still refrained from actual curse words. Brian has a few F bombs, but that's it, right? It works. They don't stand out. No, not much. But they found one part where something did stand out to them. They actually went back after they shot the movie and dubbed in instead of the C word. I'll let you guys figure that one out. They put in clutch instead. John Cleese calls Graham Chapman a clutch because he screwed something up. I don't remember what it was. But they went back not because of a sensor. They went back and edited it. That's a really difficult edited it out fast. Yeah. Because they thought that it kind of detracted from the overall joke, the larger picture. They were self referential. How about that? I don't know about reverential, but they didn't curse much. We got a couple of tidbits to end here. Yeah. Well, not only were they influential in the world of comedy, but they're part of pop culture now. Like, people say things like the knights who say no and the Spanish no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. It's worked its way into the fabric and the lexicon of pop culture. Python esque is actually a word that's in the Oxford Dictionary now. It's official. It's a real word. Spam. Like Spam email named after the famous sketch. I wish we had the Spam sketch. Well, you should have given me a heads up. I know you guys have seen the Spam sketch, right? Where they come in and everything. Spam, spam, spam on the menu. One of their great wordplace sketches. But my favorite part of that sketch not the weird fact that there's Vikings in there or the weird fact that it stops halfway through and there's a history lesson for Michael Palin, but it is when the sketch starts are you looking it up for no reason at all? Lower the two main I think it's scramchatman. And they lower them into the scene from wires in a sitting position into their chair for no reason whatsoever. It's just a diner scene. And then they just are lowered in sitting like this and then sit in their chair. Then it starts. Yeah. And then it starts. And that's like the genius of Monty Python, for no reason whatsoever. And Python is a coding language, too, named after Monty Python. There's actually a fossil snake, a fossil river snake that lived 100 million years ago in what is now Australia called Monte Python. OEDs, river slavensis. Nice work. It's named after Monty Python. And like you said, the guys all went on to do their own thing. They were together very short time, made a huge impact. When do you say palin did travel docs? Among other things, of course. Fish called Wanda. We all saw and loved that they still enjoy being together, I think john Cleese's wife said she loves her husband and she's never seen him have as much fun and laugh as much as when he's with the boys. The lads. Yeah. It's very sweet. That is sweet. There's a very sad thing I should mention just yesterday. Well, don't you think we should save this for the very end to really bring him down? No, I'll wedge it and then we'll try and make you laugh again. Terry Jones just announced yesterday he is suffering from a rare form of dementia. And it's super sad. His mates have known about it for a while and they've all kept it quiet, but it's a form of dementia where it renders him unable to speak. So they officially came out with the announcement just yesterday and said, Terry Jones won't be doing interviews anymore. And all the guys are making statements about that. They've known about this for a while. It's been very sad to see. And now something funny completely different. So if you go to a UK funeral, you are probably very likely to be hit with the song Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. Actually, there was a survey done in 2014 of, like, 30,000 British funerals that found that that was the number one song played at them and it beat out Invisible Touch. Nice. That'd be great. It Beat Out My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, which is can you imagine? How offensive is that, being at a funeral and being subjected to that? Just be like, yeah, you would rise from the grave and gag, I've got nothing against Celine Dion or even that song, but that plus a funeral is just I got something against her in that song. I'll say it. You're a music snob. I am. So we'll finish with this little tidbit. We might not know about Money Python, and it might not have never made it to the United States if not for one Terry Jones, because back in the day, it was common practice in the BBC, and I guess in the United States, too, to erase over tapes of shows. Yeah, because they're expensive. Yeah, they were pricey. And someone at the BBC literally called Terry Jones and said, they're about to erase over flying Circus. Get down here now. Yeah. And what do you do? Terry Jones left the phone hanging, and the guy was like, hello? Hello? Did you hear what I just said? Terry and little lady know Terry Jones was already on his way there, showed up while the guy was still on the phone shouting, Terry into the phone. This is, like 2030 minutes later. Terry Jones grabs the tapes, goes and pays for his own blank tapes, makes copies of them, and the legacy was secured. That's right. So we have Terry Jones to thank for that legacy and this unnamed person from the BBC who thought to call them rather than just going ahead and erasing the tapes. That's right. You got anything else? No. Do you guys want to stay here and watch Monty Python clips for, like, a half an hour, see if you can find the spam? Seriously? I found the spam. It's three and a half minutes long. Perfect. Great. We got three and a half minutes, right? All right. That'll be a great way to close it out. Those of you have to pts. Okay, we bring you to close out this stuff you should know live episode at La podcastfest, the Monty Python Spam Sketch. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
c4367cee-5460-11e8-b38c-2bff5ac89acd | SYSK Selects: How the U.S. Postal Service Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-u-s-postal-service-works | Back when this episode aired, the USPS was teetering on the edge of going under and there were a lot of plans on the table to save it. With the USPS again at risk now for different reasons, join Chuck and Josh as they explore the history and future of the postal service in this classic episode. | Back when this episode aired, the USPS was teetering on the edge of going under and there were a lot of plans on the table to save it. With the USPS again at risk now for different reasons, join Chuck and Josh as they explore the history and future of the postal service in this classic episode. | Sat, 25 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=116, tm_isdst=0) | 43472869 | audio/mpeg | "With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is, like, the easiest decision in the history of decisions, kind of like choosing to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with their top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms. Apply capital one in a member FDIC. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? Now you're making smarter decisions faster, operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, friends and family. It's me, Josh, your pal, your buddy, avenging angel, all that jazz. For this week's SYSK selects I've chosen how the US Postal Service Works, because, as you may know, the Postal Service is under threat of being closed and going under yet again. We don't want that for some reason we can't quite put our finger on. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode and it rouses you to do something like save the Post office. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. I'm Amy Goodman. This is democracy now. Warren peace Report. Warren peaceorg, et cetera. I'm Steven. How are you doing? Good. Jerry just said, let's do this old school right before she recorded, and I have no idea what she meant. Three of us back in, like yeah, she's back two years back. I thought she meant let's make it crappy in five minutes long. Right. And we need, like, little empty tin cans to speak in. Dude, make it sound right. How are you doing, Jerry? That's great, Jerry. Give us a thumbs up. I know. In our new murder room, jerry is within our eyesight again after a long layoff where she was not within our range of viewing abilities. It's kind of weird because now I'm looking at you, but I can clearly see my peripheral vision that she's on Facebook. She's waving. She's brushing her teeth. She's rearranging the severed human heads that are in jars all around the place. That's creepy. Yeah. You want to talk Post office, man? Yeah. You want to give the disclaimer that we're only talking about the post office in the US. Of A? I think you just did. Okay. We don't know how it works in your country. No. And actually, it's probably not nearly as interesting as what's going on with the US. Postal Service. The USPS. Because I don't know if you know this or not, Chuck, but the USPS. Is in a lot of trouble. Their solvency the amount of money that they have to keep the lights on and keep everything going is expected to run out in October of 2013 if they don't do something. Yeah. That's this year. Yeah. I think they lost $16 billion last year. Yes. And 5 billion the year before. So that's three times as much money in a year. That's bad news. Here's the caveat to that $16 billion loss, though. 11 billion of that was in payments to the future benefits of postal workers that have not yet retired. But well, yeah, the Postal Service is the only federal agency of any sort that is required to prepay its employees benefits for the future. In 2006, the lane deck session of Congress said, you know what? You guys need to make sure that your workers are taken care of. Right. So you guys have to start prepaying over the next ten years. And they have been and they've been bleeding money. I mean, like a $16 billion loss, but 11 billion of it was to these future payments. I guess that would make sense then if you took out that eleven, they would just be at about the same losses before a mere 5 billion a year. Right. And that's a lot of money to lose. It is, but they're figuring out ways to make up for that extra loss. And one of the big ones that's on the table now is cutting out Saturday delivery. Yeah. August, I think they figure they can recoup $2 billion a year by doing that. So then they're down to three. The thing is, the post office is part of the executive branch. Man, it's all over the place. It's a part of the executive branch. It's part of the federal government. But it gets $0 in tax revenue, and it's also a thrillkill cult. Right, exactly. That's the horrible secret of the year. They're all over. Right. So they get no money besides what they can make off of their own revenue. Yeah. They're essentially a corporation. Right. But they're also under the purview of the federal government. Yeah, it's a weird, weird thing. And they can't act without asking Congress. And Congress hasn't exactly been forthcoming lately. They haven't approved the Saturday thing yet, have they? Congress? Here's the thing. Isn't that still up? They've been trying to get Congress to approve that forever. The Senate passed a bill that said, after two years, we'll let you cut out Saturday service, we'll give you $11 billion in overpayments that you guys made toward the retirement stuff, all the stuff back that went to the House, and the House didn't do anything with it. Right. Yeah. So, you know, the fiscal cliff, the US. Congress passed a stop gap measure, basically a federal budget that says within this period, we're still able to operate. Right. Right. And the USPS. Says, haha, you didn't include our mandate from 1981 that we have to carry out Saturday service in that stop gap. So technically, under current federal law, we don't have to carry out Saturday service. And they're arguing it legally. So they're just saying that's the loophole they're going to use to shut down Saturday service. Yes. Packages, medicines, just packages. They're going to deliver packages on Saturday. And here's a really good reason express mail. Their revenues from packages have increased 16% over the last ten years, whereas first class mail letters have gone down 32%, I believe. So they're making almost all of their money because it's only $45 to mail a letter from Florida to Hawaii. 46. Is it 46 now? Yeah. But they make however much shipping in the shipping game, which is where they make all their money, which is, ironically, the one place they don't have a monopoly. As far as the mail goes, I'm glad to see mail order medicine on that list, too. Express mail packages and medicine, because at first I was like, who cares? I don't. Yeah. I don't need my mail on a Saturday. Right. But you need your medicine on a Saturday or else you go blind. Well, that's why they included that as something they would still deliver. Right. And post offices that are already open on Saturdays, you'll still be open on Saturdays. Yeah. So if you want to go to your PO. Box, maybe there'll be some mail, maybe there won't be. Who knows? I bet you've had a PO. Box. I've been thinking about this. Haven't you? No. Really? Yes. Have you? No. You just struck me as the kind of person that would have had a PO. Box at one point. That's where I get all my guns in the mail. So I'm pretty worked up about this, as you can see. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Yes. Who would have thought that the Postal service would ever be interesting? Sure. I think parts of this are very interesting, and we would just want to go ahead and say hello to all of our postal carriers out there that listen to our show, who won us over during the Bush era, because we've gotten emails from you guys and gals. Yeah. Including one of our favorite people out there is a postal worker who? Van Nostrin. Yeah. Is he? This one should really be a tribute to Van Nostril. He's a carrier. He's always been kind of cryptic about what he does, but I'm under the distinct impression that he's employed by the Postal service. All right. So Bangalores, van Nostrin. This is for you. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about the postal service. Man. I'm all jazzed about the USPS. I'm glad you are. So for a little while, even after the advent of electronic mail, the postal service, the amount of mail they were delivering was still increasing. As of 2007, it was on an upward trajectory. Sorry, 2006, right? Yes. 213,137,000,000 pieces of mail that year. Yeah. It's down to 167 now. Yeah. And then when was this written? Do you know? I think 2007, 2008. Okay. So then they had 700,000 employees. Now they have about 580,000. So they've been in trim the budget mode, I think, for the past few years. Well, the reason why, in 2006, they also made $72.8 billion. I mean, those stamps add up. In 2011, they made 66 billion. Wow. Not bad. Yeah. But they're still losing a lot of money. I mean, that's what, $7 billion in difference in just five years? Yes. It's not good. It's not good. So where does this come from, Chuck? It came from back yonder day. People always need to communicate, obviously from long distances. And in 1639, colonists here in the New I guess they weren't United States yet, but in the New World, need to get word back to England occasionally and say things like, hey, quit bugging us, or, hey, send us more tea and crumbts. Right. So the first official postal service was established in 1639. Richard Fairbanks Tavern in Boston was the official mail drop for overseas there in Massachusetts, and that was the place to go if you want to mail something. Yeah. And I couldn't find what happened or where it went on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably not a pub. I would imagine that you just went to that pub and said, hey, is there any mail? And they said, no. And you turn around and travel to 500 miles back to your village. So that was step one. Step two was about 40 some odd years later, 1683, william Penn established. Very famous person, obviously the first official post office in Pennsylvania. Yes. Named after that's. Right. And I love the side note here in the south, private messages were just sent between plantations. Yeah. So they would probably just give it to a slave and say, carry this over to that guy. Right. And then flash forward a little bit more. The 1691, the British Crown gave a man named Thomas Neal a 21 year grant for the postal service in the United States. And he paid like seven shillings a year. So that's nothing. Right. He still died in debt. Did he really? That's a monopoly. So the postal service has always been kind of tricky to call money from. Interesting. So that continued until 1774 and a lot of big stuff was happening around that time, like, hey, we don't like you anymore in England, controlling us over here and taxing us. So we're going to start and establish our own constitutional post office for any kind of mail going from anywhere. Basically intercolonial mail. Yeah. It was very cutting edge at the time. Sure. And actually, when the British were carrying out the postal service on behalf of the colonies, in the colonies, there was a guy named Benjamin Franklin who was appointed the postmaster of Philadelphia and he actually killed it as postmaster. Of course he did. He like, totally improved the roads. He said, like, we're going to start working like 24 hours a day. We're going to have lots of shifts. We're going to put up milestones. Like the Postal Service helped improve the connectedness of the colonies, thanks to him. So when the Continental Congress said, hey, we want our own Postal service, ben Franklin became the first postmaster General. Sure. And of course, he ran it like a tight ship. And he's one of those dudes. I get a feeling if we could resurrect him and bring him out today, he could fix what's going on in this country. Yeah. And he'd say something pity and ask for a glass of sherry. Exactly. So this is to me, when it gets super interesting, was in the 19th century when westward expansion happen, california gold rush. All of a sudden we needed to get stuff from the East Coast to San Francisco, let's say. Right. As quick as possible. What's crazy is, as quick as possible was to go down New York around Florida to the Caribbean. Yes. Unlike a steam ship through the Caribbean and then across like, Panama and then up on the Pacific side to California. That was the fastest way to get mail for a while. Yeah. And how long? Three to four weeks to send a letter from the East Coast to the West Coast. And that's the best case scenario. Right. And that's how the East Coast communicated with the West Coast for a while until some stage coach routes were established. There was a southern route and there was a central route. Yeah. And the southern route you could supposedly use year round. Sure. Because it's lovely down here. But then the central route, it was faster, but they said you can't use that year round or storms. Yeah. And it also killed me, man. The way they used to name companies back then was so, like, it made perfect sense. You basically just said what you did. Like one, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company said, we're going to carry your mail to the Pacific by steamship. And then the Overland Mail Company like, well, we're going to do it over land, so that's what we're going to call our company. Yeah. So they got the contract. The Overland Mail Company along the southern route took about 25 days. And then one of my favorite parts of American history was born. The Pony Express. Yeah. And it's just so amazing, like the idea that they had to do this. It was a different company that was competing that wanted to get that contract away from the Overland Company. Right. The COC and PP. And they said, you know what? We know the central route shorter. We're going to prove that we can use it year round and we're going to set up something that it's just going to blow this 25 day thing out of the water. And they set up the Pony Express. Yeah. And they had stations, what, every 1020 miles, and a rider would ride from st. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento or be part of a line of rider? Well, yeah, that's the key. They go about 100 miles and then they change horses every, like, ten or 15 miles. Yes. So the same rider would change horses because they rode the average 10 miles an hour, which doesn't sound fast, but you got to factor in, like, the Sierra Nevada's, where they're just crawling up these mountains. So these dudes were riding hard and on flat ground, if they're averaging 10 miles an hour. Right? Yeah. And they're going 24 hours a day, they're going 2000 miles, 10 miles an hour. That's what, 20 hours? Yeah. No, that's 200 hours. So what is that? That's less than ten days. So that cuts that Overland Company's rate by 150%. Yeah. There was always one set of riders going east, one set going west. Yes. I think when you were relieved by another rider, you'd hang out at that station and wait for somebody to come the other way and then relieve them. Yeah. They were paid really well at the time, $25 a week, which at the time, unskilled labor made about a dollar a week. Did you read the first ad they ever put in? No. Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert writers willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. And that's maybe legend, but supposedly that's what it says. But apparently they were young, little light life, skinny kids because you didn't want some big dude like me up on a horse. Right. The horse would be like, I don't want to ride anymore. So they were like these young boys. I think the youngest one was like, 14. Oh, wow. And supposedly Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider, although people have disputed that now. Oh, yeah. He's the stuff of legend. Well, he's by far and away the most famous Pony Express rider, if in fact he did. But anyway, think about the amount of infrastructure built up along this central route to have a station every ten or 20 miles. You've got all these employees going and they proved it. They proved that the central route could be used year round. So they got the contract then, right? No, the Overland Company got the contract to use it, to use that same route that was already established. And the Pony Express is like, you have to be kidding me. Yeah. And so the US. Government said, no, you guys do half, and then let the Overland Company do the other half. Yes. And they were mad for about a year and a half and really angry. And then the telegraph line was completed and everyone's like, oh, well, I guess we're all out of business now. Yeah, that was it. Pony Express is sold to Wells Fargo and basically shut down. Yes. I think American Express ended up branching out of Wells Fargo, too. Yeah. Like, these are old companies, like these modern banks and credit card companies. It's interesting how far they go back. But think about that, man. Even as far back as the mid 19th century, new technology was putting mail delivery out to pasture, and then mail delivery would evolve and figure out how to come back. Yeah, it's pretty cool foreshadowing. It is. So this is a big jump forward to the mid 1960s. Yeah, a lot happened in between then. It did. And actually we started to go move further and further out into the suburbs. There's a huge population boom in the post war era, and businesses started to realize the value of direct mailing. And all these factors put together meant that the postal service was totally overwhelmed. Yeah, completely, because it became such a big deal. Everyone was writing letters and they were using the same old, I guess, hand delivery methods, sorting methods. That's what it was. They weren't automated at all, and they needed to be right. And so there was a postal reform that was undertaken. Yeah. And this was in 1971, the post office department. And I didn't even know this. This is shortly after I was born. We weren't the United States Postal Service until 1971. That was when we officially became the USPS. It became an independent establishment, was no longer a part of the cabinet of the federal government, but was part of the executive branch and got the monopoly, basically to deliver mail, even though it was supposedly just a company. And they re up the mandate from, I think, 1792. That said, the postal service is one of the most essential services of the federal government. No person is cut off in this country. None shall not get delivered. Exactly. Everyone's going to have a mailbox, and everyone's going to get mailed to that mailbox every day because we need to help keep intellectual freedom going and ideas in business and commerce going all the time. And the postal service is the federal agency that carries that out. And I'm sure that put a financial burden on them when people started building in these especially rich people when they started building in these remote areas, because then all of a sudden you had to add that to your route. Well, it's 60 miles up a mountain and it's the only house. There's a guy who services the Grand Canyon. There's a group of Indians that live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He has a donkey train that goes down there every day with the mail. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's a federal mandate. You have to be able to get mail. Everyone has a mailbox. He's like, don't you guys use smoke signals? Come on. They do. In fact, I actually wrote an article on smoke signals. Yeah. I was going to say we should podcast on it, but it's like super basic. It would be like a five minute podcast. Well, we'll have to figure out some other way to use it. Agreed. That's interesting. So do we cover going postal now? It's sort of just thrown in the middle of this article. Yeah, it really was. It was talking about how packages are delivered and all of a sudden it says and then people started killing each other in 1986. Yeah. Which is actually the post office has the dubious distinction of kicking off the workplace shooting trend in the United States. Was that the first one? As far as I could tell. Well, all right. So. 1986. Edmund, Oklahoma. Patrick Henry cheryl killed 14 coworkers. Another one happened, including a supervisor getting killed with a samurai sword. November 1991, Thomas Mclevane shot and killed four coworkers, wounded five others, then shot himself. And then 1993, and then in 2003, two more incidences of postal workers killing fellow postal workers. It was like just between 86 and 97, 40 people died at post offices from postal rampages. Yeah. And gave birth to the term going postal, which is used as vernacular for just losing it, basically. And if you're interested in that at all, there's a really good documentary, I think it's on Netflix streaming right now, called Murder by Proxy. Oh, yeah. And it's all about the postal shootings. So weird. Like where they came from, there's a lot of scrutiny of the management techniques of people at post offices. There's got to be something to it. Oh, yeah. If you watch it, how many other industries had that many office shootings? Retail? The homicide rate is three times higher in retail than it is at the post office. But you don't say going retail, right. That just means you're going shopping. Well, it's like drinking the Koolaid. They really drank flavor aid. That's right. Koolaid is the one with that distinction. Yeah. All right. So that was going to be yeah, I mean, we had to mention it, but I don't want to dwell on it. But it was weird in this article the way it went right in the middle of this came up out of nowhere. Zip codes. This is kind of cool. Yeah. Zip codes were introduced in 1009, six, three and then officially put in place in mandatory in 1967 because just so much mail going on, you had to categorize it more specifically. Right. That was part of the post office being swamped. This is the first step toward automation was like a standardized code. Well, they did have other ones, but it was like one was in New York City or something like that. Yeah. So zip, this is just a nice little cocktail party factoid stands for zone improvement plan. I never knew that until I read this. Did you know that? I had before, but I'd forgotten. Okay, so it's a zone improvement plan. And here in the United States, at least, it's a five digit number, represents a location, obviously, where you're trying to send something. And now they have the zip code plus four in some areas of, I guess, major urban areas. Have a little more specificity. Right. They deliver it to your like they put it on your stomach. If you put the zip plus four, I think certain buildings even will have their own plus four if it's a big enough building. Right. Or if you get a lot of mail as a person. Is that what you're after? Is it plus four for your well, it says that some high volume mail receivers get in. I'm like, if it was cool mail, I'd love to get the mail. So the first digit there represents the state. Here in Georgia, that's a three. It increases as you move west. And there are some states that share each digit. Yeah. Like two. It's taken up by a lot of states. There's the District of Columbia, north Carolina, south Carolina, Maryland, virginia. West Virginia. Man, all twos. I would be mad if I lived in one of those states. So then you got the second 3rd digits. Those are regions within the state. The first three of those create what's called the SCF code, the sectional center facility. And then the fourth and fifth digits are even more specific. Basically, it just hones down as you go left to right until you've got Josh Clarke's house. Right. Like this state, this section facility, this post office. Yeah. This neighborhood. Yeah. And then maybe this building, this high volume mail receiver named Josh Clark. That's right. So you've got the zip code that allowed automation. And a little known fact is, the US. Postal Service doesn't just handle a ton of the US. Mail. It handles 40% of all of the mail in the world. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. So before the zip code, this was really difficult. It also went from if you're mailing something from New York to San Francisco, it went through every distribution facility in the country in between New York and San Francisco before it got there. Really? Yes. Now, with zip codes. Well, let's talk about what a letter does. Okay. And this is all thanks to zip codes. So I write a little love letter. I'm going to mail it to Emily, which is weird because we live together. Right. Just being romantic. That's actually a great example, though, because you can mail something from your mailbox to be delivered back to you, I reckon. I've never done it. That's the poor man's trademark I've heard about that. Is to mail something to yourself in this whole field. I think it depends on the judge. Yeah, probably. Okay, so you put it in your mailbox. Postal carrier is going to pick it up. They're going to take it to the post office. They're going to put it on a truck and then take that from the post office to a processing plant where we have our long awaited machines doing some sorting. Shape and size. Yeah. Well, first they sort everything out and make sure everything's facing the right way up. Right? Yeah. And the packages are put on one belt, and then letters are put on another. And the letters say, let's just stick with the letter that you wrote. Okay. It goes into a slot, so it's facing upwards and upright, frontwards and upright. And then they put a little bar code on the back of the letter in, I think, ultraviolet inc. Yeah. Well, first thing it does is it gets a postmark and cancellation line saying basically you can't use the stamp again. Yeah. Don't even try it. Don't be cheap. We've seen the whiteout tricks. We've seen doctoring up a stamp, which is probably a federal offense. It probably is. And then, so after that, the barcode is printed on the back of the piece of mail. And then there's an optical scanner that reads the address, which is pretty cool. And they're really, really, really accurate, too. But if your handwriting is terrible, they have a new system now where this conveyor belt takes a picture of it, send emails, a picture to a human being at a computer who reads it that's what I think it is. Types it in, and then so it stays on the line. It doesn't have to come out any longer. That's pretty new technology. Yeah. And then, so, based on this address, including the zip code, it prints a barcode at the bottom. If you look at a letter, any letter you get has a little barcode on it. And so that's what's red that's right. The thing on the back is invisible, I think, right. Yeah. It's fluorescent. It's just showing off. We have invisible link. Other processing machines then read those barcodes and then sort them in their little bins according to zip code. And it's just basically placing everything in what will eventually be a trade that will be delivered back to a post office or a sorting facility. Or does it go straight to a post office? It goes to no other processing plant. Right. So imagine each processing plant, like regional, I guess, has a bunch of mail coming in on trucks that it sorts and then sends out. And then based on its zip code that it serves, it gets a bunch of flats from other distribution facilities that's right. That are already according to the zip code. So let's say it's getting a flat of mail by zip code. It then also sorts through those that's right. And it actually sorts them into an individual carriers route in order. And that's what's delivered to the post office. So it arrives at the post office ready to go on the truck. Yes. Okay. And that doesn't mean that the postal worker doesn't have much to do. They still have, like, circulars magazines, bulk mail they have to go through and put it for every address, all that crap. All that my recycling bin, basically, yeah. Although the coupons remember our junk mail episode from years and years back? We got so much holy from people who are. Like, no, you can't get rid of junk mail, right? That's the only thing keeping us in business. It's 2022, and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why teladoc is ranked number one by JD Power and Telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Telecom is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. So if you're going to address a letter, there are a few guidelines. You got to put your address legibly on the front. You got to put your little return address in the upper left corner. Yeah, on the front. Don't put it on the back upper left corner there. And don't use periods and commas. Like if you write PO box, it's not p period, o, period box. Although that doesn't matter. Apparently it allows for greater efficiency in reading your letter. Maybe, because I always put like, atlanta. Comma ga period. I do too, and they still get there. But don't you wonder if they get there, like, earlier? I don't know, maybe. So it is. Supposedly you need to be able to read the address at arms length. So don't write tiny, right? And don't write so big that they can't do other things to the envelope, like scan and stamp and things like that. And then you got to put your return address, because if something happens, you want it to come back to you. Yeah, although I don't do that much anymore. A lot of times I'll just put like Atlanta, Georgia. Really? You don't put your return address on there? No, but I rarely mail things, and a lot of times when I do it for work. So I'll just put Atlanta, Georgia, house of work or something. I got you. And it's not the kind of thing that if it doesn't come back to me, I would care. I got you had some precious thing. I would put a return address. I have a feeling that you're going to get some email from postal carriers that are like, I hate people like you because whether you care if it comes back to you or not, I'm sure they have to get it back to you. There's a lot of type of delivery services. We won't go over here. But I did want to say that media mail is a great little trick. Not a trick, but a great tool if you're mailing things like books and or DVDs, because it's super cheap, but it takes a while. But that's part of that mandate from 1792 that they want to keep the intellectual juice of America flowing through the Postal Service. So things like that, like creative stuff or books or correspondence. And I think that's how if you've ever ordered a book on Amazon for like two cent, you're like, oh, how can they sell a book for two cent? Because they charge you like 495 for shipping, and they probably pay like eight cents to mail it with media mail. That's the greatest scam of the 21st century. No, not really. I mean, they're making their money via shipping instead of the book itself. But publishers don't like it, of course, because they want to sell their books new and not for two cent on Amazon. So I think we said that the Postal Service has a monopoly on delivering mail, but not on delivering packages. Right? Sure. So because they're kind of in competitive business against like Ups and FedEx and DHL and all those guys. Those guys have gone ahead and invested in the infrastructure of, say, like air delivery, air transportation of mail. And the Postal Service has tried that before. Like they tried a guided missile in 1953 which they shot full of mail from a submarine to a naval station in Florida, but it was just too expensive. Right. So the Postal Service said, hey Ups, hey FedEx, you guys have a bunch of planes. Can we start putting our mail on it? And they said, sure, for a few billion dollars a year. And the postal service said great. But at the same time, they kind of stepped forward into the 21st century by doing so. Yeah. And the Postal Service, having access to everyone's mailbox is often tapped by Ups and FedEx deliver what's called in the business the last mile. So a lot of times, especially if you're a rural person if you get something from Amazon. It was shipped by Ups, but eventually it made its way into your postal carriers route and being delivered by the Postal service. Yeah, there's way more mixing of package mailing than you would think. It's like a swinger party or something. Pretty much. And part of that deal in 2001 with FedEx was, hey, FedEx said, can we put our boxes at your post offices? And they said, sure, for $126,000,000. And they said, can we hit you right on your plane? They said, sure, for 6.3 billion over seven years. But it seems like a good agreement. And they did the same with Ups. And we scratch our back, you scratch yours. We scratch your back, we'll scratch yours. Yeah. Is that how it works? Yeah. Why didn't everybody scratch their own back? I don't know. Okay. Because it's hard to reach. Yeah, I guess so. If you realize that the Postal Service needs a few billion extra dollars, you say, why don't you just up the postal rates? Yeah, well, the federal government keeps its thumb on that. They want to make sure that anybody who needs to mail a letter can do so without great expense. Yeah. It's a big deal to change the postal rate. It is much more than you would think, because a layman like me would just be like, yeah, just add a few cents. Who cares? Yes. What's the problem? Just print it. This forever stamps. Genius idea. You don't have to go back and reprint a bunch with the amount. Great idea. Or the $0.01. Remember in Fargo and Wade got the $0.01 yet with the duck? Yeah. And she was like, Everyone needs the $0.01 whenever they raise the rates. Yeah. He's like, oh, gee, I didn't think about that. But yes, there's a very long, protracted, difficult process of raising the postal rates. It's not a very easy thing now, and it involves a ton of bureaucracy. Should we get into that or just leave it at that? It's up to you, man. I think we should just leave it at that. Okay. So if you are going to mail something from your house, you need your little mailbox. And I just installed mine in what seemed like a sensible manner. I didn't realize that there were actual rules. In fact, you are supposed to contact the post office before installing your mailbox, which I had no idea to make sure it's like, the correct placement and height. The post office person or the mail carrier doesn't have to get out of the truck. Oh, they'll burn it down if it's not the specification. So you want to contact the post office? I didn't, but I guess I just lucked out because they say generally 41 to 45 inches from the road surface to the inside floor of the mailbox or point of entry, and then set back six to eight inches from the front face of the curb or road edge to the mailbox door. Right. I guess I just got lucky then, because I get my mail without any burning down of your no or without a post office box, which we talked about. They've been around for a couple of hundred years. And that's if you want to have a little key to your little own box in a post office and get your mail there, you can certainly do that. It's handy if you're starting out a business and you want to make people think that you're not working out of your house, you can get a post office and say, look, I have a PO. Box, which means I'm working out of my bedroom. Right. It's like code, I think. Or you're getting guns in the mail. Is that what people do? I'm sure there's a lot of people who try to get guns in the mail than their PO. Boxes. Yeah, sure. Okay. Or if you tend to move around a lot in the same town and you don't want to worry about changing your mail and forwarding your mail, you could always just get a deal box. Yeah. So those are some reasons you want to talk feature the post office if it's around after October 2013. Sure. What is the future of the post office? Well, there's a lot of stuff coming down the pike. There's the cancellation of Saturday mail yes. This August, they're really going hard after package delivery services now. What, trying to oh, with the flat rates and stuff like that. Yeah. Just really like courting businesses to say, hey, consider us instead of Ups or FedEx. Right. And especially with prescription medicine. Sure. Because we have an aging population that's going to do nothing but increase in size. So you're going to need more prescriptions through the mail. So, hey, let's get into that. Yeah. And you can get stuff like that certified and insured and signature delivery approved and stuff like that. It's helpful. Part of the post office is pledged that your letter carrier won't take your medication before delivering. It might hit you up for some. Right. But there's also a line of clothing coming out. Postal service line of clothing coming out, I'm not kidding, called Rain, Heater, snow. And we almost didn't mention this. So the postal service is Creed, right? Sure. Neither rain nor snow nor sleet hold on. Rain or snow, neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. And that's actually not the post office's official motto. They don't have one, but it's been linked to them. And it's actually an adaptation of something from Herodotus, the Greek historian, who was making a comment about how the Persians, even during their war in 500 BC, they were one of the first ones to establish a real postal service. And even during war, the postal service didn't stop. There were still documents being delivered, and herodotus was commenting on that, and that's where that came from. It should include or loss of limb. It did originally. That's an adaptation. It wasn't loss of limb, but it was something like, yeah, some sort of sickness is befallen you right. They were putting the mail before themselves. The show must go on. Right. So there's a line of clothing called Rain or Heater, Snow. And then they're also talking about creating federal email addresses that you get at birth. Just like you have a physical address, you would also have an email address, but your email address is attached to you rather than the physical location you live at. And if you say you need to correspond with the IRS or Social Security Administration, something like that, you would send this very secure email through this postal services portal. Everything else you could just use, like Gmail or Yahoo or whatever for everyday stuff. But this is like the big stuff, the really important stuff. And then the postal service would also offer, like, a digital lockbox for a will or your medical records or something like that. Yeah. And listen, as every conspiracy person in the country now says, I want a federal email attached to my name that I have to send things through. Yeah, well, that's the number of the beast, obviously. Yeah, I don't know that I would want that either. I'm not a big conspiracy guy. Oh, it's not that you have to send it through that. It's that if you send it through that if somebody hijacks that or reads it, you're going to be in a lot more trouble, federally speaking, than they would be if they read your Gmail. Yeah, because isn't it illegal to open a federal offense to get someone's email? Exactly. And that's what there's this guy who runs the think tank for the postal service who's like, it's not just about mailing documents. It's about protecting the connectedness of the United States and Americans. So how do we do that in a digital world? And it's thinking about this. So if you're even the least bit interested by this episode that we just recorded, there's an Esquire article called Piece. I didn't though there's an Esquire piece. It's called do we really want to live without the Post Office? And it's by Jesse Lichtenstein. And it is really good, man. It's a really good overview of what does Jesse think we need it? He or she, I think, kind of leans toward we need it. And the more you start to read about it, the more this weird kind of civic affection for the post office developed, where I'm like, yeah, we don't want to get rid of the post office. You want the post office. Who doesn't want the post office? It kind of develops. Yeah. Maybe it was a simpler day, or maybe that people stuck with their routes longer, but I remember my postman growing up. It was the same guy for years. And we lived on we didn't live in a neighborhood. We lived on a street in the woods with like, six houses. And so I would run out and check the mail and wave at them, and we would give them gifts at Christmas. That's awesome. And now I have no idea who my postal carrier is, which is my fault. I need to just go out there. I think you do. Yeah. And also, the postal service is responsible for the largest food drive in the United States every year. Oh, really? Yeah. You know that food drive where you just put, like, canned food in your mailbox in your postal employee picks it up. Really? You can do that? Yeah. I've never heard of it. It hasn't been very well publicized, but at least around here, I guess. But it's a huge food drive. At the very least, postal carriers are taking and eating cans of braviolet for dinner. This is delicious. I love this food drive. Yeah, so don't just put cans of food in your mailbox. Check into when that is supposed to be. That's got to be the worst day of the year for letter carriers. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? It's a lot of weight. Yeah. You got anything else? No. Respect your postal carrier. You want everybody to go out and meet their postal carrier? Yeah, why not? Give them a hug. Actually, don't do that. They might mace you or something. Yeah, but give them a wave. Yeah. If you want to learn more about the post office, you can type those words into the search bar athouseofworks.com. And be sure to check out the Esquire article, too. It's very cool. And I guess before we get into that, Chuck, you want a message from our sponsor? Let's do that. Yeah. It's 2022, and things look different. Like doctors visits, for example. Sometimes you don't have to go into a doctor's office to be treated for nonemergency situations, like a sinus, infection or allergy. And that's why Teladoc gives you the chance to connect with board certified physicians right from your home via phone or video. That's right. Doctors are standing by 24/7, so you can schedule a visit according to your schedule. You can see for yourself why Teladoc is ranked number one by JD power and Telehealth satisfaction with direct to consumer providers. Tele Doc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use Teladoc. That's right. If you want to check it out, download the app today or visit teladoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today, that's Teladoc. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an evergrowing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify.com stuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right now. Okay, now it's listener mail time. Josh I'm going to call this fan who thought we were wrong and did a little research, and we may not be wrong after a call. That's a great title. We had a bunch of filmmakers right in when we talked about the subliminal messages being inserted into movies in the 1950s by James Vickery, because we said it's one 3000 of a second or something, and a bunch of filmmakers went, there's only 24 frames per second. So if you switched out one frame, it would only be 120 4th. There's no way. There's no way. And where'd you get this number? Where did you get this number? I went back and looked and I was like, I see this number in various places. So we got this email from Brian Henry that disputed this, and then he wrote back with this. Hey, guys, looks like I may have spoken too soon. I was assuming that Vickery was just changing the film itself, which would result in the messages showing much slower and at the maximum, 120 fourth of a second. But I did some research and apparently he used something called a I've never heard of this before. A tatchestadoscope. Tatoscope. I think you got it. Tatoscope. Okay. To project the messages on the screen, not the movie projector, he said. So this way he would have had a lot more control over the speed of the messages. To all the filmmakers out there who wrote in and challenged us, I wrote back to a few that was like, jeez, I don't know, man, I'm looking for it. And some of them were even kind of snotty about, like, you should research it more. So apparently put that in your Titius scope and smoke it, is what I say. Yeah. And that is from Brian Henry. Yeah. Thanks, Brian, for the research and being a good guy, saying, hey, I was wrong, he was one of the nicer ones about it. Well, thank you. If you want to let us know that you were wrong, even though you had told us that we were wrong at first, we love those. Yeah, you can tweet that to us at syfpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffiesudknow or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-12-22-sysk-christmas-special-final.mp3 | The Stuff You Should Know 2016 Christmas Extravaganza in 3-D! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-stuff-you-should-know-2016-christmas-extravaga | It’s the most wonderful time of year again! Time for Josh and Chuck to take you on a cozy, hall-decked ride full of glad tidings right into the heart of the holiday spirit! | It’s the most wonderful time of year again! Time for Josh and Chuck to take you on a cozy, hall-decked ride full of glad tidings right into the heart of the holiday spirit! | Thu, 22 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=17, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=357, tm_isdst=0) | 52187066 | audio/mpeg | "You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco pet supplies plus, and select neighborhood pet stores. US hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilguera and Georgia Hard Stark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuckworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is the 2016 stuff you should know. Super Christmas Holiday Spectacular glad Tidings Edition in 3d. Nice and stinko vision. Nice smello vision. That was a real thing, you know. Yeah, it was. It was a great idea. That didn't really pan out very well. I don't know about that. Well, no, it didn't pan out very well. Yeah, funny. I know what you meant. So, my friend, I look forward to this every year. Yeah, me too. Because as I've said before, I save up my vacation and take an elementary school break for a solid three weeks at the end of every year. Right. Which also means you get a bit of a break. Yeah, it's a de facto decision on my behalf as well. And this is it. In 1 hour, roughly, you're not going to see me again until next year. Yeah. I like to get small over the holidays. That's cool, man. I don't blame you. I do, too. Just hold on. I'm secretly fine with you making that decision for me. That particular one. Yeah. So are you full of cheer glad tidings? Well, I'm in a silly mood, so who knows where this goes. How's Jerry? Jerry, are you feeling pretty happy? She is. She's good. Just gave a thumbs up. She's fresh faced, pushy tailed. Are her hauls decked? Oh, yes. Double decked. Well, I guess we should welcome everybody, Chuck, to the Christmas spectacular. Tell you, first off, to be sure to start a fire somewhere in your house, put on sweater, maybe put on some slippers, put on pajamas, make yourself some eggnog hot butter room, something like that. And just sit down and enjoy yourself. Yeah. And we do a holiday special every year we like to cover. I'm always afraid we're going to recover something, which I actually pitched something we had already covered. I've got a list, so don't worry. About it. Okay, great. Well, then let's ring in the holiday cheer. Hey. Also, we should say if there are any little true believers among you, you may not want to let them listen to this one. Well, yeah, I was going to give a warning. They can listen to most of it, but there is one feature of the show where you may not want your kids to listen to some of the details, and we are going to give you a warning before that comes on. Yeah. So you can it'll sound like this. Ring, ring. That's still Christmas warning. All right, let's do it. All right, everybody sit back as we begin our annual Christmas special. So, Chuck, we're going to hop over there, slay, and head on over to Catalonia. Parts of Spain. Parts of Spain. And there's a Catalan tradition. There's a couple of them, actually, that are really interesting and are scatological in nature. And the first one is called cagatillo. Yeah. I had never heard of this, but I put out and you'll see later in the show, we put out a call on Facebook for some unusual family traditions from listeners, and a couple of people mentioned this, like saying, we don't do this, but I've heard of it, and it's really strange. Yeah. It's definitely a thing in large parts of Spain. Portugal. Even some parts of Italy. Too. From what I understand. But specifically in the Catalan region of Spain. Cagatillo. Which means poop log. Basically in Catalan. It's a Christmas tradition that starts on December 8 when the family gets around. And while they've gone out. I think either made one or they purchased a cagatillo. Which is a log with a face on it. Yeah, I get the idea that part of the fun, and correct me if I'm wrong, Spanish among you, but part of the fun is making it with the family. Sure. But I'm sure you can buy them, though, as well, right? Fully featured. Even if you bought one fully featured, there's still some ritual that you, the family, have to go through that would be kind of fun. Exactly. So with Cagatillo, with the log, he's got a face, but very importantly, he also has two front arms, so he's kind of propped up, right? Yeah. And when you bring Kagatillo home, he also has the standard Catalon red, kind of overhanging hat cap the battle. Yes, exactly. And so the family brings them home, and on December 8, they get them prepared for the Christmas season. Right. They wrap them in a blanket, and they basically wrap them from what would amount to the waste down in a blanket to keep them warm. To keep them warm. And to maybe incubate what dwells inside of the log. Yeah, because that's where we're headed with this. They feed this thing orange peels, a Spanish nougat called Terrone. Is that right? Yeah. And apparently, as tradition is held, the more you feed the cogatillo the more gifts it will bestow to you through the traditional route. Which means out of the rear end. Right. So the kids every night while they're caring for cogatillo, and I imagine probably more than just every night, I'll bet this thing gets fed a lot of orange peels and nougat, they feed it. And as the I guess Christmas day I also saw Christmas Eve approaches. They prepared to extract the stuff from cogatillo and they do that by hitting kagatillo with sticks. And they have a traditional chant. You want to give them the translation of the chant? Yeah, not the original. In English it translates literally as poop log, poop, taron, hazelnuts and cottage cheese. If you don't poop, well, I'll hit you with a stick. Poop log. And so once they've beaten cogatillo with a stick enough times, they'll look under the blanket and see that he's pooped out a bunch of candy and treats and gifts. And it's an amazing, wonderful little Christmas tradition. It's wonderful. But that's not the only unusual poop based Catalon Christmas tradition either, is it? No. I was kind of surprised to know that there was more than one. How do you pronounce this? The kaganar. Kaganair. Kaganair. Yeah, pretty close. So this is just not a log, it's an actual carved or now readily manufactured sort of doll figurine that has dropped its pants and is just pooping. Yeah. And with the little traditional figurine, there's a little pile of poop beneath his rear end on the ground. So not only is he pooping, he has pooped. And if it's the original version, it looks like a Catalan peasant. So he also has that red hat. He's probably smoking a pipe. And these things are designed to be put into the nativity scene as one of the figures, along with the Holy family. And a lot of Westerners find that offensive and don't understand that it's not meant even in a joking manner, it wasn't originally. It was meant because the caganeer represented things like fertility or good fortune or good luck being as poop did. But over time it's definitely evolved. And now you can find cagoner figures of all sorts of famous people, from Barack Obama to the Star Wars crew. Has a kagganair collection. Yeah, of course. Did you see it? Well, yeah, there are all kinds of pop culture icons now with their pants pulled down pooping. But did you see the Star Wars one in particular? No. Was it good? Yeah, it's pretty great. C three PO has pooped out like a bolt nut. Not a nut like one might traditionally find in a stool. No, not a peanut, a walnut. Oh man. Who knew this one was going to be so gross? Yeah, well, I guess we could have guessed. Yeah. You found this stuff. What else can we mentioned here? There was a world's record, of course, on December 10 I'm sorry, december 2010, there was a 19 foot pooping figurine placed in the shopping center and on the record for world's largest cognair yeah. In Barcelona. Pretty good. Yes. I looked at a picture. I couldn't find any actual specs on it, but by my estimates, the pile of poop is about 3ft tall. Oh, okay. Yeah. In the middle of the shopping center. The Mara Magnum shopping center in Barcelona. Nice. Well, my sister lives in Portugal now. I'm going to hit her up and see if she's seen any of this action. Yeah, for sure. Ask her to mail some cognaires. I'd love one. You can order one online. Yeah, I bet you can get a better deal on one. Should we take a break? No, Josh, we shouldn't. Oh, yeah, we shouldn't, because as of per tradition, our Christmas episode is ad free. It's one small little thing. We like to do it's ad free with 100% more Christmas. That's right. All right, so let's pile in our sleigh and let's head on over and see how Doctor Krampus is doing yeah. Over in the Alpine region. Yes. Of Austria. Well, let's talk about Krampus. It's a weird thing, but then it's not any weirder than Santa Claus, if you really look at it. Yeah. Or bringing a tree into your home. No, it's really not. And it actually makes a lot of sense, too, because Santa Claus is so good and pure and happy and joyful, and Krampus is all the opposite, as it was put in this one Smithsonian article I read. Krampus is the yin st nick's Yang. Yeah. And they actually hang out together. And we should probably describe Krampus a little bit first, huh? Yeah. So here's the legend is that Krampus shows up. Krampus is sort of a beast of sorts, a demon, a demonic, impish beast with a long tongue and claws. The name, in fact, is derived from the German word for claw, I believe. Yeah. What's that? Krampin. Was it that simple? So Krampus, he shows up. He shows up in the town the night before December 6, which is also known as Krampus knocked or Krampus night. And that's also Nicholas. Tiger St. Nicholas Day, December 6. Right. So they show up on December 5, the night of the fifth. Yeah. And like the light in the dark, krampus is like, no, Saint Nick can't just show up. I will show up as well and try and ruin the good time. Right. So what's interesting is, like, on Krampus knocked, St. Nick goes around and leaves little goodies in the shoes of good kids. Sure. And then birch sticks in the shoes of bad kids, ostensibly for their parents to smack them on the behind with for being bad. But there's another level reserved for the truly bad kids, and that's what Krampus is there for. He's there to abduct and torture and potentially eat the really bad kids. Yeah. He's actually going around with St. Nick, visiting people's home. Yeah. How bad are you? Do you need to be tortured and eaten. Are you bad or like, Krampus level bad? And this harkens back. The first thing I thought of was, of course, our episodes on the Grimm Fairy Tales. It very much sort of aligns with that, where children are readily offered up as food for beasts. No one cared back then. No, they definitely treated their children more harshly, for sure. There was a lot more, like getting lost in the forest and no one coming to find you going on. Yeah. So Krampus obviously over the years, there have been a lot of people who have been like, let's abolish this. This is not in the modern Christmas spirit. He is the son of the Norse god of the underworld, hell, H-E-L. And during the 12th century, the Catholic Church tried to ban Krampus, and then more recently, in the 1930s, when Austria's conservative Christian social party came around, they definitely tried to get Krampus outlawed, but people would not have it. They needed their Krampus. Yeah. I mean Krampus predates Christianity. He has some staying power. He was originally like a Germanic demon of pagan folklore. He would be tough to get rid of, and probably now more so than ever, because some sort of weird strike, in effect, apparently happened. And now more people are aware of Krampus than ever before. And he's celebrated big time. People love him. They're mostly people. Oh, yeah. There was a good horror movie. I can't say if it was good. I haven't seen it, but it looks good. But people who get sick of the holiday spirit being crammed down their throat for after X number of weeks usually turn to Krampus to kind of find some relief. I looked up this other thing, because at the end of this article, it mentions a couple of weird things. Demons in other countries, Christmas demons, and the one in Greece, Calacons. Did you look that up? Yeah. This is crazy. These are little impish demons that speak with a lisp and eat worms and frogs and things. They only come out at night. They're afraid of the sun, fire, holy water. And then the rest of the year, they live in the center of the earth and attempt to chop down the tree of life. Right. But at Christmas time, they emerge to wreak havoc above ground. Right? Yeah. And apparently one of the legends of the Calicans are that they can only count to two. Did you see that? No, I didn't, actually. But I'll bet I know where you're going with it. Well, they won't say three because it's a holy number, supposedly, so they only count the two. So if you want to guard your home against these little empty you leave a colander on your doorstep. So they go mad trying to count the holes. They just go 1212 over and over until they commit suicide. That's pretty standard. It's very strange. You know what is strange, though, too? Is that's a remedy for protecting yourself against vampires? The original vampires couldn't count, and they would just go nuts trying to count, like seeds. I think you're supposed to leave. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I remember they originated in Greece, too, I think. Yeah. So it's all a surefire remedy that just works for everything. One size fits all. Yeah. Did you see the one about Danny, the South African ghost boy? Yeah. That was really this is just, like, scary. So if you're a kid in South Africa around Christmas time, you need to keep an eye out for the ghost of Danny, who is a little boy whose grandmother made a batch of cookies for St. Nick. And Danny just couldn't help himself. He ate the whole batch of cookies. So his grandmother murdered him, and now his ghost haunts Christmas in South Africa. It's a weird tradition. Yeah. It really drives home that we're at an all time high in terms of regard for children in the world. Yes. We're finally doing it right here in 2016. Yes. No murdered children's ghosts on our watch. You ready for the next segment, or you want to? I'm so psyched about this one. Let's get in this way. Yeah. Let's ride on over to TV Land yeah. Which exists in our imaginations. And in Culver City, California. That's right. Of course, we're talking about a Charlie Brown Christmas and just a little bit of its history. It's one of my favorites. After All These Years. I still love watching that show. Yeah. And after all these years is right. It's been on every year since 1965, which actually makes it the second longest running animated cartoon special in history. It's in second place after Rudolph, which came out the year before and has run every year since as well. The Rankin Bass Rudolph. Yes. Which is kind of sad. Charlie Brown just can't come in first. But it's a very Charlie Brown thing, though. Yeah. It's kind of reassuring. Well, that's one of the things I always loved about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. And this article points out the melancholy behind it. It was never just some happy go lucky, dumb kids thing. There was always just so much melancholy and pathos in those characters. It really I don't know, it spoke to me as a kid. Yes. And so I guess the executives at CBS and the ad agency for Coca Cola were expecting something totally different from everything that Charles Schultz had done up to that point with this Christmas special when they ordered it. Right. Yeah. Well, it almost wasn't even ordered. There was a producer named Lee Mendelsohn who did a little documentary short about Charles Schultz called A Boy Named Charlie Brown. And for the first time for that little documentary, they just did a little animation because previously had been a comic strip only. And so they just a little bit of animation by a guy named Bill Melendez. Yeah. Exactly. And so they put that famous jazz piano scorpa, Vince Garrali, which is amazing, and people saw it, and they were like, hey, maybe this would be a Christmas special. And they said, no, no one wanted it. Yeah, somebody, though, heard about this documentary, which apparently was just lost the history pretty quickly, and said, have you guys ever thought of just doing just a straight up Christmas special? And apparently Lee Mendelson heard the first rule of Hollywood, which is, you answer yes to every question, of course. And he said, yes, of course we have. And apparently rung up Charles Schultz the next day. And that next day, they had basically all the rough outline points of what would become the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Yeah, they're like, we need this music because we love it. We want some ice skating, we want a Christmas pageant, and we want the theme that well, sort of a religious theme. Like Charles Schultz apparently insisted on that. Well, yeah, he was pretty religious. And yeah, he definitely insisted on it. And again, the executives who were waiting with bated breath for this thing to be delivered to them were like, this is awful. What's going on here? This is super religious. It's not hilarious and joyful. It's like you said, it has paths. But it's a children's animated Christmas special. Where's the laugh track? They wanted to put a laugh track in. Yes. And they definitely wanted Linus reading from the Bible out. Yeah, they definitely did. And Charles Schultz said, no, it's staying in. And they also wanted to cast adult voice actors. And it kind of occurred to me that I never knew who did any of those. So just for quick shout outs to some of the characters, charlie Brown was voiced by Peter Robbins. These great, classic iconic voices were just little kids. Linus was Christopher Shea. Sally was Kathy Steinberg, and Lucy was Tracy Stratford. And you can go look up the rest of the cast if you want, but that would be weird if we read out, like, 18 people. But the other kids actually so the ones you named were professionals. The other kids were actually neighborhood kids in Bill Mendelson, the animator and director's neighborhood. So they were, like, not just kids, they were legit kids, not famous Hollywood kids right, exactly. Who are actually like, 35 or 40. Yeah, but the use of kids was unusual, for sure. And they hadn't really thought it through, from what I saw, because some of these kids were so young that they didn't know how to read yet. Like, the kid who played Linus didn't know how to read, so he had to be told what lions to say. Yeah, because he couldn't read the script. Yeah. And Snoopy actually was the only one not voiced by a kid. He was voiced by the animator himself. Right. So that's kind of neat. And it was a huge hit, despite the doubtful nature of the network. It was a big hit on Thursday, December 1965. It was seen literally by half of the audience available in the country. Yes. Almost half. Yeah. Basically everyone who had their TV set turned on at, I think, 08:00 or whatever on that date watched it in the entire country. That's pretty astounding. And like you said, it's the exact opposite of what the executive thought was going to happen. They thought it was going to air once and then just be gone. Yes. It won a Peabody. It won an Emmy award. It really says something about the time it finished second place only to Bonanza, which really says that Americans loved Bonanza. Man, they really did. I watched it. You watched Bonanza? I never did. Sure. Yeah. I never got into it. Well, it was probably not a little hokey for your taste. Probably by that point. Little? You were more sophisticated. I was a very sophisticated eight year old. I wore Cravat. And here are a couple of interesting tidbits about Charlie Brown Christmas is there have been some scenes cut throughout the years, notably sponsorship inserts, notably Coca Cola. Even had a full on Coca Cola sign animated into the show that Linus is thrown into. And they cut that out I'm not sure how long. They said several times, I guess just the first few years. And they cut that Coca Cola sign out of there. Yeah, because other advertisers are like, what the heck? We're Pepsi. Where's my son? We're Royal Crown Cola. We don't want to advertise on your Coca Cola ad. What else? Something else that wasn't added until 1997. Right. Well, they had cut out the Peanuts gang throwing snowballs at a can on a fence to make room for more ads, and it wasn't restored until 1997. Man. Yeah. Well, they did the right thing. Yeah. That's an important part. And I'll be watching it this year and every year to come till I got you. Charles. Yes. Charles, it would not be our Christmas special if we didn't teach people how to make booze in new and interesting ways. Yeah. This has become a bit of a tradition around here. A holiday drink. Oh, yeah. Have you had this one? I cannot wait to make this one. No, I haven't yet. You always follow through. I don't. Yeah. Although I have to say, I've still not had a hot bartered room. You see, my whole problem comes. It's an effort thing. Like, I get out the bottle of bourbon, and then I'm just like, oh, well, I'll just pour this. I really don't even need a glass. I can cut my hand and lick bourbon stuff. Yeah, I should really put in the effort. This one does sound like a little bit of effort until you really think about it. It's not that bad down in the Caribbean. It gets so hot that you wonder, do they know it's Christmas time at all? Yes, they do. Actually. And in the Caribbean, in Jamaica in particular, there is a drink, a refreshing cold punch called sorrel punch that apparently screams Christmas. It's part and parcel with Christmas down there, but again, since it's hot, they need something that's cool and refreshing. So we're going to go with Jamaican sorrel punch this year as the Christmas drink, because it sounds pretty great. All right, well, should we just start with the ingredients? Yeah, we should say the first ingredient. Sorrel can be really confusing up here in the States. Yeah. What's the deal there? So sorrel is apparently a part or a flower of the hibiscus plant, but it's not what those of us in the United States would think of as the hibiscus flower. It's a different flower. And you can't use hibiscus flowers or you'll die. You'll be haunted by Danny. You want to use straight up dried sorrel plant flowers. Okay. And you can actually find them online for five $6 on Amazon. Or if you have an international market, you can probably find them there in that whole cellophane dried herb section from other parts of the world. Okay. They're probably going to be there, but you want to start with those. All right. A couple of ounces. Yeah. All right, that sounds good. I can do that. You want to get some fresh ginger? Definitely do that. You should be able to find that anywhere. You want to make two one inch cubes, peeled, and then finely chop them. Three cloves is a good next ingredient. Yeah, I can taste it in my head. Yeah, it's got, like, coming together Christmas Eve spices. And then this guy didn't use this in his recipe, but I also saw that you could, at this point, add orange peels without the pit. You never want to use the pit with an orange peel and cinnamon sticks. And you take all these things and you put them in a heatproof bowl and you boil five cups of water in a saucepan and pour it over the soil mixture. So basically what you're doing is making a sore tea because you let it steep for at least 4 hours or overnight. You're putting together your roo, I guess. Just kidding. I would say T is closer than ru, the mother batch. There you go. You're making the mother batch. None of these things are applicable. So you let the mother batch, T, ru, sit overnight and just sleep, right? Yeah. And then you want to make a simple syrup. Yeah. I would say if you make your own simple syrup, if you have your own favorite recipe, you can just use that, right? Sure. Yeah. No, it doesn't have to be special. You just want to make a one to one simple syrup. And since this is the Caribbean, you probably want to just go with demerrera. That raw brown, not brown sugar, but brownish in color. But demerrera sugar is probably a good one to use. But you make a simple syrup. Not a complicated syrup. No, simple syrup. You get yourself some good amber rum. Yeah, I would recommend getting the good stuff because this is Christmas, guy. Yeah. It's once a year. And then you take the tea that you've let steep for 4 hours or overnight and you strain out the ingredients in there. So you just have the tea and then you add to it the simple syrup and the rum. Stir it up, little darling. And then you add some ice cubes and then garnish with lime and orange slices. All right, so as far as the amounts, we're talking a couple of ounces of the sorrel flour. We already said that. How much ginger? Three whole cloves, five and three quarters cups of water, three quarters cup of sugar. For your syrup, one and a half cups of amber rum. Little more if you're yeah, two tastes and then garnish at will. Yes. Sounds delicious. I might have to make that this year. I can't wait, man. I have the sorrel ordered. Oh, you do already? Well, I'm making it up. All right. Maybe you can bring it to our holiday sauna party. You got it. I'll have added roof to it, some flour, some flour and butter. It's just floating in clumps. Oh, man, that sounds good. All right, so let's hop back in the sleigh. It's cooled off a bit because that took longer than I thought. Yeah. So let's heat this sucker back up and head over to another part of the Internet. All right, so we're back. We're out of the sleigh and into the frying pan. Actually, that's not true, because that made it sound like you're about to cook something. You are in a silly mood today, aren't you? I am. I think I've mentally gone on vacation. You're giddy with delirium. I am, totally. I like it, man. You should mentally go on vacation a lot. It's a good fit. So we're going to talk a little bit about Mrs. Clause. It sort of occurred to me when we were putting this together, I was like, you know what? You hear about St. Nick all the time and nowadays you see his wife in the Photosum, but where did she come from? Who is this woman? And I didn't know, but she has not been around the entire time. Santa used to be very much the batch. Yeah, I didn't realize that either. This article puts it as kind of a loner, which is funny. Yeah. But yeah, he was given a wife finally for the first time in 1849, and there's an American author named James Reese, and apparently there's an author named James Reese that's working today. He's hogged up all of the Google search engine pages, cannot find any mention of the other one. But there was apparently an author named James Reese who wrote a short story entitled The Christmas Legend. And it was published in 49. Yes. I wonder. What gave him the right? Don't get me wrong, I love it, but why did he get to say, like, you know what, I'm going to just write in a Mrs. Clause, I guess, literary license. Yeah. So is it canon? Did this get approval from? I guess George Lucas. I think that just gets worked out over time, you know? Yes, I guess so. Probably if people buy into it. Yeah. Although it sounds like she was kind of a device that he used because he had a necessity. Because in the story, mr. And Mrs. Claws are like delivering presents to a family. Right. And it turns out that there is no Mr. And Mrs. Claus. It was really a friendly couple that the family was friends with who had dressed up as Mr. And Mrs. Claus. Yeah, the burn bombs. Right. So the guy turns out to have no imagination whatsoever for a short story writer. Yes. But she did stick a little bit, and then she really started sticking in later years, she started kind of popping up more and more in magazines and stories, and then she showed up in a big way in a picture book by Catherine Lee Bates. And this is when she really took hold. And everyone was like, hey, I love saying I'm having a wife. She's super cool. She's a strong lady. She is the woman behind the man and the backbone of that whole operation. Right. And who can argue with that? Nobody. I mean, everybody liked the fact that Santa had finally settled down. He wasn't just sewing his oats across the world and chimneys all over the world. Seriously, baby, I'll give you a ride in my slave. You know something that struck me that I hadn't really realized, Chuck? Mrs. Claus does not have an official first name. Well, I looked into that. Did you? No. Did you find one? Apparently with artistic license, you can just name her whatever you want. Right, okay. That's what I found as well. And they're like, Monica, Erica, Martha, Jessica Matha, which apparently is a typo. Was it? I don't know. Maybe. I wasn't sure. I didn't know if that was just a variation. No, I'm sure it was a variation now, but at the time it was probably a type of printer, didn't have an R, so they were just like exactly. Fine, just forget the R. It's the one cares. That Sandra Claus. That sort of rings a little bit. Who would you pick? What's your favorite? Probably Rita. That's what I was going to go with. Yeah. Or Mary. Mary Clause. Yeah, because also you could say Mary, like Merry. Oh, sure. The one I do not agree with, I should say the two I do not agree with are Monica and Jessica. Not Mrs. Claus name. Monica Claus? Yes. That's weird. It's a little odd. Nothing against the name Monica, but just for Mrs. Claus. Come on, even Monica can agree with that one. Yeah, I think so. And then Jessica, that's Jessica Rabbit's name that has no business being part of Mrs. Claus. Agreed. You found something else great on the Internet that I just found very heartening. Yes. Parents, you may not want your kids to hear this part. It is not dirty and filthy or weird in any way, but depending on how you run Christmas in your household, if you know what I'm saying. We just want to give you fair warning. So let's just do a little Christmas music for like 5 seconds. Oh, good. Okay. All right. Hopefully you are not a psychopath and you got rid of any little kids who still believe. Yes. And hopefully Jerry inserted the music from the movie Psycho instead of Christmas music. That would be wonderful. Yeah, because people would be like, what happened? I wouldn't understand it until we came back. All right, so I found this thing. This is actually new this year on the social media. This lady named Charity Hutchinson had a Facebook post that has really taken off. Last I looked earlier, it was had about 30,000 likes and has been shared quite a few times. And she had a solution in her family on what the conundrum parents face by lying to their children. Bald face lying for years about the existence of a real human Santa Claus as a person. Right. So she, I guess, tried this with her oldest, her firstborn recently, and they bought it within the last couple of years. Yeah, they fell for her client's anger and in a way, it's a really great thing to do, but at the same time, you're basically you're getting out of one lie by creating another different lie, right? Not really. Okay, all right, well, let's let everybody judge for themselves. Let's describe this, okay? Okay, so Charity says that you start off by taking your kid out for coffee. I didn't realize that was the thing that you do with kids these days. Yeah, I didn't either, but apparently it is. So you take your kid out for coffee or wherever, maybe milk? Sure, yeah, we'll just go with one of those two. But you take your kid out and you just basically say, hey, you know what? I've noticed you're doing a lot of really great, kind, compassionate things this year. For example, this and that. And the time you beat up that bully who pushed down that smaller kid. That kind of thing. Yeah, the time you laid on that bird who had no chance of surviving without his mother. Just some nice stuff. Right. And you say, you know, son or daughter, I think you have become compassionate enough and old enough to become a Santa Claus. And you drop your mic and you leave your kid in Starbucks and you just walk down the street feeling good about yourself. You get in your car, you drive off to California to start a new life with a new name so no, you're old enough to become Santa Claus. And then your kid is like, what? Yes. And you say, Get ready for your mind to be blown, kid, because guess what? Here's the deal with Santa. Santa is a construct. Sort of. Kind of. Basically what you're trying to do is say you can become Santa because Santa is someone who just very kindly, unselfishly gives something to others anonymously. Yeah. Being Santa, anybody could be Santa as long as you want to give to people just for the sheer joy of making other people happy exactly. Is Santa. And anybody who does that can be Santa. And so, hey, I've got an idea. Why don't you try starting it out this year? Like, just pick somebody that you know and like and say, find out without them knowing what's going on, something that they really want, and then go get it for them and wrap it up and leave it for them. But here's the key. You have to say that it's from Santa on the little card or tag. And you can never tell them that it was you. That's pretty great. Yeah. And she backs it up by making the point that being san is not about getting credit, it's about just giving for the joy of giving and making other people happy. Well, you just never tell in that way. You become Santa. Yeah. And it gives the kids all these lessons, understanding about what's going on around the world and in their own neighborhood. Maybe this article says it gives them providence over their own innocence. That's a great point, I think. And she said that it works so great with her older kid. Now that kid is in on it, trying to help the new batch about to lose their innocence. The thing is, Chuck, maybe you know and I don't but is there some standard way that besides this that people recommend breaking the news to kids? Well, I don't know about a standard, but there's lots of different opinions on that. I put up a Facebook post tangentially related to this and people were just kind of throwing out their ideas. And one of them I think they got the most likes was this guy that was like he has never described Santa as a person. He said he has always, from the beginning, described Santa, as I said, as a construct. You don't say construct your three year old, but it's just a part of the Christmas spirit. It's a thing. And not a person who literally comes to your house. And he was like, I can't tell any difference. They love that just as much as I did, thinking it was a real guy. And he said they see the Christmas specials and they get that it's a made up thing, but it's just a part of the whole idea of Christmas. Right. So he was just kind of truthful about the whole thing. Yeah. And they're still delighted with Santa and when they see Santa in the mall, they aren't like, you're a construct. Although that would be great. Some part of you would be pretty proud of your kids for that. Yeah, I think it's interesting though, I don't know what I'm going to do yet, so I got to think this over. Yeah. Because there's probably parents listening right now. They're like, oh man, yeah, I don't want to do this, but this is a pretty good out. So everybody give Charity Hutchinson a pat on the back. All right, Chuck, it's almost time for sorrel punch. That's right. We're going to wrap it up here. We crowdsource some Facebook traditions from our listeners. I asked for specifically unusual traditions and I waited through the 90% that were not unusual in any way and managed to find some pretty interesting things. Oh yeah. So I don't know what percentage I didn't see what percentage of the actual ideas submitted this is, but some people have some pretty cool little traditions that I just love. Agreed. So you want to start? Yeah. So Victoria Croom, she says that on her father's side of the family, I think he was Polish roots. And so in order to honor their Polish roots, every year their father makes a pauper's meal for Christmas Eve. Instead of a big lavish, extravagant thing, they made sauerkraut soup and pirokies and the most reasonable priced cold water fish available. Yeah. Because it kind of honors like the humble roots that their family has. Yeah, that's great. So Victoria Croom, good on you for that one. Nice. So how about Emily? Ruth vander Ark? Yes. This is actually a lot of people had this. So this is the thing. So her mom hides a pickle ornament on the Christmas tree somewhere. Right. And on Christmas morning, everybody tries to find it. Whoever finds it first gets a gift. And Emily said that it started out just being like, oh hey, here's a piece of chocolate, and the person would just be like, just throw it to the ground. But she said that it's gotten better over the years. From now it's like up to like a Starbucks gift card. Woe. Yeah. I saw a lot of people with this pickle thing though, so obviously it's a thing that it's regionalized. She said that her husband is a master ace at finding the pickle now. Yeah. And he wins it every year. So champ pickle finder. Emily's husband. Emily's husband. So thanks. Emily Ruth Vanderarch. That's a great name. Jessica Evans Totten. This is pretty good. I love weird dads. After my parents got divorced, my dad was in charge of getting and wrapping his own Christmas presents for me and my three older sisters. And he had a hard time knowing what to get us, so he made the tradition of buying us a Barbie doll every year along with a gift receipt and he called it a creative gift card. I just love that basically like, I know you're going to take this back, but here's something at least. And he also has a really fun time rejecting traditional Christmas wrapping. Right. So he would just put it in a garbage bag for him. I love this. And then apparently, in his older years, he's like, I can do better than this. So now he goes to thrift stores and vintage shops and finds old carpet bags or old briefcases that's awesome. And puts them in there. Yeah, that was really cool. Super 80s. Like delivering a Barbie doll in a briefcase. Yeah. And he's still doing it. They still get the barbie. They're well into adulthood now, she points out. And he still gets them the Barbie every year. So I think that's a really cool thing. And Mr. Evans, if that is your name, sir, I salute you. Yes. So, Catherine Joy Figley. Yeah, this is a good one. She said that her husband's family wraps presents. They also reject traditional Christmas paper wrapping paper. So they kind of have, like, a friendly competition or theme going where they find the weirdest thing they can wrap it in. Yeah. My favorite is the unused diaper. Yeah, that's good. My favorite is birthday wrapping paper. Yeah, I like it. It's subversive. It is extremely thing like. Yeah, I'm going to use wrapping paper. I'm just not going to use it for this particular holiday. Yeah, I like it. So that's from Catherine joy Finley. Keep that going. All right, check. There's this cat named Nick Miller who has a great cricket Christmas morning tradition with his mom, who he calls his mum. So he probably spells color with A-U-I think it's a lady, too. Nick oh, it could be Nicole, I guess. Yeah. I think she's from Australia. Okay. Well, every Christmas morning, this would actually make a lot of sense that she would be from Australia. Every Christmas morning, her mom and she get up very early and they go to the beach. And this is where the Australian crew kicks in before the hordes of people get there, because they're not very popular in the Northern Hemisphere in Christmas time. But she says that they grab a bottle of champagne and a huge bucket of cherries and that's what they have for breakfast. Yes. That's so neat. Great Christmas tradition. Let me see this one. I love Tanya Foyd. Ellis. Growing up, my mum and father in law, my grandpa, would pass to each other a Bahambug can. They both relish disgusting. Sorry. And disguising the can. Don't worry, it gets disgusting. To make it unrecognizable as a wrap present. And some of the more memorable additions to the can, like you put junk in it was a year's worth of grandpa's toenails in there. Yeah. Very nice. Pile of dog poop gathered in January and left to cure until the next December. Clump of ketchup packets held together by one broken packet now acting as glue. I love that. Thank you. Tanya. Floyd Ellis. That's a good one. All right, so how about Sarah Florentte's Christmas tradition? Yes. So every year on Christmas Eve, her whole family has an ice cream eating contest with all of her cousins. Yeah. So whoever can finish a half a gallon of ice cream within an hour and here's the key without throwing it up wins a substantial amount of cash. She says. She doesn't say how much. She does use the word substantial. So she says that it's nearly impossible to do this and it's only been done three times before out of probably 100 attempts. I'm thinking that they haven't been doing this for a century, but just if you take the number of people who've tried it over the years, you come up with 100, she means. Yeah, I think so. She says that a lot of people can finish but not hold it down. And that's where that key comes in. So there's a lot of vomiting going on at Sarah Florente's house on Christmas Eve. Yeah. And she posted pictures, too. She posted a couple. One of the entire family sitting around with each with a gallon, half gallon of ice cream in front of them. And then one of a couple of people doing that with her grandmother just like bitter and staring at them. She said her grandmother hates it, so they're going to do it as long as she's around. It's very nice. Here's one from Norma Mullen. That's really neat. This is not gross or anything. Our family has a tablecloth that goes on the Christmas dinner table every year and everyone signs it with a fabric pen. And they've been doing this since 1994, so they use the same tablecloth and they're able to look back every year and look at all these memories, along with, obviously, people they've lost over the years and people that they've gained over the years. So that is just super cool. It's older than most of her cousins and she can see how much their family has grown year by year. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's really nice. And then how about Ryan Bradfields? Yeah, that's a good one. Ryan Bradfield's mom's family, who he says is a large Sicilian bunch, they have a wind up Et. Toy that they got in the somehow it just became family tradition for them to dress up the Et. Doll as different characters and then they use it as a Christmas tree topper for their grandparents tree. Yeah, that's pretty great. So Et. Has been like elvis NBA player dolly Parton. Your favorite. Yeah, a showgirl. And it turns out obviously weirdly, but one of Bradfield's cousins married a member, or a friend, I guess, of the Spielberg family. So they're trying to get them pictures of the Et. Dressed up over the years. I'm sure no one's ever tried to get Steven Spielberg a funny Et. Picture. This one is very sweet. This is from Holly Henderson. Of Portland. She and her husband bought their first house four years ago just outside of Portland on the very first night there on Christmas Eve. They spent the night in a mattress on the floor next to the Christmas tree. And she says, now, we do that every year. We bring that mattress back in the living room on Christmas Eve and sleep on the mattress by the tree. That's very sweet. Lovely. And then the last one, chuck how about Chelsea Allen Lindsay? Yeah, the Christmas Rude. Vega. I love weird families. So her family puts a Christmas rude out in the living room along with the tree every year. And the whole thing started from a car trip when they were living in the UK. And she says that her grandparents and her aunt had come to visit one Christmas time. They were all in the car, and everything was just going nuts and crazy. And apparently Chelsea's mom started calling the whole thing, Rudabaga is on Parade. Yeah. I love her mom. She bought a Rude and put it on the dashboard of the car for the rest of the trip. And then when she got home, she made a face for it out of clothes. Clothes. Put a wreath on it, and then it became a Christmas route of vega. Yeah. It's not just weird dads. Weird moms are great, too. Sure. You know, I got one more. Okay. Because I forgot Michelle Greenwald. I want to be in her family because they have a holiday they invented called Pajamicas. Oh, yeah. And I think you'll see where this is going. It's the day before Christmas Eve even. And she said it was necessary since we were traveling for Christmas Day and didn't have a day that was dedicated just to the four of us in our family. So Pajama just goes down like this. It's immediate family. They get each other pajamas and change into the pajamas altogether. Well, they're all wearing the pajamas, in other words. And then they watch Christmas movies and eat breakfast for dinner, which is one of my favorite things. And it's like a no holds barred breakfast for dinner, right? Yes. Yeah. She says they cook all day and have a huge breakfast spread, like latkes, waffles, poached eggs, brioche, you name it. Yeah, whatever you want. You get to have your dinner. I don't know where the green walls are, but I want to come over for Pajamicus. Yeah, it sounds pretty great. So just invite me and I'll be there. Get me pajamas with feet. Those are good. I got nothing else. Okay. Well, I guess this is the outro then, huh? Yeah. Wow. This is great, Chuck. I mean, it's officially now Christmas time for us. That's right. And another wonderful year of stuff you should know. 2016. We're going to close the books on this one and thank everyone, as we do every year, for your support. Because without you, there would be no us. We really don't take that for granted. And actually a very special birthday shout out. I know people that are born around Christmas always get dipped off in the birthday department, but one of our most delightful and oldest, most supportive fans, Ms. Gail Coons. It's her birthday on Christmas Eve, and her husband Mark was kind enough to email me because he knows what a big fan she is. And Gail is wonderful. So happy birthday, Gail from Ohio. You're the best. Hope we can all meet up someday. And sounds good, right? Yes. So happy holidays to everybody. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Kwanza, tiptop tet. All that jazz. You guys have yourselves a wonderful holiday season from all of us here at Stuff You Should Know. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-05-04-sysk-fan-show-theories-final.mp3 | Some Nutso Fan Theories | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/some-nutso-fan-theories | It turns out that the characters in your favorite TV shows and the like are actually dead, dreaming, dying or don't exist. | It turns out that the characters in your favorite TV shows and the like are actually dead, dreaming, dying or don't exist. | Thu, 04 May 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=124, tm_isdst=0) | 50805939 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. Almost forgot who I was for a second there's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah. There's Jerry. Or is she really there? I don't know. I don't even know anymore because it just occurred to me we're doing a show on TV, show Fan Theories, and we have our own little fan theory here that Jerry doesn't exist. Yeah, that's true. It's a fan theory, which is sort of a common thread in a lot of these, is either like, oh, they were really dead, or they didn't exist to begin with. Right. And so we've heard from people for years that think that Jerry's made up. I love it. Yes. Because they're right. We're not saying no. Actually, Jerry is totally real. I'm looking at it right now. So I was going through the Internet looking for think pieces, essays on why people come up with fan theories or what about fan theories make shows better? I couldn't find anything. No, I think the answer is obvious. I think that's why I couldn't find anything, too. People like, they just have time on their hands. That's not what I was going to say. What are you going to say? I was going to say that it takes something that's already pretty enjoyable and adds entirely new dimensions in depth to it. It takes something familiar and you can go back and rewatch it through different lens now. Yeah. And you have time on your hands. Right. It's definitely not something that super busy people do know. And then I also was like, maybe I should just calm down. We don't have to explain everything. We can just have fun sharing fan theories. That's what we're going to do. It's like a summer break one. Yeah. This feels like one of those we're both drunk. Sure. Pretty drunk. Just kidding kids out there. We're just joking. So we just get right into these. Yes. Some of these are going to be shorter, others are going to be a little longer, and we're just going to kind of jump around. Right. Should we start with the granddaddy or end with the granddaddy? Well, is the granddaddy to you, David? No. Do you like that one, though? Maybe if I said it. Yeah, I think we'll start with, say, by the bill. I don't know why I thought if I said it really fast, only I would know what you were saying. We'll start with save by the bill. We'll finish with one that I know you're talking about. Okay, cool. That's very quick, baby. I know, but you won't believe the last one. One of the things that is really hard to do when it comes to fan theories, we should say, I guess we should define a fan theory is basically it's where somebody who likes to show says, hey, you know, the show that you think means this or is about all this it's actually this is what's going on almost all the time. It's just somebody's idea. But the part of the backbone of a fan theory is that it has to hold up in just about every circumstance. Yeah. And I'll get one out of the way quickly as a bad example. Okay. Because to me, a bad fan theory is Murder She Wrote. She was really a serial killer because you never found out what happened to her husband and all these people are dying around her. I like that one. Yeah, but it's just too easy. It's not like to me, a good fan theory is one where you can say, and this happened, and look at this. What about this? What about this? So I know what you mean. And yes, a fan theory does have to do there else it's just some schmo saying something somewhere. Yeah, but Murder She Wrote has a couple of things to back that up besides the husband and the murders. What is it? The husband, I think, is whatever. But the point that I've seen here there number one, is Jessica Fletcher is a murder author, a murder mystery authorist. And she murders follow her everywhere she goes. Right. Think about the last time you stumbled upon a murder. Well, that's just called TV. Okay? So that's one thing. Hold on. And then secondly, even when she travels, she stumbles upon new murders. But more to the point, in her little town of Cabot Cove, population 3500, a significant number of the, say, 274 episodes of Murder She Wrote took place there. If even 200 of those murders happened in a town of 3500, it would be the murder capital of the world, percentage wise, per capita. So I see what you're saying about the fact that she's a writer. It's not like she's a detective. Like, you can't say, boy, the 18 were always getting in these crazy adventures. Like they were hired to each one. Yeah, they were seeking it out. She just happens to be sucked into it. All right? She just happens to be there. Right. I've never seen that TV show either, so that probably has something to do with it. What? Never seen Murder, She Wrote. Shock, because I was a 13 year old boy, not a 65 year old person. It's even better now. Oh, really? Yeah. You're re watching it? Oh, yeah. It's on Netflix, and I think prime. Wow. Oh, yeah, man. It's good. Check it out. And I'm not saying, like, oh, Murder, She Wrote is good. I'm a hipster. I've been watching Murder, She Wrote for years and years now, pal. Yes. You don't have a beard. No, but hold on. I want to extend this for a second. You raised a very good point, and I feel like I defended Murder She Wrote with that same point that a fan theory has to have meat on its bones. Yeah. It can't be an offhanded thing. It's prove what you just said, prove why Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer. Well, there's a couple of them. It's a little thin, granted, but there's something to back it up, which makes it a decent fan theory. Not the best, but a decent one. The other thing is, it's really difficult to pinpoint the origin of fan theories. Oh, yeah? Like who did this first? Yeah. Who came up with this idea? What loser? Well, I've got one for you. So we're going to talk about the Saved by the Bell fan theory. People are just, like, nervous with anticipation about that one. As far back as I can tell, it looks like a person, a writer on the website, cracked website, a writer named man. I lost their name. Logan Trent in 2012 wrote a post called Saved by the Bell a Conspiracy Theory. So he originated this one. As far as I can tell, he gives zero credit to anybody else. And the way that the post is written, it really comes across like he is laying out his argument himself. All right, so it's possible. And if you had this idea prior to 2012 and you're not Logan Trent, let us know. But I'm bestowing Logan Trent with the origin of the Save by the Bell fan theory, which is one of the best. Yeah. And big shout out to Cracks and Mental floss and our own article. And who else? Meet TV had a good one. Yeah. Paste magazine had one. There's a lot of good fan theory articles out there. All right, so at long last, Save by the Bell. And I like this one. And I don't remember watching this show at all, but I know these characters and the gist, so I had to have watched it at some point. You didn't watch save by the bell. No, I wouldn't. That wouldn't in my wheelhouse. I guess not. A little older teenage boycollege. Well, they had Saved by the Bell of college years just for you. But I do know these characters, so it had to have absorbed into me somehow. Okay, so here's the deal. Pre say by the bell. This I did not know there was a TV show. Was it called? Good morning, Miss Bliss. Yes. And it was unbearably bad. So you saw that, too. Yeah. So the idea of this show is there's this boy named Zack. This is in Indiana. Not just Zack. Zack Morris. Yeah. The Zach, played by Mark Paul Gosler. Right. This is in Indiana, of course, not California. And he was a troublemaker. And there was a teacher named Ms. Bliss who was super smart and always thwarted him. What's the name of the lady who was in the original Parent Trap, played the two twins? Haley Mills. Yeah, it was her. Oh, okay. Apparently when you sign a contract with Disney as a child, they owe you for life. He has a couple of friends named Mikey and Nikki. They're always putting him in his place. He has a brother, his parents are divorced, and by all accounts, Zach Morris. And Good Morning, Ms. Bliss is a bit of a schlub who's always sort of getting his come up and from other people. Yeah, kind of a loser. Yeah. Basically the opposite of Zack Morris and Say by the Bell, did they ever say Zack attack? Did I just make that up? No. I think so. Okay. I think there's a T shirt, even that said that. So flash forward. And how many years later was this? A couple. So good morning. Ms. Bliss goes off the air. I get the feeling it wasn't very popular, or they wouldn't have rebooted it as Saved by the Bell. They would have just kept it going. Exactly. So Saved by the Bell comes along. And now Zach is at Bayside in California. Right. He's Mr. Everything, as this article points out. He's the most popular kid in school and excels in everything sports, music, casual racism, whatever. Right. That's Logan Trent's wording. He's the alpha. And his circle friends Mikey and Nikki are gone. Yeah, they're just gone. No explanation. Right. And there's no explanation for any of this. Like how he got to California. But it's the same character. Right? It's the exact same character, but there are some huge changes. Like, at his core, he is a different person. Actually, not necessarily at his core, but as far as how he's treated and viewed by his peers and everyone else, the difference is night and day. He's not a DWave anymore. He's not a loser. He's a total winner. He's zac attack. As Logan Trent points out. Like, if he were to miss a quiz rather than fail, he would convince the teacher to hold a bake off, and then he would win the bake off by cheating. That was how he went through life. And also, very notably, his parents were no longer divorced. They were married. And he didn't have a brother. He was an only child and was beloved by all right. Yeah. I think Slater went from his rival to his sort of his pal, but his second, his wingman. Right. Screech was around in both, but I think he was sort of Screeching both. Right. He didn't change much. Right. Yeah. Screech has always been screeched. What can you do? He'll stab you in the bar. All right, so what's the big reveal? What's the fan theory? So the fan theory is that Saved by the Bell is the daydream fantasy of Zack Morris, who's actually living back in Indiana at John F. Kennedy Junior High. It's great, man. And that the whole premise of this fan theory, is revealed through the theme song. Right. So in the theme song, the theme song talks about how harried Zack is. Well, it's all first person. Right. But you assume that it's talking about Zack because the whole show, it revolves around Zack. He's the narrator. Yeah. And he's having a lot of trouble getting ready. And he gets out to the bus just in time to see it fly by and the teacher's going to pop a test and he knows he's in a mess, his dog ate all his homework and if you actually watch the show, nothing ever gets Zack. He's untouchable. So in the theme song, it says it's all right because I'm saved by the bell. Right? Yes. Which this fan theory suggests that once he either settles into class and starts day dreaming or gets home at night and starts dreaming, he can go off to Bayside, where he's the biggest winner around. That is the bell. Right. So the fact that these lyrics by the time I grab my books and I give myself a look, I'm at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by and then eventually riding low in my chair so she won't know I'm there, meeting the teacher. This all? Is Zach in Indiana? Right. It describes a different person. Doesn't make any sense that these lyrics if you had not known that that was a show that existed and all you knew was saved by the bell, these lyrics don't make any sense. Exactly. But they do if it is all a fantasy in his imagination. Sadly, it also makes sense if you think that the producers hired the composer before they were really aware of what the show is going to be like. And that's what the composer came up with, lyrics wise. Yeah. It's not nearly as fun. Well, the other thing I like about fan theories is that they are almost 100% not real. It's just fans having fun. But I do like the idea to imagine, like, some subversive writer that's like, oh, well, here's what we'll do. Right? Exactly. This is all an elaborate fantasy of this Zach guy. I've got one other thing that I think the Cracked article points out. If not, someone else came up with it later. They pointed out that Zach has the power to stop time and address the camera. Like, he breaks the fourth wall fairly regularly. Sure. And he can just stop time and move around within this frozen time. Which also that's a weird thing for somebody to be able to do if they're not in the middle of their own daydream. Yeah. Or night. Dream. Love it, man. That's a good one. And things like Mikey and Nikki disappeared. At one point. Kelly is in love with them and then she just is gone with no explanation. Yeah. People kind of pop in and out sometimes with no explanation at all. I think Kelly dumped him and then all of a sudden she's gone. And she was like one of the characters throughout the entire save by the Bell. Right. And then she's just gone once she jumps back. He's really bad at school, but he got a 15 two in the Sat. Like, all this stuff is like dream stuff. Right. Well, that's another point that Logan Trent makes, is that a 15 two is literally impossible. Like, you can't score a 15 two Sat. Yeah. It's 500, right? Yeah. So it's even more evidence that all this is made up. Apparently not. So smart kid, man. So let's save by the bell, man. You want to take a break, and then I think you get back to it? Yeah, I think so. I could do this all day. All right, we'll go through a couple of quicker ones here. The Fresh Prince is dead. Yeah. Kind of. Really don't need to say anything else, do you? Well, in the TV theme song where he talks about getting in a fight and that's the whole reason he sent to Bel Air. Yes. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is the a TV show from 1990 to 96, and the rap that Will Smith, the real life Will Smith actually plays a character named Will Smith. Right. And he talks about getting in a fight and getting sent off to Bel Air to get him away from the rough neighborhood in, what, philly. Right. West Philadelphia. Born and raised. Right. So the theory is that he was actually killed during this fight. Right. And everything else is his journey in the afterlife. Yes. The cab that picks him up to take him in Bel Air, the rare cab is supposedly God or some sort of ethereal figure that's taking him to the afterlife, which is Bel Air. His parents are like, basically nonexistent, but they show up a couple of times. This is explained away by the FAM theory as his parents visiting their son's grave. I think it's pretty awesome. Yeah. And then, boys, the men apparently showed up at one point, but they were like a heavenly choir. I don't remember that episode. So that put all that together. Fresh Prince is dead. That's right. What do you want to do next? Should we do the two of them from Gilligan's Island? Yes. The drug one is super lame. Yes, I thought so too. There's this one theory that you're right. It's dumb that Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island paid Gilligan and the Skipper to take him out to Sea to do a drug deal, which is why he has a trunk load of cash. Full of cash. Right. Ginger's got a drug habit. Marianne is a federal agent. This just sounds like someone smoked some weed and came up with, like someone said, hey, what's your first idea of what Gilligan's Island could have been other than what it was they went drug thing, man. I think he nailed it. But there's a better fan theory for Gilligan Island. Agreed. That Gilligan's Island is hell. That this, like, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, takes place in the afterlife, but not in heaven, in hell, or at least in purgatory. That minnows shipwreck caused everyone on board to drown, and that inhale each one of the characters represents one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Ginger is lust. Marianne is envy. Professor as pride. Thurston. Hal, of course, is greed. Mrs. Howell. I've seen a sloth and Gluttony seen that, too. I've also seen Skipper as either gluttony or wrath. Wrath makes a lot more sense. And then Gilligan is sloth or is Satan himself. Yeah. And one of the giveaways for Gilligan being Satan well, there's two of them. One is that he's always wearing a red shirt. Oh, wow. So obviously Satan, because Satan wore a red rugby shirt. Right. And then, although it seems like it's always accidental, he's always thwarting their plans. Like every time they get something going to get off of the island. Right. Gilligan is the one who somehow screws it up and they're stuck there again, so he's keeping them in hell. This one actually has legs. Yeah. Apparently, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan's Island, in a book, confirmed that they did it was his idea that they did stand for the Seven Deadly Sins. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. So there you go. One of the rare fan theories that actually was true. Whoever thought of that was like, no. Yes, I was right. Well, that makes me wonder if somehow it got out or something, maybe. Or he was retroactively just being like yeah, that's what I meant. Shorts. Here's a quick spot from Star Trek, one that I kind of liked. We'll do both of the Star Trek ones. How about that? Okay. On record as not having watched Star Trek. Yeah, me neither. But in Star Trek Six, the Undiscovered Country, The Undiscovered Country. Sorry. People are so mad at me right now. Trekkeys. Yeah. An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And that was Spot in that movie, and the source of that was Sherlock Holmes himself from The Sign of Four from an 1890 book. And so the idea here is that Spock is related to Sherlock Holmes. It's a little weird. How about that? But I could see it. I mean, they're both pretty rational. Yeah, well, Sherlock Holmes, he loved his speed balls. I don't think Stock was ever into that. No, he was more involved. You know Sherlock Holmes loves speedballs, though, don't you? I did not. It doesn't surprise me. It surprised me at first. Really? Yeah. So there's another Star Trek One. I love this one. That Andy Griffith is the preapocalyptic world that leads into Star Trek, and this one is pretty awesome. So it's based on a Star Trek episode. Chuck Miri. M-I-R-I. Like siri, but with an M. Yeah. And in this episode, the Star Trek crew beams down to Earth, and it's very obvious it's May Berry, but it's like a post apocalyptic may be. It's people entirely by kids. The reason why it's people entirely by kids is because some disease has broken out where you die at the onset of puberty. Yeah. Well, it is May Berry. Because it is May Berry. It's literally the same back lot that they shot both shows at. And they just outfitted Maybury to be postapocalyptic right down to, like, Floyd's Barber Shop. Yeah, but I think they just scratched out Floyd. They scratched out the F, and it just said Lloyd. Oh, did it? I don't know. I think it said Floyd did it. Really? Yeah. Oh, it's that on the nose. I think so. Oh, this one's great. This is a great fan. The Seal. It for you, then. Well, there's another part, too. That the kid who played Barney five's cousin, Virgil. He actually appears in this Star Trek episode. What? Yeah. So it's full circle. Gene Roddenberry was like, I'm going to come up with a fan theory. No one knows what those are yet, but I'm going to lay it down for them decades from now. Pretty cool. When the Internet comes around. I don't know what that is, but it's going to be something. I'm Jean Roddenberry. You know the beginning of Andy Griffith when they're walking down to the lake and he skipped the Stones on the lake? Yes. It's like right in the Hollywood Hills. Is that right? Yeah. My brother drove me up there one time and he's like, this look familiar? And he started whistling the theme song, and I was like, no. Wow. He said, yeah, he's like the Bat Caves, like, over there. Oh, yeah. And it sort of killed my dreams. Well, same with Mash, too. That's like the Hollywood Hills. The Hollywood malibu. Is it Malibu? Well, like the mountains behind Malibu, right. When you fly into la. And you're looking for it, you're like, oh, I totally see that. What we're talking about is the helicopter in the opening montage for Mash. It's supposedly flying through Korea, but it's actually yes, it's California where they're shooting, which is way cheaper to shoot. Yeah, I shot a TV commercial over there, and I think we talked about this before. One of the Jeeps is still out there. I don't know. I don't remember that. Rusted out and overgrown with weeds. But yeah, it's like an old army Jeep. There are a couple of little remnants. Jamie Far is still out there like, hey, how are you doing? Thanks for visiting. You need anyone today? Can I get a lift? Background. I'm cheap. That's terrible. Is he still around? I'm supposed to know this. He's like my hometown's favorite son. Was he really from there? From Toledo, yeah. Is that why they wrote that into the show? Yeah, and he's always talking about Tony Pacos, which is a real place. Oh, yeah, I knew all that, but I didn't know if it was. I know. Jamie Far is definitely from Toledo. Okay, well, he's older. They never let you forget it. Yeah, he's 82. Hey, Jamie Farr. Godspeed, sir. What else we got? So this one is one of my favorites. It's a good one. Garfield oh, yeah. Is dying alone in an abandoned house. And everything that you've seen in all except, I believe, six of the Garfield strips, all of them that have been going on since 1977, is the hallucination of a dying, starving cat in an abandoned house. Yeah, I was way into Garfield. Yeah, Garfield is great. Bought the books. Yeah. Garfield and Bloom County were my two biggies I was never into Bloom County, man. I loved it. I did love Garfield, though. I mean, it was a little bloom county is a little more advanced, I think, and it's humor, right. Which I still got. But Garfield was kind of perfect for a ten year old. Chuck. It was perfect. So what you're talking about is in October of 1989, jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put out six strips in a row that are not funny. No. They're actually kind of untitled. Yeah. Very bleak. And if you go and look at these strips, you can find them online. Obviously, it's Garfield alone in an abandoned house, and it's really heavy. Awful. Garfield wakes up in the first strip, and no one's around, and he's starting to get a little panicked, and then it just kind of continues on, and his panic continues to build over the course of the six strips. And finally, in the last one, I believe, he wakes up and John and ODI are there and everything's back to normally so happy. But leading up to that point, and strip like three, four, five, it's getting a little freaky. And again, like you said, there's nothing funny about it. It wasn't intended to be funny. It was intended to scare. And the idea is that what we're seeing in these six strips are the actual reality of Garfield and that everything else he finally manages to go back to is basically dying, fever dream that featured John and Odie. Yeah, but will they disappear, though, in that strip, too, at the end? Yes, they appear, and then he goes to give them food, and then they disappear. And he's alone again at the end of that 6th trip. Yeah. Okay, so he's hallucinated them. Got you. And then is alone and abandoned. So that's why okay, right. So then that backs up that whole idea that they're just a hallucination because they're demonstrated as an hallucination in that six series strip. Yeah, six trip series. His intent was very much to do something sad and different, and I think he heard quite a bit from the fans, like, what is going on? Right. And then apparently, he kind of laughed at the idea when someone said, hey, you realize what people think, that this is all a big hallucination. Like every other strip you've drawn is a hallucination of this dying cat. And he laughed about it, but what else are people supposed to think yeah. That he just got really heavy and weird for six trips. And I think the other thing that was so off putting about it, too, is it resolves. There is no resolution. I think on that 7th day, the Sunday one just picks up like everything's totally normal and it never happened. Which makes it even more unsettling. Yeah. And then, Chuck, there's a clear I don't know if it was a reference to it or coincidence or whatever, but there's this animated movie called Allegro Nontropo and there's a segment in it. What's the name of the segment? Valsrist. About a cat that turns out to be a ghost cat. Have you ever seen it? No. It's very good. Yeah. Haunting. But it's sort of parallels to Garfield story very much. Whether or not it was purposeful, we don't know that part. Right. Or did Jim Davis discount that, too? I've never heard whether or not he discounts that. Yeah, but that's definitely go check out the Garfield strips. Just look up, like, Garfield dead or dying or whatever, and it'll bring them up. But also, I'm sure it's on YouTube. Just look up Valse. V-A-L-S-E. Trice. Triste. And it'll get to you. It's very sad. And you should plug your favorite thing ever, which is Garfield without Garfield. Oh, yeah, that's great. Which in that case, it was John who was just crazy and hallucinating. Right? Yeah. You could make a pretty good case that John was out of his mind. When you take Garfield at any given strip and it's just John shouting out loud, he's just, like, putting his head down on the counter. Good stuff. Yeah, I forgot about that. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and go through another couple of quickies. And then the big daddy. All right. Did you see this? Breaking bad one. Yeah. This one has spoilers for Breaking Bad and a little bit of The Walking Dead. So if you haven't seen that tune out but there is a theory that's actually, I think, kind of cool because I love both shows. Breaking Bad and walking dead. Right. That the blue meth from Breaking Bad is what caused the zombie outbreak in The Walking Dead. Yeah, that's bad. Yes. But it seems like they're totally unconnected until you start digging in there. That's right. When you look at season one, the character of Glenn hey, shout out to Stephen Young. He's a listener of stuff you should know. Yeah. What up, dog? Hopefully he still is. Not anymore. He drives a red Dodge Challenger in that first season, which looks kind of like Walter White's car that he eventually ends up with. And then in Breaking Bad, when Walter White returns that Dodge, he takes it back and the dealership's general manager is named Glenn. The best one comes in season two, if you ask me. Yeah, I agree. You take it, buddy. Because why? You didn't want either. One of these shows? No, I did. Okay. I saw all Breaking Bad, and I've seen I can't remember how far I've seen pretty far into Walking Dead. I'm behind on Walking Dead by, like, one season. I need to go back, catch up. Yeah. Anyway, season two, Darryl, played by Norman Reedus, is trying to take the fever down on TDog. He's another character. Right. Why is it funny? Dog? So his brother, Merle, he has this bag of drugs, basically. So he looks at the bag, see if there's anything that can help bring the fever down. And there is that blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad in his bag. So that's a good little hint. Yeah. And then before the zombie apocalypse, Merle, his brother, was actually a drug dealer. And he described in one episode, his supplier was, quote, a janky little white guy who threatened him with a handgun and said, I'm going to kill you. B word. And that very much sounds like Jesse Pinkman. Yeah. The only way he could have gotten it across more is if he mentioned fat stacks or something. Right. That would have been, like, super on the nose, though. So that's pretty fun theory. It is. Obviously, myth equals death, everybody. That's right. Especially blue. Well, the one thing I didn't get was like, what are all those people on meth? But then I thought, no, maybe just a certain amount. And then they infected other people with their zombie juice. Okay, I got one. All right. This is an old one, but I think it's a good one. The Flintstones and The Jetsons take place at the exact same time. It's a good one that The Flintstones are not prehistoric. They're actually set in a post apocalyptic future. And it doesn't make any sense, does it? The author, I think this came from Mental Floss points out why would some cave people create record players with whatever they had on hand? No one in prehistoric times knew what a record player was. But if you were living in the post apocalyptic times, you would want to be able to listen to records because they'd already been invented. So you would figure out how to make a bird put its beak on a record and use that instead. Why do they celebrate Christmas in prehistoric times? Good question. Why does the music in The Flintstones, any popular music is always like 50s English British Invasion type music. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Twitch. Twitch. Yeah. Why do they have a banking system set up? It's fairly complex. It is. Why are these animals talking? Well, that's just weird. Yeah. I don't know if you can place that at the feet of George Jetson. The thing about The Jetsons, though, is supposedly they are living up in it's not Cloud City, orbit City, which is supposedly built in the clouds above a small glen, which is where The Flintstones live, below the small glide. And allegedly, the thing that divides them, really more than anything is income. Yeah. That the Jetsons are wealthy and part of the ones that can survive and live up in the clean air. The Flintstones are part that have to scrape by with whatever they can find back here on Earth. Well, and that George and Fred mirror one another. And that Fred labour's at this I mean, I don't even know what you call that. Like a corey, a quarry. Yes, Mr. Slate. Whereas George works at spacely rockets and it says here in this article works for a total of about 9 hours a week. And then robots and computers handle everything else. That's supposedly how our life is supposed to be right now. But we're not doing it right. Oh, really? Yeah. And now robots are just stealing everyone's job but we don't have anything to show for it except for joblessness but the bad kind. Right. There was a movie called The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones. And in that very movie, George Jetson visits the past and has a little kind of a throwaway comment when he sees green grass and he says that it's something he remembers from ancient history. Right. So that one kind of undermines the whole idea. Oh, I don't know. Well, if he's saying that he or he remembers it from ancient history oh, I see that part. Yeah. Like there was an apocalypse and there is no grass. But if he visits the past, I don't know. Is it falling apart? Yeah, we talk about it. It undermines that one. Remember The Great Kazoo? What was up with that guy? Yes. Well, this is where stuff you should know is devolved to remember the Great Kazoo. What was up with that guy? The whole Christmas thing is weird to me. That the Flintstones would celebrate Christmas when they were clearly supposedly before the birth of Christ. Sure as being in pre historic times. Right. No, it doesn't make any sense. There's a lot of stuff The Flintstones didn't make sense about. How about the Scooby Doo? I thought this was pretty great. Yeah. And not Scooby Do. See, this is the difference between a good fan theory and a bad one. Bad one. Those Scooby and Shaggy are always stoned because, look, they're bumbling and they're always hungry. For Scooby Snacks. For Scooby Snacks. Bad fan theory. Good fan theory. Scooby Doo takes place after the world economy has shattered. Right. It's great. Yes. And there's a lot to it, right? Yeah. So the idea is that these guys are driving around and if you really look at the places that they visit everything is abandoned and run down always. Like abandoned amusement park, abandoned ski resort, abandoned everything. And not only are these places abandoned they're populated by people who are squatting, basically, in these abandoned places. They live in the abandoned place the bad guys are, yes. And they have no means to support themselves other than by carrying out these weird veiled crimes that they try to dress up as something otherworldly, which suggests that they're geniuses. Right. So very smart people living in squalor and are jobless. Yeah. Was this correct? Yeah. So it says that out of the 27 villains in the original Scuba Do, where are you run? 23 of the 27 are motivated by monetary gain via theft, smuggling or land speculation. And like you said, if these people are geniuses, why are they like, I'm going to squat in this abandoned mansion so I can gain ownership of it. Right. It's all very strange. Yes. And they point out that the talents that these people have indicate a very wide variety of specific schooling. Right. Yeah. Two were PhDs or three were PhDs, two were lawyers. One had an ability to produce forged paintings. One could repair boats. One was a magician. Right. The stuntman. So these are highly skilled, highly specialized professions that these people are trained in or capable of doing, but yet they're out of work, and they're pulling off these very elaborate schemes rather than just having a job in their profession. Yes. And even Scooby Doo, when they go into a nice vacation spot, it's run down and abandoned. It's like Soviet level vacation spot. Yeah, pretty much. So I thought this was a great one. At the very least, they had some reason to not just have it be like normal society that they were living in. And when you go back and look at them, they were weird settings for shows really sparsely populated because it's animated. There's no reason to do that. I can see if you're like, we're not much of a budget, so we got to go shoot at this abandoned music park. But if they are at a restaurant, they're almost invariably the only people there. Have you ever noticed that? Yes. It's like a really empty series. It's cool. It makes it a little more haunting. I like it. You ready for the last one? All right. I think we've waited long enough. This one is based on the television hospital procedural drama seeing Elsewhere. Right. Which elsewhere, if you watched it, or even if you didn't, and you just are a fan of, like, famous endings of TV series, st. Elsewhere was very famous for its ending in that. Also famous for having a bunch of big stars early on in their careers. Yeah. Howie Mandel denzel at begley. Yeah. Begs a lot of other people, but it very famously ended with at the very end, it showed a shot at the hospital with the snow falling, and then you pull back and you realize that that was actually a snow globe held by a boy. Right. It's kind of mind blowing. It's like, oh, my God. Right. Because, again, this is real. If you watched Er or anything. Scrubs. Any normal show about hospital life, and it's about hospital life. That's what Stalwart was about. It was weird and quirky, but it was about a hospital. So the idea of drama that the last scene of, I think, six seasons yes. Six years, 137 episodes about life at a hospital and the characters that inhabited and worked at this hospital. The hospital is in a snow globe. This is totally out of left field, right? Yeah. To make it even weirder, in Walks, who had, up to this point been the director of surgery, I think Donald Westfall. He's the medical director of St. Luke. He walks in. He's clearly not a doctor. He's not dressed like once. He's like a construction guy. Yeah. The way he's talking, he's super, like, blue collar all of a sudden. And he walked into the room. Where the boy holding the snow globe, whose name we will find out as Tommy Westfall. He is Donald Westfall's son in the series, then elsewhere. Yeah. He had been on the show, but he was never, like, a big character. No. He had autism. And in walks Donald Westfall, who's now a construction worker, and says he's talking to his own father. He's like, I don't get it, Pops. He just sits around and looks at that snow globe all day. I wonder what he's thinking in his head. Which suggests pretty strongly that everything about St. Elsewhere, all 137 episodes, took place in the mind of Tommy Westfall, this boy with autism who is sitting there staring at a snow globe. Yeah. In fact, it was even more on the nose than that. He actually says, I don't understand this autism thing, Bob. He's my son. I talked to him. I don't even know if he can hear me. He sits there all day long in his own world staring at that toy. What's he thinking about? Right. They didn't need to say all that. They should have just to me showed that and showed him coming in as a construction guy right. And maybe just looked longingly at the sun. Sure. But he's kind of like, you get it, everyone. So America is sitting there like, what? Yes. At the time, this is what, 1988, I think when it went off the air, all of America was just like, what just happened? That's really weird. But then in 2002, it started to get even weirder. Right? Yeah. Because there's a TV writer named Dwayne McDuffie, and he wrote a post called Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere, and he points out, wait, everybody. If all of staying elsewhere took place just in Tommy Westfall's mine, then that means that there's a significant amount of NBC shows that also are just in Tommy Westfall's mind. It's come to be called the Tommy Westfall hypothesis or the Tommy Westfall universe? Multiverse. Okay. Yeah. And it just spreads and spreads and spreads. And there's a really good paste article called Tommy's World the TV Legacy of Staying Elsewhere's. Tommy Westfall Universe is pretty much the definitive outside post on it. Yeah. And it lays out a pretty good thread of how shows are connected. And since they're connected, that means that they're all taking place in the mind of this boy with autism, Tommy Westfall. Right. And it goes a little something like this. Some of the doctors from St. Luke went to Cheers one time. Okay? So that means Cheers is in Tommy Westfield's mine. Fraser was a spin off of Cheers. Check. That means fraser isn't real. Yeah. You're getting this? We don't need to say that after each one, do we? I think it really drives the point home. The John Larakette Show, which was actually pretty good. John Larryette is great and that show was very underrated. But the lead character played by Larryatt was John Hemingway. He called in one time on Fraser's talk show. On Fraser. He was one of the call ins as that character. Right. So now John Laraquettes universe is in Tommy West Falls mind. That's right. So on the John Larry Kett show itself, they mentioned Yoyo Dine as a company, a tech company, right? Yeah. And in Star Trek, yoyo Dine made technology used by the Enterprise crew. Yoyo Dine. Right. Right. So that means Star Trek is in Tommy Westfall's mind. That's right. Yoyo Dyne also appears again in angel the TV josh whedon's? Angel. I think he was a client of the law firm Wolfram and Heart. Angel okay. And then Wolfram and Heart was representation to another tech company called Whalen, Utahi, which made tech on the TV show Firefly. Yeah. Things are getting deep now. Right, so now Firefly is in Tommy Westfalls mind as well. Then Waylon, Utah ship was in a spaceship graveyard on the series in Britain, Red Dwarf. Right. And then bring it home. And then the TARDIS is in the hangar bay of the ship. Red dwarf on the show. So that means that Firefly, Red Dwarf and then Doctor Who are all in the mind of Tommy Westfall because all of them are connected back to sane elsewhere. And as the author of this Paste article points out, this is a normal thread, it spread to something like more than 400 TV shows being implicated as being in the imagination of Tommy Westfall. Yeah. I think the last count I saw was 419 shows. So amazing. Which if they just get one more, then all of a sudden it's a weed theory. Right. Pretty great. Tell them about John Munch, though. He's like the all star character from Tommy Westfall universe. All right. That was Belzer's character on Homicide. Life on the street. Right. That was apparently a spin off from St. Elsewhere. It was related to it somehow. Yes, I think so. Officially related. But then Munch was on a bunch of different shows. Yeah. Like his character not just the guy who played him, but he just popped up in different shows all over the place. Not even necessarily just on NBC. Oh, yeah, he was on X Files and that was Fox, wasn't it? Yeah. Law and Order. He was on the Wire and he was on 30. Rocky Munch is just sitting there. Since he was already connected to Saint Elsewhere, any show he pops up on, he's obviously in the same universe as seen Elsewhere, which, again, is in Tommy West Falls Mine. So most of the television in the United States, it doesn't exist, except in the mind of a boy with autism who likes a snow globe back in 1988. I wonder how much of that was not pre planned, but zero, from what I understand. Well, they clearly meant to show, though. That same Elsewhere was a figment of his imagination. Right, but I don't think they even stopped and thought, oh, like what other uses, too? Right? Well, then most of that stuff came after saying Elsewhere, too. So I wonder then, if someone kind of ran with it. Like if there's this inside Cabal and Hollywood and the WGA where people are trying to tie these things together. It's like putting a Wilhelm screaming yes, which we did incorrectly. We tried one that was an sisk. Jim, you got anything else? No, sir. Well, if you want to know more about TV fan theories, you can go find them on the Internet. Send one in now if you have one that we didn't talk about. Yeah, a good one, though. We defined what a fan theory is. A good one. Yeah. And nothing from Lost. Yeah, just don't bother if you already said all that stuff. So since I said I already said all that stuff, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this hidden whisky. Remember our live show in Vancouver we talked about? The Canadian Club had a very special promo in the 80s where they hid cases of whiskey all over the world like a big scavenger hunt. And not all of that whiskey was found. Remember that? Yeah, I remember. So this guy Chris Ortloff writes in about that. He said one of them was hidden in Lake Placid, New York, a year before the 1980 Olympics, and supposedly it was never found. A few years ago, more than three decades later, my mother picked up the trail when she discovered that it was possibly still out there. Nice. I love it. This guy's mom was like, what are you whisking? I think she was just like, sounds like an adventure. Sure. Just kidding. Maybe she wanted the free whiskey, too. A fan of cryptic crossword puzzles, word games, and snowshoeing the allure was too much for her to pass up. There you have it. Plus, she really liked whiskey. She tracked down a man in Connecticut who had previously searched for it, spoke with customer service at Canadian Club even, and with a couple of other leads. She spent months turning over the clues, checking current and historical maps, and hiking through the woods and fields around Lake Placid. Love this guy's mom. Yeah, I sat down with her a few times with my thinking cap on in hopes of unraveling the mystery, as did many of her friends and relatives. We have lots of research and speculation amassed as a result, and I was really kind of nervous reading this. I was like, she found it, right? She didn't find it now, sadly, after all the effort and intrigue, we still have no idea where it is. Maybe some kids took it years ago, could be completely buried by leaves and twigs by now. Or maybe it's still waiting to be found and someone else can crack the case, so to speak. Blame it on leads and twigs. If you or any listeners want a chance of some by now vintage Canadian whisky, though for the very least, an enriching walk through the pristine northern New York wilderness. The clues, as originally printed and the CC ad are as follows and then he gave them to me. So you can just look that up on the Internet. They're out there. It's really yourself. Well, I mean, I can't read them all. Get out your decoder pin. Happy hunting, and do share one with me if you find it. That is from Chris Ortloff. Thanks, Ortloff. We appreciate that. You have the last name of a person who is only called by their last name. And Mrs. Ortloff, or at the very least, your mom. I don't know if that's her name. Madame Mortloff. I like that. The great explorer and adventure there. That's how she shall forever be known. Yeah. Well, thanks, Ortloff and Madame Ortloff, if you want to get in touch with us to tell us something cool that your mom's done, we want to hear that kind of thing just in time for Mother's Day, too. Yes, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast or Joshmclark. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. Charlesw Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Apps music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
8a6cd704-4a58-11e8-a49f-8303c967f5a9 | SYSK Selects: Does the five-second rule work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-does-the-five-second-rule-work | You know when you drop a piece of food and if you pick it up within five seconds it's still good to eat? | You know when you drop a piece of food and if you pick it up within five seconds it's still good to eat? | Sat, 29 Sep 2018 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=272, tm_isdst=0) | 33287620 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everyone, its me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen this episode on the five second rule, and I want to point out that my opinion on what constitutes something that can be eaten off of the floor has narrowed dramatically since this episode came out in January of 2013. And I was also surprised to figure out how many of my cleanliness habits actually came from researching this episode. Maybe it will have some sort of positive impact on you too. Who knows? There's only one way to find out, and that is to enjoy this episode. Thank you. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryant consulting his notes. He's wearing his glasses. Everybody's getting ready to podcast. So that means this is stuff. You know, stretching, doing my yoga. You just peed for the fourth time in the last hour. Got more coffee. I drink a lot of coffee. Yes. That was exciting. Yeah. And while I was getting coffee, I was like, I used my elbow to press the buttons to make coffee. Are you doing that now? I'm trying to think back to what initiated it, but I have definitely become far more germ conscious. I'm not a germophobe because I can just be like, oh, God, that's fine. Your fingers touched your mouth. Stop simpering. Right. Like, I can get a hold of myself like that, but at the same time, you know what it is? It was flush eating bacteria when it was going around Georgia for a little while. Yes. And then simultaneously, like, being aware that the gym is lousy with germs. Yeah, and I think that did a one two number on me. And now all of a sudden, I'm very aware of what I touch. Yeah, I'm not super germ conscious. I have been more so, though, since we've started learning more about this crap. But we have a mutual friend whose girlfriend won't even keep her toothbrush in the bathroom. Oh, really? Yeah, she said among the fecal air. The air? Why would I keep my toothbrush in the bathroom? Makes sense. Yeah. And she knows who she is. I don't know who she is. I'll tell you after. Okay, good. So you're okay with the idea of germs? I mean, there's this whole thing called the hygiene hypothesis, which makes utter incomplete sense to me. What that? If you allow more germs and you'll just learn to fight them and have more robust immune systems. Yes. Especially growing up as a child. And children who develop allergies it's because they are raised in a sterile lysol environment. Mine environment was filthy dirty, and so when they finally get out into this very filthy, dirty world, eg preschool, they don't have any antibodies built up for it. It makes a lot of sense. I don't know that there's any hard science that backs it up, but I don't know that's ever been disproven, but it's called the hygiene hypothesis. It appeals to me. It appeals to me. I don't have allergies. I don't get sick that much. No. And I'm unhealthy as it gets. I wouldn't call you that. No. I'm in the middle. Yes, I appreciate that. Okay. I guess, really, the division line between a germophobe and a non germophobe would probably be found somewhere in the five second rule, wouldn't you think? Sure. So, like, if I dropped something, depending on what it was and where I dropped it, I would possibly eat it. There's a comedian here in Atlanta. He's pretty good. His name is no garden Shorts. And he's saying, great name. Yeah. It means Noah Black Garden, I think. Yeah. And he was saying that the five second rule basically exists on a sliding scale. Like, if it's a piece of broccoli, it's like a zero second. Agreed. If it's like a cheeto, it's like whenever I find it rule. Yeah. Whenever I find it and pick it up and eat it rule. Right. He does it way better than me. But he had a great observation about the five second rule. The point is, for me, it depends on what it is, where it is not really even how long it's been there. I mean, if it's been there so long and it's under the couch and there's, like, dust bunnies accumulated on it, I won't eat it. No, you wouldn't eat anything that you didn't recently drop, would you? If you just found a cookie on the floor, you would eat it. Again, it depends on where the cookie on where it was found. Like, some places seem far cleaner to me than others. Like, mine and Yummy's department is very clean. Sure. So if it fell and was just slightly under the couch yeah, I'd eat it. It depends. I mean, if it were a piece of salami or something, I wouldn't but if it were, like, a very dry cookie sure. Perhaps a good potato chip that wasn't stale yet very clean, I would blow it off and eat it. Yeah. Since we're talking about our sliding scales, I would eat nothing that I didn't recently drop, unless it was, like, a little bit sweets. The king, they're candy bar the king. If I found one of those that I just forgotten that was under my couch, unwrapped on the floor, I would eat that no matter how long it had been there. Yeah. I would maybe rinse it off, or I would melt it down and reform it or do something, deconstruct it all arrange. Now, that's what I would do. That they released a box, a selection of caramels called stuff you should eat a little bit sweet. Really? Yeah. And it says specifically on their website that's in honor of us. Thank you, Liz and Jen. Okay. So I feel like we've gone in depth on what we do with the five second rule. The question still remains. Chuck is it viable? Is that a real thing? Like, if you are an adherent to the five second rule and you're like, I'm a very clean person. I only eat stuff that's been on the floor for 5 seconds or less. Are you full of it? Well, you're sort of full of it. You're totally full of it. There's a high school student in 2003, Jillian Clark, and she was doing her internship fighting lini of the University of Illinois, and she said, you know what? We should do a little study, because it's the old wives tale about the five second rule. Right. And she coated these tiles with E. Coli, which is really gross, and dropped cookies and gummy bears and things onto the surface for certain amounts of time and then studied what kind of bacteria it picked up. Yeah. And of course, no matter how long it had been down there, bacteria did jump onto the food within 5 seconds. What is important to point out, though, is the longer you left it there, the more it picked up. So the 5 seconds or under is important. Like, it's usually not 5 seconds for me, if I drop a piece of food, I've got it back within my hand in like 2 seconds. I've seen it. You're like a ninja. And it matters because the longer it's there, the more bacteria it's going to pick up. Right? Yeah. So Jillian Clark just did this very initial preliminary investigation, but she was a pioneer and received the 2004 IG Nobel Prize for Public Health for her effort. Really? Yeah. Good for her. Kind of. She established this trail, she blazed the trail, and then about four years later, some Clemson University researchers really kind of dug in to figure out what was going on with this five second rule and built on Clark's work. Go Tigers. Yeah, I mean, we got to say it. I don't feel like we do. Okay. Screw you, Tigers. All right, so what did they find out? They found out well, if you thought that the same thing, right. If you thought the E. Coli bacteria and the tiles was gross, I know where you're going. These guys created a broth of salmonella. Yes. They call it salmonella soup, which is so nasty. Yeah. And they applied it to three different types of material because, I mean, like, sure, maybe 5 seconds, you're going to get some bacteria on it. But doesn't it depend on the kind of food doesn't it depend on the kind of surface it comes in contact with? So these investigators, they're pros they were at Clemson, they applied the salmonella soup to tile, wood, surface, and carpet. Right. And then they started dropping bread and bologna on it. Good choice. Sure, why not? And they found what? Clark found that in less than 5 seconds, no matter how short the time, there was a bacterial transfer. Yeah. Between 158,000 bacteria if under 5 seconds. And consider this with salmonella, you only need ten individual bacterium wow. For what's called an infectious dose. Okay. So that is 5 seconds or under. If you left it down there for a minute, it was going to be ten times that. And there are ten strains of salmonella. Besides just the bacteria, there's a lot of stuff going on down there on your floor. Most notably poop shoes. Yes. That's another thing too. There's poop everywhere, but you should take your shoes off. My wife is of Japanese ancestry, and one thing that I definitely picked up from her is, like, you take your shoes off when you come in the house. So you just walk around without shoes on all the time or slippers or something? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Because especially if you're germ conscious, man, if you go into a public bathroom and you walk out of there, the bottom of your shoes are just like a nightmare. You don't want to track that all over your house because you may find a cookie on your couch that you want to eat. You have to plan for the future, basically, and that starts with taking your shoes off in your house. For some reason, I don't think the Japanese culture is rooted in the hopes that you'll find a cookie on your floor and be able to eat it. No, maybe not, but they are big into taking a shoe. My friend Jason in Tokyo, he is married to a woman in Cayo. And years ago, when we were living in Athens, they started that tradition of removing your shoes. And he was like, hey, do you mind? I was like, of course not. Watch this. Well, sometimes they'll even provide, like, slippers and stuff for guests, like if you're in a Japanese home. So you're still wearing shoes in there. But I guess the point is they've never left your house, so that's the deal. Yes. Environment. You're all good? Yeah. And I won't wear my slippers in the bathroom either. I got to tell you, I just got some new slippers. What, do you go barefoot in there? They're socks or whatever? Yeah, okay. But like, I don't want to burn the socks. I cut my feet off. I bought some new slippers. Dude. I'm not usually one to plug things on the air, but if you're a grown man and you want some the best slippers you've ever had and you don't mind throwing down a little cash uggs. Men's slippers, my friend. What do you think I wear? I was at what you wear. Yes. I wonder if they're the same ones. It looks like a little loafer, sort of suede. Mine don't have a back, they just have the sole. Okay. Mine have a back and they have like, the hard bottom, so you can go out and get in the mail or if you're me, go to the grocery store. Man, it's so comfortable. Yeah, that's nice. And all the what is it? The sherpa or whatever. It's not the sherpa. It's called sherpa lining. Oh, is it? Yeah, the sheep shear. Sherpa lining. That's what some people call it. So cozy. Okay, so slippers. I need to start plugging these things and getting them for free. I'm a sucker, I always buy them and then plug them. Right, I know, but it's not a sucker. Chuck here above the boards. Okay. So back to it. The longer the stuff stayed in contact, the more it was, the more bacteria that came upon it. But surprisingly, what they found was that the transfer was the least for carpet. The type of surface that came in contact with made a difference. I thought it was the most for carpet, it was the least, it was the least transferred. But the stuff survived in the carpet longer, so it all washed out. Got you. So it made some difference, but not really. Whether it's wood, tile or carpet, when you drop something on it, there's going to be a lot of bacteria transfer. But this stuff survives on these services. Carpet, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, there's a lot to it. There's pile and there's some sort of burber factor and all that. I can't forget the burber factor. Right. So of course, carpet, it's not much of a surprise that there's a lot of bacteria in there, but wood or tile, not only do they find that this stuff can survive for a while, it survives for up to a month. A month, wow. After they put this stuff on there, a month later, there was still living bacteria enough for an infectious dose on all three surfaces a month. Dude, that's okay. I'm becoming more of a germaphobe. And we're alternating to David Putty right now. David Puddy, is he a germaphobe? Yeah. Remember he and Peggy, who called Elaine Susie, they both turned out to be germaphobes. They had like a little bacteria necklace. Remember that? Yeah. Remember Kramer made a radish rose in his shower? He had a garbage disposal in his shower so he could bathe at the same time. It was that episode. Okay. So I know earlier you mentioned you just kind of off handedly, said if it's something dry like a cookie or that actually makes a difference, you found out that moisture can be the key to more bacteria transfer. So a dry cookie versus a piece of like wet bologna or salami or moist baloney. I just said moist baloney. We'll have more bacteria. And that's why they say when you go to the restroom and you wash your hands, the drying is just as important, if not more important than the washing. Yeah. They found that this transfer of bacteria seems to be facilitated by moisture. Right? Yeah. So when you touch something with your wet hands, you're going to get a bunch of bacteria transferred onto your hands. Right. If you wash your hands and then use one of those hands free paper towels dispensers and dry your hands, you can touch that same surface that you would have touched with your wet hands, and you're going to have far less bacteria transferred to it. Yeah. Or nowadays the air dryers in the bathroom. Have you noticed in the past few years, or just like, for 50 years, it was the same air dryer? Oh, no. There's the accelerator now. There's the accelerator and the Dyson blade dryer. I like the accelerator because the Dyson blade, you have to stick your hands down in there. I like that. And it's almost like playing Operation. It's almost impossible not to touch the side. Yeah, that's true. And then does anyone clean the bottom of those things? I don't think so. The accelerator is all just like, blowing your hands and you're done, and you cannot touch things more. That's true. I like the accelerator because the way it makes your skin ripple like the GForces is pretty amazing. Like we were in the indoor skydiving thing. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about hands real quick, Chuck. So there's a study that came out of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and they found some really surprising things using this technique called metagenomics, where they take a swab of, like, a sample off of your hands, and then rather than doing culture, they do basically a DNA profile for everything found in that swab. What they find? Well, they did 51 participants. They found 4700 different bacteria species across the 51 participants. And what I found was particularly interesting. They found that only 5% of these species were found in all 51 participants. No. Five period. Not even percent. Oh, yeah. Five, period. So out of all these species, the only one we're sharing. So that means there's just way more out there than we thought, I guess. Yeah. And it's just luck of the draw as to what leaps to your hands. I guess so. And not only your hands, but specific hands, too. They found that the right and left palms of a single person shared only 17% of the bacterial species. So that means that there's different species on different hands of the same person. That's weird. And then women tend to have a higher diversity of bacteria on their hands than men. Not necessarily more bacteria total, but more diversity among species. Interesting. So depending on which hand you shake, you're going to be getting a different type of bacteria from someone. Yeah. And if somebody shakes your hand is like, oh, it's just water. I wash my hand. Yeah. Punch them in the head. Yes. Because that's bacterial transfer. Jerk. Dry your hands. Yeah. Since you mentioned women, I think the study by the girl in 2003 found that women are more likely to eat something off the floor than men, which surprised me. What surprised me is where the person who wrote this article got that. I couldn't find it anywhere. I couldn't either. I saw that women were more familiar with the concept of the five second rule, but not that they used it more. Yeah. You know what? I'm going to call that a dubious statement, then. Dubious indeed. Okay, so you've eaten something off of the floor. It would get on hands. Yeah, thanks for that. Okay. I like in the article, they pointed out that out of the 51 participants, there were 102 hands. Yeah. All right, so good. You didn't have any amputees in the study. Right. What was funny is I didn't think it added up, and then I realized that's why I stopped for a second a minute ago. All right, so you picked up a cookie off of the floor, it's dry, it's been down there for 3 seconds, and you think, you know what? I'm going to roll the dice and eat it because my stomach acids and the acids and my saliva is going to kill all the stuff factor fiction. That is fiction. That is very much fiction. So it says, the germ guru of the University of Arizona. Go. Were they Wildcats? Sun Devils? Arizona State? Arizona State. Arizona's Wildcats. Go Wildcats. Charles Gerba. His name almost looks like Germ. Yeah. Close or Gerber. It's closer than Clark. Like he's the adult version of the Gerber baby. So he says that viruses actually survived the low PH. In fact, a lot of them like it. And that pretty much any bacteria that you can infect your intestine with is going to stay alive long enough to get your intestine right. It's going to survive that acidity in your stomach. Yeah. Look for a podcast on Digestion. That was a good one, man. That was great. If you want to learn how that works. And it does make a difference on where it's landed. Like you said, some floors are more dangerous than others. And bathrooms are the worst place on Earth. Yes. And kitchens. Actually, kitchens are the worst. They're supposedly dirtier than bathrooms. It depends on the bathroom. But yeah, Gerba points out that of all the shoes that he's ever analyzed and this guy runs around on Good Morning America and the Today Show and analyzes stuff and just freaks people out. It's like kind of his trade. Sure. Yeah. He said that fecal matter appears on about 93% of the shoes he's ever analyzed. Of course it does. Yeah, like I said, there's poop everywhere. Everywhere. Especially in my house. So, yeah, you'd think a public restroom is pretty bad, and it is, but it depends on what part of the public restroom you're talking about. And sometimes compared to other places that it doesn't hold the candle, there's some surprising germ statistics that we're about to unleash on you. Let's just jump all over then. I got the kitchen floor, the area on the kitchen floor just in front of your sink where you're going to be doing your dishes and dropping food. And poop has more bacteria than your trash can. 830 per square inch, as opposed to 411. So double. And your kitchen sponge. I know, everyone knows that that's a really filthy thing to have. Yeah. Remember that one? Necessary, but filthy. Remember the, I think, a Clorox wipes or Lysol wipes commercial where the lady was using a sponge? If you're using a sponge, you might as well be doing this. And she was just rubbing, like, a raw chicken breast on her counter like it was a sponge. That's basically true, though. It's like you should be really careful with your sponge. What you clean with, it what you don't clean with it, letting it dry out, changing it, like, regularly. Like, if you got a two month old kitchen sponge and you're using that to wipe your counter, you are spreading bacteria all over the place. You don't love your family, so you can use it at first, is what I do, because I'm a clean guy. My wife is not. I will clean up after her with the sponge, and then I'll go back with my organic spray and then do the paper towel wipe after that. Nice. That's the final step in the process, as always. The dry paper towel with my 7th Heaven stuff is what I use. And then a little bit of lighter fluid. Yes. Sterilize the counter. All right, so your kitchen floor is dirtier than your trash can. Your sponge holds 60 times more bacteria than your pet food bowl, even though pet food bowls are pretty gross, too, supposedly, because you don't clean them out as much. Sure. And all of this is Jermier than a toilet seat. Yeah. You always hear that, the old toilet seat. Yeah. And I think the reason why the toilet seat is surprisingly cleaner in comparison, or surprisingly germfree compared to other things, like your kitchen sink and all that, is because people clean the toilet seat more frequently because they think of it as a dirty place. And this is kind of borne out in another study that Gerba carried out on behalf of the Clorox Corporation, who make lice all wipes. And he found that one of the dirtiest places in the universe is a person's desk. Yeah. And he found that apparently the average desk has 100 times more bacteria than a kitchen table and 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet. And one of the reasons is because people don't ever wipe us out. So he did this study where he divided workers into two groups. One group used the Sanitizing wipes once or twice a day, and then the other group didn't. And after two days, there was a 99.9% reduction in bacteria on the desk of the people who are using the wipes. So wiping down your telephone handset, your desk mouse is a big one. Your mouse, your keyboard, apparently, where you typically rest your hand on your desk. Mine's on my mouse has about 10 million bacteria on average. But he also found that over the course of a day, if you don't wipe your stuff down, you actually increase your bacteria from 19% to 31% on telephone mouse keyboard desktop services throughout the day. It increases that much more. Man, I haven't cleaned my desk in so long. It's been a while for me, too. I don't use the phone, though. I don't either. Yeah, no one calls us. I don't even know my number to give out. And anytime if somebody asks for them, just email. Yeah, that's what I do. Molly Edmunds, the former co host of Stuff Mom Never Told You back in the day, she wrote about cubicle death and specifically germs in the workplace, like we were just talking about. And she points out that if you're a restaurant and you have more than 700 bacteria per square inch, you're going to be considered unsanitary, but you will come into contact with 10 million bacteria a day in your office. And statistics, like, people eat at their desk and don't clean. I eat at my desk occasionally. I don't clean. 75% of people only occasionally will wipe down their work area. And your desktop itself, not the computer desktop, but your desk, it's going to be 100 times Jermier than a kitchen table. Right. And again, 400 times Jermier than a toilet seat. And presenteeism, which is a big problem, 75% of workers I'm sorry, one third of workers. That's not 75%, it's close. Reported to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases that they felt like they were obligated to go to work even when they were sick. Yeah, that's the problem. It's not okay. And I know around here, especially Tracy Pop stuff, she takes it pretty serious. She's like she gets pissed off when people are in here sick. She'll yell. Yes. She'll say, if you're sick, please stay home because the office is dirty, your bathroom is dirty, your kitchen is dirty. That cutting board that you're cutting your vegetables on, filthy. Yes. It's all dirty. It's all gross. Well, I can't remember. I was trying to think of what episode biofilm came up. You were telling everybody about biofilm. Yeah. What was that? I can't for the life of me remember. But that's how bacteria survive. That's how they can survive on stainless steel. That's how they can survive on wood, on tile, on nonporous surfaces, on synthetic surfaces that are designed to keep bacteria from thriving. These things can survive because they live in biofilm. It's this protective film on any surface, and if a surface has grooves or things like that, where a biofilm can hide, there's going to be a lot more bacteria. And a cutting board, apparently, is one of those great examples. Yeah. Especially a wood cutting board, I think. Yeah, which I prefer. Me, too. Got to clean them well, though. Yeah. Because I'd rather have some bacteria in my food than, like, shards of plastic. Yeah, it's a good point. So before you freak out and jump in a pool of Purel. Most of these germs are benign. Like, we've quoted all these tens of thousands and millions of germs and things. Most of them are benign. And your body is going to take care of most of it, too. But it only takes, like when you find yourself wretching over the toilet with a stomach virus, it might have just been one little bacteria that got through. All it takes is ten for salmonella to get you and 100 for E. Coli. Wow. Ten little guys. The bottom of a woman's purse randomly Gerba again, just ran up to some people. He's like, Let me test your purse. And he found from the hundreds to 6.7 million on the bottom of one woman's purse, texas ten or 100. He didn't say that. That also had, like, pieces of pot pie. There are probably reasons. Yeah. But I think that was the one lady that's a good thing to go out on, tuck you to get by, reassuring everybody that as long as your immune system is in order, you're probably okay. As far as these bacteria go, don't keep your toothbrush in your bathroom. So, as our friend's girlfriend, let's see. Before we say anything like listen or mail or go find this article, I want to do a quick shout out. Okay, do it. Our Kiva team, Chuck, recently hit a very significant milestone. $1.5 million in loans. Wow. That's enormous. What's? Kiva? No, say it. Oh, yeah, Kiva. I know what it is. Kiva.org is a micro lending site where you can make loans and little $25 increments to people in the developing world to use for entrepreneurship, to have their taxi license, to buy oxen, to retail clothes, what have you, farming, whatever. And our Kiva team has doled out one 5 million in these $25 loans. That's just such an amazing accomplishment. Yeah. When we started this, we had no idea that it was going to have like this. And, I mean, we're going to keep it going in perpetuity. We are. One of the reasons I wanted to shout out is because we are resetting our goals. We're setting our goal to $2 million by the summer solstice, June 21. It's an international date, right? Yeah. And Glenn, the team leader at Kiva, came up with this. I think it's a sound idea. Yeah. Thank you to Glenn and Sonya, as always. So we're going to 2 million by June 21. And if you want to join us in this, we are not the least bit exclusive. We're a very inclusive and welcoming group of people. You can go to www. Dot kiva. Kiva.org teamstepychino. And if you wanted to know anything more about the five second rule, type five second rule in the search bar@housetoforce.com I said search bar. So it's time for listener mail. It is Josh. We are just a few days away from our TV show premiere, though, when we would be remiss, I know you're probably. Tired of hearing about it by now. I'm not. We would be remiss if we didn't remind everyone that on Saturday night at 10:00 p.m.. Eastern on Science Channel, you're going to get two episodes of Stuff You Should Know back to back. The premiere. Episode two, following the season premiere of Ricky Gervais's Idiot Abroad with Charles Pilkington. Yeah. That comes up first. And then we come on at ten with two brand new the first two episodes of Stuff You Should Know, the TV show. That's right. And if you do not have cable, fear not, because, as we have announced, you can purchase these episodes on itunes after they are released next day. And because we love everyone so much in the world, you can get the premiere episode for free on itunes. Yeah. So just seek it out, download it, watch it and make some noise over at Science Channel. Yes. And on Twitter, too. We think you're going to like it. It's us and we play ourselves. But it's set in like a kind of a fictionalized version of The Office, our office. And there's podcasting and action and adventure and all sorts of goodness, so it should be hopefully everybody likes it. Yeah. As we have said before, it's the realoss and a fictional world spelling factual information that's retired lining. All right, I hope you stuck around for this Lister mail, because it's pretty good. This is from Ben. Guys. My name is Ben. I'm a 30 year old husband and father. Never consider myself a very smart man. I did mediocre in high school, not because of lack of trying, but because of being viewed as a lazy student. And I was just socially awkward, to be honest. My wife has talked me into catching up with your podcast and since then I've gotten a smartphone and done so. And all I can say is thank you guys from the bottom of my heart. It just helped me become a better husband and father. Let me explain. After high school, I became a father to a beautiful boy with an ex girlfriend who was not the best person. Due to some heart complications. My son Logan passed away four days after his first birthday. This resulted in me not following through with college, shutting down emotionally, basically becoming angry at the world and God for my son's passing. Put it bluntly, I became someone who I said I never would become. It was full of hate. The years that followed in my life was just gray as I went through the motions of life. Things turned around when I met my wife, Jordan, got married and had our son Raiden. And, yes, I did name him Raiden after Mortal Kombat. And then I was turned on your podcast after listening to over 200 of them. You two have opened a hard spot in my heart after listening to you guys and hearing how good natured you are. I myself have been trying to give everything in life a fair chance and have become more of a good hearted person who no longer battles something bad within myself. Wow. I know, right? I'm happier in life than ever before. And I have my wife and son and now Chuck and Josh to thank for helping. I'm trying to further my education. I can't stop reading and learning, and I saved your show. So when my one year old son is old enough, he can experience something that changes daddy's life for the better, just like he and his mommy did. So I can't thank you guys enough for all you've done without even knowing it. Sometimes all it takes is good hearts and a good podcast to make even a small difference. If you guys are Evan Ohio, I'd like to play with a drink that is from Ben Chilton. Damn, Ben. Thank you for that. We're not even trying. I know, dude. I read the stuff, and I'm just like, are you kidding me? That's pretty cool. What are you supposed to say to that? Thank you. So thanks, Ben. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, about five second rule, how about this? We want to know the nastiest thing you've ever eaten, whether it was something that was prepared, something that touched the ground. Tell us your nasty eating story. Yeah. And if you're one of those kids I had friends in elementary school that would have, like, gross eating contests, that would throw mashed potatoes on the floor and then eat them. I explored that once. I was like, you know what? Maybe I am that kid. Let's find out. And I ate a sticker that was on the ground with some hair attached to it, and I was like, no, I need to keep seeking my persona, not me. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. But we want to know about them, right? Yeah. I can't believe you tell that. I mean, that long. That story tweet to us at syskpodcast. Join us on facebook. Comstuffyshenknow. And as always, you can send us an email. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
42bc8054-53a3-11e8-bdec-5b4981366091 | MC Escher and His Trippy Art | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/mc-escher-and-his-trippy-art | We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in today. | We love us some MC Escher. Turns out his story is pretty fascinating too. Tune in today. | Tue, 17 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=351, tm_isdst=0) | 55136001 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. The arts edition. Jerry Roomtone Rowland. Yeah. I think that's make Bully's Stuff room tone. Yeah. She might as well be like, let me capture a few fairies in this Mason jar first. I think it's the same thing. We may need those in the final edit. Fairies. I don't know what it is about to explain to everyone room tone is you did this on film sets and in studios where you just make everyone sit completely silently. You capture the sound of the room. So I guess you can what do you do with that, Jared? You layer it in case you need it or something. Did you hear that, everyone? She said she cleans up the background. To everybody listening, it sounded like there's something about it, though. It's like being in church and getting the giggles. It's really hard, especially on a film set when there's like 50 people standing around being completely silent. Island farting. I suspect it's strictly a power trip. You think so? The person calling for room tone, that's what I think. I'm going to start doing that in my house when things get out of hand. Room tone. Exactly. Don't make me bust out the room tone on you. Well, since we have to do with it no, I was going to say, since we're talking about room tone, obviously the topic today is MC Escher, who is well known for going berserk. Anytime someone asked him to be quiet for room tone, he would trash chairs, grab reptiles straight out of the two dimensions and throw them into the third dimension. Just do all sorts of weird stuff. That's funny. Did you think so? That was a joke just for you. Yeah. So everyone knows MC Escher. If you've ever been to college or taken drugs or sold drugs to somebody in college, then you've probably seen Drawing Hands. Or I mean, that's not what the name of that one? Was. It's called Drawing Hands. Oh, is it? Or some of the more famous ones. Are these impossible rooms, like stairs that lead to sideways stairs, but you got to wrap your head around it in a certain way to even make sense of it. All right. Or stairs that lead into other stairs. That lead back into the other stairs. Sure. Just constant. I'm a big fan of that one self portrait he did in the with the sphere. The mirror sphere. Mirror sphere. Yeah. It's cool. It is very cool. I'm not crazy about the face, even though I'm sure he did it exactly precise. But the hand, if you look at the hand, it's really realistic. It's very pretty. Yeah. I mean, I like this stuff. This is not my style, as in anything I would put on my walls these days, but I still think he's one of the coolest, more innovative artists out there. And there's a great factoid that I hope will hold till the end, which is not the end, but kind of where it falls in our non outline. What does factoid mean again? Does that mean you've killed 10% of all the facts? That's right. And this is just one of the 10% remains? That's right. Okay. Got you. So one of the things, Chuck, about Mcscher that I found was that if you were impressed by his work, prepare to get exponentially more impressive. We talk about how he made those work. That's the fact that they showed him for me. Okay. That's the fact. Yeah. We got to hold on to that. Sure. I was just teasing it a little bit. I didn't know that's what you're talking about. Although I should have guessed. Yeah. So this is us talking about an artist, which means that we should probably talk about the artist being born. And in the case of MC, Escher, whose name, by the way, was Moritz Cornelis. I want to say Cornelius, but there's no U in there. I think Cornelis. Sure. Asher. I nailed the last name. That's right. But I misspoke on name. You didn't say name. I nailed the last name. This is the point where the people say, Get to the point already. Well, we are at that point. That's MC and then Escher, born June 17, 1898, not 1989, as the Grabster put it. I was like, man, he's like, here's the numbers. He was born in Leo Warden, Netherlands, grew up in Arnhem, which is about 60 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. I mapped all this stuff out. Nice. It's all in kind of that general area. You went on a little Google tour? Sure. And he signed even from early on as MCE. He signed his paintings, although people called him Mock Mauk friends and Family. Right. Which didn't mean anything, Ed points out, but it's just like, an affectionate term for Moritz. Yeah. Is it Moritz? Probably moreitz Moritz Cornelis, Escher, but it could also go the way of Morris. So is it Morris or Morris? I don't know. I wish I knew. Well, what we do know is that in this, we should put a pin in, because it sort of plays a big part in how he pursued his art. But his dad had some money. He was a rich kid. Yeah, for sure. Which really helps as we'll see as he's tracing around Europe on Dad's dime, slowly getting better at art. Slowly. Yeah, that's a good point. Because he was not great in school. He did love drawing class, but apparently he didn't have his second grade teachers falling over themselves about what a talented artist he was. No. And apparently he also didn't consider himself much of an artist, although he engaged in art like he did produce art from a very young age. He was terrible in school, except at math and at drawing, apparently. When he was in grade school, primary school, he failed his finals, all of them except for math. And I read that his father noted in his journal with some affection that his son consoled himself by producing a linatype of a sunflower. That's how he made himself feel better after failing out of school. Well, and he was somewhat adept at math early on. But it's interesting. His work is highly mathematical as far as art goes. But later on in life, when he was confronted with real mathematicians, he would sort of be like, no, not me, man. I'm an artist. I'm not that kind of mathematician. Yes, but most of his friends are mathematician. For most of his career, he was mostly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists. Those are the people who really vibe on his work. And drugs. That came later. Okay. That came later. And it got really popular. But I saw that somebody made a movie called Journey into Infinity. It's a documentary, a full length documentary, I believe. The whole thing is on YouTube. And the trailer starts out with Graham Nash saying, hey, I called up MC Escher one day just to say, mr. Escher, I think you're a really great artist. That's all I wanted you to say. And he said, I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a mathematician. Oh, really? Yes. So I'm going with Graham Nash's interpretation. Everything is counter to this. Spoke to him directly. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Not to spoil anything, but he died in 1972, just 73. So if he would have lived to his mid 80s, which is somewhat reasonable, he would have been alive in the 80s, which just seems so weird. It does seem kind of weird, yeah. Because he seems countercultural, for sure. Even though his personality was not very countercultural now. And he didn't really have much love for hippies. In fact, he later said that the hippies in San Francisco are legally making copies of my work. He didn't exactly follow the normal usual beat throughout his lifetime. And he was a mathematician. He was a bit of a square, but he was also a very imaginative square. That's right. I was trying to make a square joke, but it's not coming to me. Remember that show Square Peg? Square Peg. Square Pegs. Sarah Jessica Parker. Was she in that? She was also in girls just want to Have Fun. That's right. Yeah. And I'm going to see her on Broadway next spring. Really? Yeah. She and her husband are co starring in Plaza Suite. Neil Simon's plaza Suite. Very nice. Very excited about that. I'm trying to align it with The Bonnie Prince Billy Show, but they're like a week apart, and I'm like, I can't just stay in New York. Time to kill. Especially when there's hourly flights between Atlanta and New York. I know I may just go see Bonnie Prince Billy and come home, because he didn't play much, but that's a story for another day. All right. So he goes to school at Technical College of Delft, not for very long. And then he went to the Harlem with two a's school of Architecture and decorative Arts, which is west of Amsterdam, not Harlem, New York. Well, I think that's what the Harlem in New York is named after, right? Yeah. That's where Bonnie Prince William is playing. He's a town hall, actually. Oh, is that right? Yeah, we played there. That's right. We got our stink on that joint. So his dad said, because his dad had a lot of money and made money, and even though you want to support your kids, you want to try and edge them into something, if you're that kind of dude, that might be lucrative. So he said, hey, you like to draw shapes? Why don't you go study architecture? And he did that for a little while, even though he wasn't super into it. But while at school there, he had a very fortunate meeting by being mentored by one Samuel Jacoen de Misquita, who would be his mentor, who noticed some of his early art. I'm not sure how he saw it, but he took one look at Usher's art and said, you don't need to go into architecture. Come study under me and learn graphic design. And so Esser did. He became a graphic designer, which he whether he knew it or not, he had been his whole life up to that point. All of his work is very graphic in nature and designing. Yeah, it really is. But I'm sure his dad in the early 1920s was probably like, is that even a thing? Right. That sounds made up. Yeah. Well, his dad also, I don't know if you said or not, was a civil engineer, so of course he would be like, you draw. Just go do architecture. Right? That's what I know, civil engineering. And there's architects in the world. Just go do the other thing that I don't do. And he probably thought graphic design just meant, like, you're going to make signs, right. Or postage stamps or Christmas paper, which he did later on. That's right. So he made a little bit of dough. So in the early 1920s, he started on his sort of rich kid journey, traveling around Europe on his dad's dime on a gap year. That was really long, very long. But on one of these trips, he went to a couple of places that would end up having a big influence on him. One in Spain at the Alhambra, and then just traveling through southern Italy, through the countryside. Yeah, he just fell in love with Italy. Yeah. But in Spain, this is one that didn't bear fruit right away, but he was really fascinated by these mosaics and tessellations, which are described as okay, they are repeating designs that interlock with one another, leave no space between one another. And that when you put them together, they fully cover a plane, which is harder to do than you would think. Yeah. Like if you've ever seen the Escher fish sort of tessellation, the white fish and the blackfish kind of working in one another. Yeah, that's a perfect example. And he would do this a lot later on if you've ever played Cubert. Yeah, those cubes are tessellation. Sure. A certain kind. But he got really into this, even though it wasn't like right away that he started doing these things. That sort of came a little bit later. But what he did do was started drawing the Italian countryside because he loved it. Loved it. I mean, he went to Italy and was like, this is my home. Yes. And he was quoted at one point in time as saying that he never wanted to become an Italian among Italians. He liked being a stranger, but he loved Italy, which is an interesting thing to say. I'm not exactly sure what it means. I think what he was saying was he likes being a visitor to Italy rather than there's a certain amount of responsibility that comes with being one of us. You know what I mean? Sure. Whereas if you can be like that guy over there who will accept them, we're not going to throw rocks every time we see him or anything like that. And we'll take his money and maybe even say hi to him or whatever, we'll leave him alone. We won't include him in our expectations of what it means to be a local. Got you. That's what I think he's after. Clearly, I can identify with that. Well, that kind of came through in his work, too, because if you'll notice, even in these, before he started doing the trippy, three dimensional hand drawing hands and stuff, when he was doing countryside, he didn't do a lot of people, didn't do a lot of faces. People were very much in the background and nondescript. But even when you look at these, when you say Italian still license of countrysides, what came to mind for me were these beautiful, lush, colorful recreations of a countryside. No, when you look at these, they still look very much like in the MC Escher style that we all know. Yeah. Like, very clearly, a lot of them. I love them, too. They're cool. Yeah, they're beautiful. They're black and white and then shades of gray, which is all just shading, right? Yeah. But they are beautiful in their way and lovely, even. I like this stuff more than the trippy stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is something I would put on my wall. You're an art snob. You're like. Oh, I only like Escher's. Early Italian landscapes. Oh, man. Trippy stuff for Graham Nash. I'm so ashamed. No, I think it's great, Chuck. You have totally right. But they are gorgeous. And then in 1923, he met his wife. His name was Jetta. Jetta Umaker. That's right. Very nice. Thank you. She was Swiss. I learned from the best. They met her in Italy, but she was Swiss, and she went home, and they sent a bunch of love letters. It's a very sweet story. I'm sure an mCer movie would be pretty cool. Somebody wrote a script, or they wrote a dissertation about the process of writing a script about MC Escher. It's from University of Texas. They wrote it in 2017. I can't remember the name of it, but just look up just some random stuff comes up. If you look up mosquito bootprint, which will come up later. Right. But if you search that on Google, it brings up have you ever done that? Have you ever been like, I'm bored. I want to see what weird stuff I can unlock from Google. No. And it takes a certain amount of skill, because Google wants to give you exactly what you're looking for. It doesn't want to give you just randomness sure. So you have to trick it. So maybe you'll type in a weird word or the first three letters of a word or something like that, and weird stuff will start to come. Well, if you type in Mosquito Bootprint, probably only, like, the first three of them pertaining to MCs, and the rest are just a random assortment of links. I remember early in the days of Google, we had a mutual friend who they did this what I thought was a very dumb game, where they would try and find two words together, that they would try and produce the fewest amount of Google results and whoever could put two words together that found the fewest one. Yes. And I don't know if you remember them doing that. I don't remember you talking about waste of time, but I remember that some guy did, like, a Ted Talk about that. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, maybe I'm the dummy. No, I mean, look at me. I do like Mcscher's early work. I think that's awesome. I mean, what tastes yeah. So he meets and gets married. She returns to Italy, and they married 1924. Do you mean, Jetta? Umaker that's right. She would become Jeda Escher. Jedda Umaker Escher. And they had a son named Giorgio, later had sons, Arthur and Yan, and they were still just sort of traveling, and his dad was even though he was married, his dad was still footing the bill. Ashley's dad. MC Escher's father. Yes, which I was thinking about it. I was like, Gosh get a benefactor. Wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror. But if you're in the mirror sphere right? And then how do you draw it so amazingly? The father, Esther's father, though, they're like, what better way to spend your money than to just be like, this is what you want to do with your life, son? You want to pursue art and live in beautiful Italy. Then, like, here, this is what I want for you. Down. That's awesome. That's the pinnacle of what a parent can do for their child in a lot of ways. No, totally. It's not like, hey, why don't you go take up heroin and here's a bunch of money for you to lay around in a visa. True. I want to know more. I hope I'm not coming across as cynical, but I wonder if some of this was like, he'll come around to architecture or whatever, but you kept waiting for the part where his father cuts them off. I was his father, apparently. Wouldn't like that. All right, I know how you feel. I'm not trying to talk you into my way of thinking. I started out thinking the same way you did, and then something happened. I was like, oh, it was actually really needed his dad. It was. It all seems above board. Yeah. So World War II has a profound effect on Escher and his work. In 1935, he learned that they were making his nine year old son Giorgio March in fascist youth parades. And he said, Pack your bags, we're going to Switzerland. That is the appropriate response to that news. Yeah, we're getting out of here. Marching for Mussolini. Have you seen Jojo Rabbit yet? No. Is it as good as it looks? It's great. It's great. Everything about it is great. Do I need to see it in theater? It doesn't seem like one, I have to say, in the no. I mean, it's always fun to laugh with a big group of people. Although by now it's probably thinned out. Yeah. And I was laughing a lot and people weren't laughing. Oh, I like that. Kind of one of those deals. I mean, it's a movie about a kid having Hitler as an imaginary friend. Don't tell me that. I know. I had no idea. Hitler's on the poster. I know, but I didn't know he was an imaginary friend. Get out of my brain. Sorry. That really doesn't spoil anything. Okay. Don't tell me anything that's not some big reveal. So they go to Switzerland. All apologies. It's all right. It's really not a big deal. As long as it's not a big spoiler. No, of course not. Okay. They go to Switzerland, and even though he did not like the mountains, he didn't like the snow, did not like cold weather. So they moved to Belgium after a couple of years, which is just beautiful compared to Switzerland. Belgium is nice. Sure. In May of 1940, though, the Nazis invaded Belgium, and so they moved to the Netherlands in 1941, where the Nazis already were. Yeah. I guess they can't occupy it again. Well, and it's home. Right. And they've settled in Barn, which is about 23 miles southeast of Amsterdam. I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it. Baarn. Right? It's probably Baron. Oh, yeah. I bet you just nailed it. I think so, but Dutch is very strange. It is language not strange, but just for my dumb English ears, supposedly, English is the strangest of all. Yes, I'm sure it's just a hybrid mongrel language that doesn't make any sense to anyone who's not a native speaker of it. You know what is an interesting language is Welsh, because I'm watching the Crown, and when Prince Charles starts coming around Prince of Wales, there are people speaking Welsh. And I was very ignorant about even knowing that what it sounds like. What it sounds like, and that it was still spoken. And it was a very odd hybrid, it sounded like, of several different things. It's all old Celtic stuff. Yeah, very unusual. Gallic. Gallic? Yeah, I think it's Gallic. That's the language group. One of the two. Everything I know about Welsh I learned from Super Furry animals. Oh, yeah. Because that guy's Welsh man. I saw them blow Granddaddy off the stage one time. Oh, you saw him live? Oh, I think he told me that he melted my brain so good. I'll bet. So they're traveling around still, even though they're settled in Baron, and they go back to Alhambra in Spain, which I don't think we said what that is. No, it's a 13th century Moorish castle from when the Moors conquered Spain. Beautiful. It is very beautiful. And they built it in the Moorish style. And then it was eventually taken over by the Christian royalty that explored the New World and all that stuff. But this castle was done in these tiles that are renowned for being some of the most beautiful geometric like Islamic patterns you've ever seen in your life. And they got to escher. He'd seen them before, but I guess he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. Right. But the second trip that he went back with after they moved from Switzerland, I think, to Belgium, or maybe to Switzerland, that's when he was like, I am obsessed with these now. These Tessellations started drawing them, jetted it, too. It says that they work together. So I didn't know that she was an artist. Yeah, I didn't either. But World War II comes back around, will not come back around. It never left, let's be honest. But Spain would devolve into civil war. And so this meant that he was kind of stuck outside of Amsterdam for a little while longer. He wasn't doing as much traveling. No, he was in the Netherlands, and he rekindled his friendship with Mosquito, his old mentor, who had stayed in Netherlands this whole time. And Mosquito was Jewish, and he was taken away by the Nazis. Eventually he was killed at Auschwitz, I believe, with his wife, Terrible, and their son was also killed at another concentration camp by the Nazis. And this really got to Escher. Like, this is one of his dear friends, and he had a work, a sketch of Mosquitoes when he went to his house to visit mosquito he found. The door was open, and they weren't there, and they'd clearly been taken by the Nazis. And one of the pieces of artwork that he gathered together to preserve was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a Nazi boot print on it. And that's what you were referenced earlier with your Google search. Mosquito boot print. Was there a picture of it? No, I couldn't find anything aside from the fact that it was a sketch. Not that it was a sketch of what or anything like that, just that there was a sketch of mosquitoes that had a border blueprint and that Escher hung onto this his entire life. This is very important to him, and he was not a very flowery, like, passionate man or anything like that. I get the impression that he and this is actually what I'm talking about that he internalized a lot of stuff, and I think that him holding on to that piece of art was probably more significant than even it appears on the outside. Yeah. And supposedly hid some people from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation years, and also during those same years, did not exhibit or release any prints. Wait a minute. I think you said hid some people from a Jewish family. Or did you say hid some members of a Jewish family? Well, people members of a Jewish family. But you said from, I think yeah, I mean, like, they were from a Jewish family. Oh, got you. He didn't hide them from there. Right. Don't tell the Jewish family that you're hiding over here. No, that would have been weird. So maybe we should take a break now. Oh, I think it's unraveled. Okay. Chuck so World War II kind of comes and goes around Escher, despite his best efforts to escape it, and it definitely had a mark on him, but one of the other things that had a really big mark on him was having to move from Italy. Like you said, he was married, had a family. His father was still supporting him, and every spring and summer, he would just tour the Italian countryside and visit small quaint towns and just be inspired to keep making these Italian landscapes. But it makes a really great point here that his Italian landscapes are very handsome works of art, very beautiful. My favorite technically proficient. They're Chuck's favorite, but you would almost certainly have never seen them in your entire life now were it not for him moving from Italy, because in doing so, he lost his source of inspiration and was forced to kind of turn inward because he hated what Switzerland looked like. He wasn't apparently very inspired by his home country of the Netherlands, so he had to kind of turn inward into his own imagination and start coming up with new subjects. And in doing that, the true escher was unlocked. Yeah, because early, like a lot of artists early in their career, they kind of free ranged through different styles trying to find their own personal thing. He had a very colorful clown period. It's very bizarre. Doesn't fit with the rest of it. Very John Wayne Gacy. Right. But you can very clearly see, if you look at Mesquito's work the connection and the influence from him. Although Mosquito did a lot of sort of graphic portraits and things like that. Whereas Escher didn't really worry too much about humans and faces. Yeah. They were just kind of like almost after thoughts. But early on, he did start experimenting with stuff that would later become sort of his hallmark. When he did do, like, a sketch of a building, let's say it would be from this really tall, odd angle looking down on it, very severe angles and like a horizon or trees that sort of go on into infinity, stuff like that that would become very much his style later on. And Ed very astutely points out that there's something about his style that I don't know how dark of a person he was emotionally but there is something about the severity of these angles and a lot of his work that was just sort of uneasy feeling. Right. It didn't look like just some beautiful, colorful Italian countryside. There was something kind of strange and unusual about it. Something about the contrast of black and white definitely does it, too. And he was such a master of shading that if something was stark in black and white, unless it was his earliest work, it was because he wanted it to look that way and to make it stark and kind of unsettling like that. There's, like, a certain amount of dread in a lot of his stuff and it's not something you can easily put your finger on, but it's definitely there. Yeah. Did you see the mummified priests? Yeah, that was creepy. But isn't it more creepy to actually do that in real life? To mummify that in these little alcoves? Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Don't kill the messenger. And he would have sometimes skulls featured in some of his work and stuff like that. Like the one of the eye, I believe, called eye right in the middle of the people is a skull staring back. So he had little touches like that without going full, like lovecraftian. Right. Or goya or something like that. Or on Aus Bosch. I don't know who that is. Sure you do. I'm just kidding. Okay. I know those people. Okay. So I guess this is where we get to the fact of the show. For me. Take it away, Chuck. Because, folks, if you've ever seen an Mcscher print and you thought, man, that guy could sure draw a print imagine cutting that out of wood. Yeah. In reverse. In reverse, because that's what he did. A lot of his stuff were wood cuts even harder than that. Chuck is the lithograph. Yeah. So a woodcut, if you've ever used a stamp or. Made a potato stamp. You're basically Mcscher. Well, that's what it is. He's actually carving this stuff into wood as a negative image because then when you run ink over it and stamp it, you get the positive image. And it's just incredible. I mean, it's hard enough to draw and sketch this stuff, much less cut it out of wood. Right. So just take a step back and think about the Esthers that you've seen before. Imagine that they were originally carved out of wood. And now imagine that to get even more detailing, because you can't adjust how much ink a certain part of the wood block gets. It's all going to get an even layer of ink. So to shade something, you have to do cross hatching lines, stippling, something like that. But to get really detailed with shading, you need multiple blocks of the same image in the exact same size with different parts accentuated, so that you can layer over. You can take the same paper and layer them on different blocks and line them up so that you have layers to this image. That was the level of the woodcuts this guy was doing. Yeah, that's sort of like a T shirt hippie, exact screen printing. Like a four color shirt. Right. You got to put it on exactly in the spot that it needs to go. Each time, drag that ink across so it's not off by a centimeter. Right. Because it would look bad. So the wood cuts, especially as earlier woodcuts, you can tell they are wood cuts. They look like wood cuts. Some of them do not. There's some of the Italian countryside that my favorites, are just astounding. And when you stop and think about the idea that it's not a drawing, that they're wood cuts, multiple blocked wood cuts is pretty astounding. But like I was saying, to me, even more difficult is making the lithograph. Yeah, I think I talked about this on some other episode. I know it talked about Petiquing, but I also talked to in industrial arts, we did offset lithography in that social experiment high school you went through. Exactly. We did offset lithography, which basically that's the process today. That's how they make newspapers, posters, books, maps, kind of everything with offset lithography. Do you remember it was in the Etchesketch. Episode that's what Ohio art originally did was lithography. Okay. This is a deep cut. This is pre. Like today, you use aluminum or some other kind of metal sheet. Right. And these emulsions and chemicals back then, it was drawn onto limestone, a flat slab of limestone with a grease pencil. And then use a chemical treatment on the areas that basically water and ink don't mix. It's sort of all built on that principle. Right. So the areas where you have written in Greece do not hold that ink. Or is it the other way around? No, I think they don't hold the ink. Yeah. Again, what you're doing is creating a negative image, just like the wood cut, essentially. Right. So you've got this attraction and repulsion interplay between ink, water and grease. Right. And when you put it all together on limestone, it makes these extremely subtle gradients of shading that are kind of like a hallmark of some of Echer's more well known works. The hands, drawing hands. Right? Yeah. That was a lithograph. He made that with limestone and grease, pen and ink. And did it in reverse, too, because just like with the wood block, you have to create the negative of it because you want the positive image on the paper. You have a very special brain if you can work this stuff out as an artist. Yes. It's not saying that any kind of artist is any better or worse or smarter than the next, but your brain just has to be wired a little bit differently to thinking negatives like that, like a mathematician, basically, your brain has to be set up that way. Yeah, absolutely. But lithography is difficult, very labor intensive. So later on he would hire a lithographer to actually create his prints after he's sketched and drawn the stuff out. Smart man. And he would destroy the limestone? Well, he wouldn't destroy it. He would scrape it clean so we could reuse it. Right. So that's the reason. Like if you want to buy an original MC Escher, good luck. Well, there's no such thing. There's original prints that he made. Right. And apparently that you're not going to get your hands on one of those limestones. No, but there are a couple of those leftover. But he said that he wanted them. I think canceled is what they call it in his will, right, where they intentionally damage it. So that even if you got a hold of one of these things and you were like, I'm going to print me a brand new Escher, there'd be like the negative image of Snagglepus come through and like the hand drawn hand picture. And he did not do many original prints from those original woodcuts and lithographs either. I think he only did ten of still life with spherical mirror. And so anything obviously anything you buy in a Spencer Gifts is going to be a print anyway. What? They told me it was an original. You mean bikini lady on Corvette? You can probably get the original. That expensive. You probably could. The original negative bikini lady on Corvette. Oh, man. Remember that Garfield with Lamborghini. These lithographs, he would also layer those just like you did with the wood cuts, creating multiple plates to layer on top of one another for shading and toning and stuff like that. It's just amazing. I mean, I did it to make a monkey's T shirt. I forgot. Used to screen print, too. So did I. Yeah, well, actually the monkeys T shirt was screen printing. I can't remember what I did for a lithograph. I think something to make a notepad. It said, like, my name and something else. Oh, that's right. So you screen printed in industrial arts. Yes. Okay. Were you ever employed Gainfully as a screenshot? Oh, no. Did you do that? Yeah. I mean, I would have loved to, and I wasn't good enough. Oh, it's not hard. Yeah, but you would draw the stuff or you would no. Burn the screens and everything and drag the ink through it for a job. Sure. Like high school? No, this is knowledge. This is college. What kind of dough do you make doing that? Jack. Yeah, but it's fun. It's cool work and beer and a few bucks. Pretty much hang out with some cool dudes. Yeah. I got you good early college job, you know what I mean? I think it'd be cool. There's a very cool T shirt local T shirt shop here. That every time I go over there, because that's where our friend the patchmaker, Katie Kulp, works, or at least she used to. I think she's got her own space now. Cool. But she shared a space with T shirt dudes, and anytime I'm in there, it's just a good vibe. You know what I mean? It really is. Yeah. There are a lot worse places to spend your time than a T shirt shop. Yeah. Another thing we should point out is that he did do color occasionally, but color was a whole different. You had to do a separate stone for each color. Right. So that's why a lot of his stuff ended up in black and white. Right. Aside from the fact that he liked it as well. Yeah, he seemed to be very pleased with black and white in general. Yeah. I'm not saying he was lazy. No. But let's take a step back here for a second and examine the idea that you thought MC Escher was a pretty amazing artist when you just imagined that he was sitting in his studio drawing all this stuff with a pencil. Now, really let it sink in that he carved these things in reverse out of wood or limestone or limestone, and then use these crazy techniques to make these extraordinarily detailed, incredibly precise and technical works of art. It's amazing. It really is amazing. Truly astounding. And like you said, there are a few of those stones and wood blocks that are owned by the MC Ashley Foundation. Nigel puts on every single one of them, and apparently they will display them occasionally along with his works. Right. Which I imagine seeing that and then looking at the work of art and then going back and looking at that limestone and then looking at the work of art, it really kind of sinks in, like, oh, my. Yeah. I'd love to see an exhibition of his stuff. Me, too. They've picked up in recent years. Have they? Yeah. It seems like he's being more appreciated as a truly great artist and less college dorm wall material. Yeah. In 2011, the record for highest overall attendance in the world, out of all the museums in the world that year was at the Centro Cultural Banco to Brazil, which held their magical World of Escher exhibit. 570,000 visitors, about 10,000 a day. Holy cow. Yeah. So if you think lithography and wood cutting sounds difficult, we'll talk a minute about meso tent. That is sort of like wood cutting, except you're using a sheet of copper that starts out as a rough surface and then use these little tools to smooth out things that are going to be the image, applying that ink and then wiping it off. Right. So the places you smooth out or don't have inks, the ones that are going to be white on the paper, blank on the paper. Right. It's the rough edges that hold the ink. So you cover the whole thing with ink, wipe it down, the smooth parts come clean. The rough stuff has the ink, and you can use this. Like, this isn't like, oh, look, I made an X. Right. This is like incredibly fine stippling is possible with these copper plates and all this a meso tint. And the eye that you were talking about doing with the skull, if you go back and look at that, that was a meso tint. Yeah. So it was dew drop, very detailed cupped leaf showing a single drop of dew inside it with all kinds of cool reflections. But Escher called this the black art. He only made eight of these because it is a real undertaking, and I think he did a handful of them and then moved on to the far easier wood cutting. Right. He's like, I came back, baby. All right, we'll take a break, and then we'll come back and pick up with his life story again, which is, I believe we left off in what, end of World War II? Sounds right. All right. Okay. World War II is over. MC Escher was, like a lot of people, very rattled by that experience in Europe. And at this point, he still is not a super famous artist making tons of money. No, but he's more famous than this makes them out to be. Yeah. He's got some renown in the Netherlands. There's certain circles, but he's not anywhere even approaching how he is today or how he has been the last few decades, since about the late sixty s. Yeah. College dorms have not yet started putting his stuff everywhere. No. But the people who most appreciate what he's doing are scientists and mathematicians who are like, this is astounding. This guy is taking what we write out as formulas and turning them into art and making them precise. Like, you could describe this work of art as a formula. That is what MC Escher was able to do. He was able to take math and translate it into a visual art. Yeah. And remember what you said earlier? This is where we are in his life where he is not in the Italian countryside. He's been ripped from its bodice. So his muse is gone, and he is now looking inward for his inspiration in his own unique brain. He's being forced into his own bodice face first. This is where he starts with these tessellations, more elaborate geometric shapes. He's doing the lizards and the birds and the insects as tessellations. Really cool stuff. His brother said, hey, dude, what you should do is go talk to a crystallographer. He's like, if you want to talk detailed shapes and math yeah. And he does. So and that taught him a lot. And then he learned about the 17 wallpaper groups, which is so dense that how much do we even want to talk about it? Well, we'll just sum it up. The 17 wallpaper groups, basically, is a mathematical concept that says every geometric pattern, two dimensional geometric pattern, falls into one of 17 categories. There's only 17, and they're called kind of half jokingly, the wallpaper groups, because wallpaper has geometric patterns on easily. Right. Esther couldn't understand it mathematically. Yeah. It was proved out twice independently that there are 17 wallpapers. Yeah. The mathematical proof. One of the things that's interesting, Chuck, is the alhambra, apparently, is the only place in the world that contains all 17 geometric wallpaper patterns within its walls. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, of course, this would appeal to Escher, but he didn't understand. He couldn't sit down and explain, like, we can't what the 17 wallpaper groups are or what they mean mathematically, but he understood them intuitively. And as he became friends with mathematicians about mid career, he was apparently kind of amused to find, like, these guys spend all this time writing this stuff out in these formulas, and I just know it. It was almost like I was born knowing it. Yeah. I guess he was real cocky. Yeah. He wasn't really that kid. I didn't get the idea either, that he was like, Take your math and shove it. He was just a little more amused that you've got these mathematical proofs. I'm drawing this stuff for my creative brain on limestone? Yeah, limestone. Cutting it out of wood. So I think he appreciated the way they coalesced. And he was very, like you said, most of his friends were mathematicians, I think, later in life. The Penroses. Yeah. Roger and Lionel Penrose. I love how it's described here. Father and son, mathematician, team. Yeah. You know those they wore matching dolphin shorts. Oh, man. Further uniform. I wish people saw those. Yeah. You drive one of those? No, they were a little before my time. Well, they were for joggers and runners. Yeah. 2011. And I forgot about that. Yeah. That is what hooters waitresses orange dolphin shorts with remember bronze fanny host yeah. And then chunky white socks. Yeah. And rebox high tops. It was bizarre interesting. Look, somebody put that together and not a woman do you remember there was a hooters airline? What? Yeah. Wow, that kind of rings a bell. That was very short lived, I imagine. I believe so. It was pretty short lived. Interesting, I guess. Yeah. So you would get asked, like, what kind of drink and what style of chicken wings you did serve chicken wings on. That, of course. But can you imagine being on an airplane, being forced to smell chicken wings the whole time if you didn't like it? That's like every flight I ever take. It's true. There's somebody with some stinky food. You know, if I sit next to somebody on the plane and I'm going to eat, I ask them if it's okay if I eat. Like, if you bring food on? Yes. I don't bring food onto a flight. Sometimes, dude, you just have to yeah, it's a long flight and I'm not going to run out of turkey wraps, like in the first half a second. So you just pull out your what? My Kung POW. Out of your pocket you had just in case they're out of turkey wrap. Not even in the containers. Just in my pocket. Oh, goodness. So I thought this part was sort of amusing, how orderly he always was with his art. And he tried to get into chaos a bit. And this one work, contrast parentheses, order and chaos parentheses, wherein he went and dug up a bunch of trash and said, I will draw chaos. And it ended up being, if you go and look at it, there's like, a broken bottle, broken eggshell, an open sardine tin, a broken clay pipe, and some other refuse drawn to, like, perfect or I guess, woodcutter lithograft with perfect, beautiful precision. Right. That was chaos, his interpretation of it. He just couldn't do it. He was very much preoccupied with chaos. He has a very famous quote, probably his most famous quote, quote, we adore chaos because we love to produce order. And he's like by we, I mean me, sounded very much like an I statement, but he was very much into geometry and precision and clean lines and all that. Yeah. And also his career would progress. These repeating patterns on a finite space. If you've seen his Circle Limit series. That's where you'll find the fish or these demons. And they start out with. Like. One in the center. And then there's a pattern all around. And as it gets closer and closer to the edge. They get smaller and smaller and smaller. And you can just sort of imagine that there is no end to these shapes. That they're just going infinitely around this sphere. Perfectly. But again, you have to stop and remind yourself, this is a two dimensional image I'm looking at. Right. And then secondly, this is cut out of wood. But yeah, he apparently made a three dimensional wood carving of his Circle Limit series later on in life. And I'll bet that's spectacular to see too he made a what? A three dimensional wood carving of it, basically proving that his two dimensional drawing was accurate because he made it in the three dimensions. That's awesome. Yeah, he was just showing off towards the end there. I like reptiles. Yeah, it's good. Aside from his early countryside work, that is far superior. The tessellation of the lizards and reptiles is really neat. That's the one that has the lizards being, like, crawling off of the page as a drawn image, circling around, walking over some books and then crawling back over onto the page as a drawn image. Yeah. Very neat. It's a lot like the hands drawing or drawing hands. One kind of where the hands are drawing themselves or one another, but they're also three dimensional, too. And that actually kind of jobs with another quote he had that I think really sums that style of art up. He said, the flat shape irritates me. I feel as if I were shouting to my figures, you are too fictitious for me. You just lie there static and frozen together. Do something. Come out of there and show me what you are capable of. And he would shout it just like that. And then Jedi would back out of the room slowly. Okay, dear. He's your teeth. And that sort of brings us to with the reptiles. We need to talk a little bit about illusion because it started sort of early on, he was preoccupied with illusion, whether it was like these lizards coming off the page or still Life in street, which is a tabletop that blends into a street scene. That's a neat one. Yeah, it's really cool. I like that one, too. Or relativity, which I don't know. I mean, is there a most famous, maybe hands it's between hands. Self portrait with sphere and relativity. Yeah. Relativity is the one with the staircases. Yeah. And people going up and downstairs that don't go anywhere, but they go everywhere and they circle back on each other and it's just an impossible staircase. Actually called penrose stairs. Oh, really? Yeah, after the famous father and son mathematician team. And speaking of the penrose, did I say mathematician? I just invented something I did. That's amazing. Completely by accident. The Penroses. That would be great. Mathematician. Yeah. I bet that's something four. Right. But the Penroses, apparently they saw some of Usher's work, wrote a paper explaining his work about impossible things like impossible stairs, which came to be called penrose stairs. And Escher was either mailed a copy of this or somebody pointed out to him. So he created something called House of Stairs, or Upstairs, Downstairs, one of the two, and sent one of the original prints to the Penroses. So, in a way, their correspondence and inspiration for one another was like a set of impossible stairs in real life. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And we were talking earlier about how his work somehow felt unsettling and the subject matter as well. When you think about the subjects walking and relativity, clearly never getting anywhere. Walking downstairs sideways, all of a sudden I'm walking back into the same staircase I was just on. Like you imagine if these things were to come alive? They would be frustrated, angry people. Right. And as a matter of fact, one of the one that you were just talking about upstairs, downstairs, that was supposedly based on a staircase in his school oh, really? Which suddenly says quite a bit about his psychology, don't you think? Well, how so? Well, I mean, like, these students aren't going anywhere. They're not even human. They're centipedes with human faces. Got you. And they're kind of trapped in this, what you could definitely call, like, a purposeless existence in this building. It's kind of a dark building. Interesting. So he does finally achieve really great fame later in his life. Like you said, he was holding exhibitions in the Netherlands and a little bit in Europe, but he did one in Belgium in 1050 that led to an article in the studio, which was an art magazine, and that captured the attention of a journalist who wrote about them in Time and Life magazines, which definitely propped them up a little bit. Yeah. Then that led to a larger exhibition at the International Mathematical Congress in 54. FlashForward to 66. He was featured in Mathematical Games column in Scientific American by Martin Gardner, mathematician, I guarantee you that's the thing. And this was 66. So it was kind of perfect timing with the hippies and the drugs and the counterculture. Right. And I guess who was it? Graham Nash. Graham Nash. Mick Jagger sent him a fan letter. Nice. And made the mistake of calling him by his first name. Oh, really? Cheshire did not appreciate Stanley Kubrick. Tried to recruit him to make 2001 a Space Odyssey, a fourth dimensional film. Yeah. There's this interesting article called The Impossible World of MC Escher that Stephen Pool wrote in The Guardian that has a lot of that stuff in it, but he was kind of like, no, I'm good over here with my mathematician friends. Well, once he was featured in Scientific American, that led to the big daddy of them all. He got featured in Rolling Stone, and then after that, it was all over. He was huge. Yeah. Dorm room huge. 448 works. Yeah. Then this doesn't count. All the sketches and drafts. These are, like, the actual final works. Right. And like we said earlier, he died 1972. Cancer, the age of 73. And I tried to find more about his family, but there's not a lot out there like his sons and whether or not, I guess, his grandkids would be contemporaries of ours. Yes. I don't know. He was born in 1899. Well, great grandkids, maybe. Yeah. Okay. I guess if his kids were born in the 1920s yeah. Contemporaries of our parents, maybe. Sure. The oldsters. Yeah. Boomers. Hey. Boomer. Okay. Boomer. Hey. Boomer. You get that, right? In that Journey to Infinity movie. Apparently all three of his children appear in it. Oh, really? If you want to know more about them, go watch that. I saw one picture of him where he looked a lot like our old colleague John Fuller when John had a beard. Oh, yeah, he did, didn't he? A little bit like him. Yeah. It's not expecting that. So there's MCs. Sure. That's right. Speaking of not expecting that, bikini babe on Corvette. Sure. And Hooter's Airline made appearances in the MCs. I just want to point out, if you want to know more about any of those things, go on to the Internet and start searching. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. I've been listening to your show since 2011 even. I've even seen you on your first amazing show in Chicago and had to wait a whole year to hear that on the podcast. Yeah, that's how it works. Sorry. It's not even guaranteed that it's going to be the show you saw. Yeah, a lot of podcasts put out. Just tons and tons of live shows. We don't do that. No. Yes. And I honestly think the live shows are a little better in person. I don't think they make as a fan of other podcasts, I don't think they make for the best, just regular content. I think most people think that that's why we only put out the one. Right. So back to the letter. This show is so great, I would even save high interest episodes for my son to listen to over the years. Nice. You were one of the few people that can keep his attention. I never thought I would write, but as a science teacher, you said something recently that it's so true. Some of the best science websites are children's science websites. Or if a definition is too difficult, I always tell people to look up a child's definition for that word. Really good tip, guys. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for all your work. And now I'll have to figure out what to do now that I am finally caught up. Keep up the great work. And that is from Jenny with an eye. Thanks. Jenny with an eye. Hopefully you dot the eye with the heart. Maybe with a little reflection on the side of the heart. Remember that one? Two curved lines, top and I guess bottomed with a straight line. I think I know what you're talking about. Here, I'll show you. Oh, boy. Since we just oh, sure. Yeah. It almost looks like a bent Roman numeral too. Inside the heart. That's the reflection of light. That's where the light is coming from. It's beautiful. Thank you. The Escher reference. I'll treasure that. You're welcome, Chuck. I wasn't going to give it to you, but now I have to just sign it first. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to Stuffyshino.com and look for our social links there. And you can also send us an email like Jenny with an I did. You can send it to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
49339992-721a-43a7-9b87-ae6e00fa22a9 | Short Stuff: The Church Choir That Didn't Explode | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-church-choir-that-didnt-explode | Perhaps the most amazing coincidence ever documented took place when a church in a tiny town in Nebraska exploded in 1950.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Perhaps the most amazing coincidence ever documented took place when a church in a tiny town in Nebraska exploded in 1950.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 06 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=96, tm_isdst=0) | 12002242 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Dave is here in spirit. He wanted to let us know that he's thinking of each and every one of you individually. And this is short stuff. That's right. I was raised in the church church choir, my friend. So this one hits really close to home, actually. Not at all. All right. But I did sing in the church choir. I've seen church choirs perform before, so it really hits home for me, too. This is a really fun story, I think. Were you familiar with this story before? No. You know where I first heard of it? A Time Life books. Ad. Are you really? Is there anything those things haven't taught us? I don't know. I wish I had a set of those. Those are fun. Me, too. We'll have to go on ebay and look for them together. I'm sure they're all there. So what we're talking about is not necessarily just a church choir. It's almost tangential to it. What we're really talking about is one of the most astounding coincidences in the history of documented history. Like, there's no coincidence that really holds a candle to this in my book. And there's plenty of coincidences. I remember we did an entire episode on one. Remember the poor guy who is in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and survived them both? There's been some amazing coincidences before. This one, to me, takes the cake. It's a pretty good one. And we're talking about a terrible incident that happened, but it could have been a lot worse. On the evening of March 1, 1950, in Beatrice, Nebraska, when a church blew up I mean, blew up. Like, the walls blew out, the roof came down, windows got knocked out of houses in the vicinity. A radio station got knocked off the air by the blast, however that works. It was a big time explosion that just destroyed this church. Yeah. And I guess we should go ahead and say how this happened. The idea is that there was probably a gas leak, and that gas leak just did what gas leaks do and filled a space with gas. And there was a gentleman there who would show up. What was his name? Was it the reverend himself? It was the reverend, yeah. Walter Klimple. Yeah. What a great reverend name. Reverend Clemple in 1950 is Nebraska reverend name, too. So he shows up at his West Side Baptist Church, like he always does ahead of time to light the furnace to get it nice and warm for choir practice, because in early March in that part of Nebraska can be a little chilly. And then he went back home to go to dinner. And so the idea is that this gas fills up, it eventually reaches the flame of that furnace, and church explodes. Okay, so a church exploding from a natural gas explosion lit by a reverend. This is not all about making Reverend Climbel look bad? No, he didn't like that furnace because he wanted to blow up the church. Like you said, he was lighting it for choir practice. What makes this astounding is that the explosion took place at 07:25 P.m. On March 1, like you said, 1950, which was a Wednesday, and every Wednesday was choir practice. And every Wednesday at 07:20 P.m., choir practice started. So this explosion that destroyed the entire church took place five minutes after choir practice officially started. And the thing that makes this the most astounding coincidence of all time is that not one single member of that 15 person choir was in the church at the time. Every single one happened to be late. That's right. And I think we should save the reasons for everyone being late until after the break with a little cliffhanger. But before the break, if you're trying to figure out the odds of something like this happening, there's no exact scientific way to do that, obviously. But what they can do and what they have done is look back and said, well, how often were people generally late at choir practice at this church? And what are the odds of that happening to everybody? And they kind of went back and looked at past choir practices and saw that each person would be late about 25% of the time. One in every four choir practices. So everyone being gone for this specific night ended up being a you guessed it, one in a million chance. Yeah. I think all of them had either an equal chance or twice the chance of being struck by lightning that year as this actually happening, and all of them being late for choir practice at the same time. Okay, I think that's a great set up. We'll come back after our short break and we'll talk about why these folks were late right after this. So before we get going on the reasons, I think one important thing we didn't point out is it's not like everyone got on a bus somewhere to go to choir practice, and the bus broke down like everyone was late for their independent reasons. Some had a little bit of overlap, as we'll see, but that's sort of the remarkable part of all this. Yeah, it is amazing. So, Reverend Clemple, he usually got there as early as anybody. He usually got there about 710, and it turns out that his daughter, who was going to come with him, marilyn Ruth, the dress she had put on, it was dirty. So his wife, Mrs. Reverend Walter Climple, had to put a new dress on the ironing board, get it ready, and that made the family late. Okay. I like that one. That's a good one. It just keeps going from there, though. And we should mention we could not find Reverend Walter Clinton's wife's name. We're not just doing the antiquated thing of calling a woman Mrs. Soandsoandso husband's name. Right. Thank you for that. Of course. So let's go over some of these. All right. So like I said, it just keeps going from river and Climble and his family's reason for being late. Next up, we've got LaDonna Vandergrift, which sounds like a made up name. She was struggling with the geometry problem. She was a sophomore in high school, and she was like, I'm not letting this problem beat me. I have to finish this before I leave for choir practice. That's the best part of this whole story, I think. I think so, too. So not only did that make her late, but it also ended up making the Estees sisters named Royna and Sadie Estees were late because of LaDonna indirectly as well, right? Because I think they were supposed to were they supposed to ride together? Yeah. Well, no, they had car trouble. The SD sisters had car trouble. Oh, okay. So they called LaDonna Vander Griffith and said, hey, can you come pick us up? She said, Just after I figure out this Pythagorean theorem thing. Oh, yeah. So they were supposed to ride together. I got you. Yeah, but they weren't supposed to. They would have arrived had their car not been in trouble. And then even furthermore, had LaDonna not been doing geometry, all three of them might have made it on time. Yeah, they were double blessed. Yes. Pretty amazing stuff. And of course, the reason I say double blessed is obviously with a situation like this in a church, the entire church believes that this was God's hand leading them away from that explosion. Naturally, I would do indubitably. Indubitably. What else we have here? We have Mrs. Leonard Shuster. And Shuster went to her mom's house to get her ready for a missionary meeting, apparently. So that's what made Shoester late. Right? Had to untie her mom's shoes, maybe tie them, each to their own shoe. What about Herbert Kipps? He was a lathe operator, which that's a lathe operator in Nebraska's name in 1950, for sure. He supposedly had a letter that he had been putting off writing, and he finally sat down to write it, and the letter itself made him late, and that's apparently unusual for him. He wasn't necessarily the most prolific letter writer, but that was the one for him. Do you know what it sounds like to me? What? Sounds like choir practice wasn't much of a priority for anyone there. It kind of sounds like it. I got a math problem. I really need to write this letter. Yes, or Joyce Black really demonstrates that, too. She was a stenographer. And by the way, she was saying all this they were all saying all this stuff to Life magazine, which did an article on this a couple of weeks after it happened, called Why the Choir Was Late. She said, I was feeling just plain lazy. It was very cold out. My house was cozy and toasty, and I was just hanging out there. All right. That's why I was late. She was the most forthright of all the time. Very honest. The piano player herself. Marilyn Paul. Usually the piano players are pretty early, and I think Marilyn had a knack for arriving about a half hour early. But old Marilyn must have eaten some turkey for dinner because she fell asleep. And her mom woke her up at 715 and she said, alright, well, I gotta get out of here. I'm kind of already late. And it says here she only had time to tidy up and then leave. Right. But let me clean up a bit first. So her mom was actually the choir director, and she was late because Marilyn was late in all this stuff, too. I wonder if she was mad at Maryland or was like, Why are you not waking up at seven in the evening? Who snaps like that? Or if everybody was very patient. I like to think they were all very patient and polite, waiting for one another. Well, it says that mom tried unsuccessfully to awaken her earlier. Right. That's what I'm saying. I love it. There was a gas leak at church and a carbon monoxide leak in the Paul's house. Will you wake up? And then Lucille Jones and Dorothy Wood. They were neighbors and they were both in the choir, so they would naturally ride together. And one of them, I think it was Lucille, lucille was listening to a radio program from seven to 730. Probably Manics or Kojack. Right. Again. Dorothy was just sitting there patiently waiting for her friend to finish listening to this radio program. Unbelievable. We also left out Harvey. All the last one. What did Harvey do? He had the worst excuse of all of them. He was taking care of his kids. His wife was out of town. Right. And he started talking. And I guess talking makes Harvey lose track of time, but he lost track of time and ended up being like, who's he talking to? I guess his kids. I'm not sure. I could not for the life of me find that Life magazine article directly. We have to thank our friends at Snopes for helping us out big time with this one. Yeah, it's probably the kids were like, Dad's finally talking to us. Right. He's paying attention to us. Yes. But I can tell he doesn't know what time it is. Yeah. This is one of those stories. I'm glad there wasn't some gross dark thing underneath. No, it was all above the boards and amazing. So all of those people, for all those different reasons, were late to choir practice. And had they all made it on time, they would have perished in that explosion. I love it. Thanks. Time Life books. Thanks notes. Thanks to you, Chuck. Thanks to Dave for producing this. Thanks to you guys for listening to it. And short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Freak Shows Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-freak-shows-worked | Not too long ago, people would pay money to gawk and stare at a performer with a physical disformity. They were called freakshows and they began in large part thanks to P.T. Barnum, whose circus we still enjoy today. Sounds awful, but some of these perfor | Not too long ago, people would pay money to gawk and stare at a performer with a physical disformity. They were called freakshows and they began in large part thanks to P.T. Barnum, whose circus we still enjoy today. Sounds awful, but some of these perfor | Thu, 03 Mar 2016 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=63, tm_isdst=0) | 46547352 | audio/mpeg | "This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today@squarespace.com. Enter our offer code Stuff at checkout to get 10% off Squarespace build it beautiful. Welcome to stuffy ship? No, from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. It's charlton beach up. Brian jerry and this is stuff you should know. You introduced as if you were asleep and I just walked by and poked you with a queue. And that's your first thing you do, is you wake up and just go, hey, welcome to the podcast. Yes, that's what I do. How are you, sir? Man, I'm feeling fine. Yeah. Good. Feeling fine. That's a Simpsons reference from what? The Shining one? Oh, yeah. The shining classic. It's a good one. So, a couple of quick matters of business, okay? A little COA at the beginning. We're talking about freak shows, right? And we will be saying freaks and things like that. That is obviously an antiquated term. Yes. But there are a lot of quotes in here and a lot of references to freaks and midgets and pinheads and all these awful terms that they used to call these people that had physical deformities and maladies. Right. So it's not us speaking. This is in historical context. Yeah. Like, we get the insensitivity. We're not being insensitive here. Yeah. And we want to shout out we used a couple of How Sturf Works House Stuff works articles, as well as one from History magazine by Laura Gande. Pricenomics. Zachary Crockett wrote one. Yeah. I have to say, I'm a fan of that dude's work. Yeah, it was a good article. Price nomics, he's written some really interesting articles. The Greed and then one from Humanmarbles.com, which is just a good website by Jtonispanal. I know that's. Right. Yeah. That's a tough one. Pineau yeah. I assume the D is silent. Yes. Or maybe not. Maybe it's Pednod, Penaud, pay Node, freaky and a couple of other places we visited. And everyone kind of says the same thing. But it's a nice wellrounded thing, I think. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're talking about the history of freak shows, and there's only one history. Certain things happen. And we found very quickly that you can't extract freak shows from PT. Barnum or vice versa. No, they are inextricably bound. But freak shows. Barnum was working in the 19th century. But the concept of freak shows, which is basically someone who is a human curiosity, and that could be someone who was born with a genetic deformity, a physical deformity, some sort of mental incapacity. Or some people have turned themselves into human curiosity, say, through the wonder of tattooing or learning to swallow swords or something like that. Yeah. Or like these days, body modification, like the Jim Rose show. Or there's one in Coney Island still that does, like, a traditional show. Yeah. Side show by the seashore. Right. Also a great song by Luna. Nice. One of my favorite bands. So the whole concept of this, of having a human curiosity and basically charging gawkers to look at it. It dates back quite a ways. Well, actually, not that far. The 16th century. That's pretty far. I guess so. But you would think, like, well, the Greeks or the Romans did this, but apparently no. From what I understand, everybody just kind of steered clear of human curiosities to that point. Yeah. I think people feared them. Right. They were locked away mainly because they thought it was some evil curse or punishment from God. And this wasn't someone you wanted to consort with else you might bring down the wrath of God upon yourself. That's right. But like you said, in the late 1500, people started to say, you know what? I'm curious about someone with hair growing all over their face. I'm curious about the human curiosity. Exactly. Chuck, I want to say I don't think it's coincidence that about this time science was starting to spread throughout Europe. Oh, sure. So the idea that this was God's breath was taking a bit of a backseat to this is a human condition of some sort. Yes. But not so far down the road of science to where there was this intermediate period where they were got debt. Right. And as we'll find out later, science would eventually take part in ending the sideshows. Right. It created them and it ended up yes. It's kind of neat. Good way to look at it. So one of the first viewings or one of the first people put on display and this is also going to be we'll get into it later, but the morality of this is very up and down with exploiting people and these people that would normally be locked away, actually having super lucrative careers sure. Long lasting made them rich. Well, plus, also, one of the authors, I think it was crockett, points out that early on, if you were in a freak show, there was a good chance that you had been abandoned by your parents, became a ward of the state and adopted by somebody who just ruthlessly exploited you and maybe barely took care of you. But one thing you can definitely say, to his credit, as Barnum came into it and basically normalized or created an industry out of freak shows, or for freak shows, conditions definitely changed and the exploitation seems to have lessened somewhat. Yeah. I think with the big names like Norman and Barnum, I think they were all manner of minor sideshows that probably didn't treat them as well. Right. And usually Barnum and Norman bought their curiosities from those minor side shows. Lesser showman. Exactly. So we're talking about Tom Norman out of England. Yeah. They were basically counterparts. Yeah. And we'll get into them. But back to one of the earliest quote unquote freaks was a man named Lazarus, Coloredo, not Colorado, who was a conjoined twin. He had a brother, Johannes, who was upside down on his chest. And technically, he was a parasitic twin to Lazarus. Oh, not conjoined twins. They were conjoined. But Johannes didn't eat. Oh, okay. He didn't speak. He never opened his eyes. And apparently the only way you could get a physical reaction out of them was if you rubbed his chest. That would make him squirm like Clayton. Total Recall very much. Got you. So he went on tour, performed before King Charles the first in the early 1640s. But it was not a big deal. It wasn't a super lucrative side. Shows weren't really a thing at that point. No, but this guy was saying, you guys are going to ostracize me. Well, I'm going to charge you to look at me then, and I'm going to support myself. And my brother doing this. He did it himself. It's not clear whether he worked with the manager or not, or promoter, but he definitely made his own choice to go do this. Yes, exactly. And he was apparently an otherwise handsome man. That's how everyone described him. Right. Which I think probably for the court or Europe who came and looked at him, probably just made it even more mind boggling. But he's a good guy. Right. PT. Barnum. And I think we should do a whole podcast on PT. Barnum at some point. Okay. To really close out the circus suite. Well, then we shouldn't mention them again in the show. No. Barnum as a teenager, he always had a pinchant for making money. He was one of those magnets sort of weird ways. He ran his own lottery as a teenager in Connecticut, and he said, here's what I'll do. I can sell these tickets. I'll give out prizes in varying levels from $25 on down to $0.25. Sure. Lottery. Yes. But it was a very well thought out for a teenager. He wasn't just like just one prize. He spread it out so he would entice people to play more. Right. And he actually made a lot of money from it until they outlawed the lottery. He was making, like, eleven grand in today's dollars a week as a teenager. Yeah, 19. Not bad. But then Connecticut and the rest of the country said, no more lotteries for now. We'll bring that back up later, though, don't you worry. TBC. And he had to find other ways to make work. Moved to New York City, and in 1835, England is where a lot of this started. And we'll talk about Norman in a second. But he got his queue from England and said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy a person. I'm going to buy my first freak, this blind, paralyzed, slave woman. And this is a hallmark of freak shows. I'm going to make up a story about her that's sensational and crazy, like a ripple's, believe it or not kind of thing. Right. And Barnum in particular was well known for just taking these things to the ants degree like, no one's going to buy that. But he could sell it in such a way that people believed it because they were exponentially dumber back then. The story for her was that she was 160 years old, was George Washington's nurse, and you can pay to see her when in fact she was only 80 years old. She was half that age. Yes. And her name was Joyce Heath. She was just an old lady, right? Yeah. She was an old slave woman who was paralyzed and blind and was being exploited by PT. Barnum in the year before her death. That's right. So she dies. But before then, as he's touting her, as this 160 year old former nursemaid to George Washington, that gets an initial reaction. And then ticket sales drop. And then PC. Barnum did something quite smart. He wrote an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper and accused himself of being a fraud in saying that the 160 year old woman was a fake. She was actually a machine, a robot made of whale skin and wood, and ticket sales went right through the roof again. Man, what a guy. There should be a good movie about him. I can't believe it's. Not like a modern one. I'm sure there is. Surely. What's the one the Greatest Show on Earth was a movie. Right, like a DW. Griffith movie or something. Yeah, that's what I mean. But like Tom Cruise should play him. Yeah. Should be directed by Michael Bay. Russell Crow should no, not Russell Crowe. Well, how about who could play PT. Barnum? You know, he would be good at it, but it'd just be so him. Sam Rockwell. Oh, totally. He could play anything. So I'd rather see somebody even broader playing them. Yeah, I heard recently. Gina. Go ahead, Gina. Who would end up playing him? Is frigging Hugh Jackman. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Because he can do cartwheels. Yeah. What were you going to say? It might have been during the Bill Gates interview or something yesterday that somebody said that? No, it was on CNN. Tom Hanks is the most trusted person in America. What? Like for some poll found that the most trusted person in America is Tom Hanks. Were we on the list? I don't think so, no. Sure, you got it trusted on we're not even also Rand. We're never Rand. All right, so he purchased that woman what was her name? Joyce Heath. J-O-I-C-E-H-E-T-H for $1000. And he made about that every week from exploiting her. I mentioned that she got very little of that. Yeah. Although you can't necessarily say that I didn't see what she was paid. True. She was very likely paid, and she was probably fairly well taken care of, especially considering that she probably just and this is based on how Barnum treated other people later in a documented manner. But I don't want to say he rescued her from slavery because she went from being a slave to being owned by somebody who exhibited her. Sure. But it's not a guarantee or a given that her situation got worse after she was purchased by Barnum. Right. Does that make sense? Yes. Man, that felt like a minefield. I was talking about slavery, human exploitation, a blind woman who is also paralyzed. Good luck, sir. His first big hoax after that. Well, actually, I guess it wasn't a hoax, aside from the made up story. But he had a real hoax. It was a hoax. Well, sure, but this was a hoax in 1842 because nothing about it was real. He was promoting something called the Fiji Mermaid, which was basically rogue taxidermy is all it was. That's exactly what it was. It was a creature with a head of a monkey and the tail of a fish that he bought from Japanese sailors. Well, he didn't he got it from a sailor who bought it from Japan. Right. And actually it was Japanese fishermen. Yeah. Well, what's the difference? Well, they didn't necessarily go to sea. They were like islanders. Got you. And this is like traditional art for them. Folk art. Okay, so not a sailor, but fisherman. Right. That's Pet Entry 101. Sorry, man, I get so fixated on things. Yeah, and he leased it for twelve point $50 right. From the owners of said rogue taxidermy. And he tried he printed out pamphlets and tried to convince everyone it was some real thing. So he actually had a partner named Levi. What was Levi's name? He's definitely an overlooked guy. Levi Lyman. Can you imagine, like, being PT. Barnum's partner? Like, you'd never be in the spotlight. Right? So Levi Lyman posed as an English doctor, a scientist who was in possession of this mermaid, and PT. Barnum very publicly was trying to get his hands on the mermaid. And this guy was very publicly resisting him because it was a man of science. And this is the real deal. Right. And it helped just convince everybody, including the newspapers, that this is the genuine article. Man. Just rubes nation a world of rubs. It seems like he ended up opening up a museum on Broadway in New York City in the 1840s. Sort of like a Ripley's Believe It or not kind of thing. Curiosities and weird things. Yeah. His stock and trade. And then we should talk about his counterpart in England, tom Norman. Yeah, Tommy Norman. Tommy Norman. He was named the Silver King, and Barnum actually gave him that name, apparently after meeting him, and he said, boy, what a huge silver showy silver watch you have there. You're the Silver King. He goes, I am the Silver King. I've been waiting my whole life for somebody to notice. Exactly. So he was doing the same thing in England, and he toured with Joseph Merrick. The Elephant Man. Yeah. And he got castigated by a lot of people saying, you're exploiting this guy john merrick is it John or Joseph? What did I say? John. Yeah. And it's like an ongoing thing. Oh, is it? Yes. I can't remember if it's well, let's find out. No, it's Joseph for sure. I just misspoke. Oh, sorry. He was attacked specifically in a memoir by Dr. Frederick Treeves called The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences. And he shot back and he said, you know what? I haven't mistreated Merrick. I haven't abused him. He wasn't forced to do anything. And he said, in fact, the big majority of showmen are in the habit of treating their novelties as human beings and in a large number of cases, as one of their own, not like beasts. So the morality battle was being waged even back then. Yeah. And, I mean, if you think about this time when people would go look at people who had physical deformities and pay for it, just look at them just standing there, you think, well, the whole world was pretty evil and amoral sure. At the time. Not necessarily true. There's a lot of people who railed against this stuff, like Frederick Tree. He was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins. Right. Isn't that him? I don't know. Yes. He was in The Elephant Man, the movie. Oh, was he actually Merrick's doctor? Yes. Okay. I didn't know that. Yes. Man that movie. Yeah. David lynch. God, one of the best ever. And then there was an historian who, at the time, I think in the his name was Henry Mayhew, and in 1861, he was British. He wrote that these freak shows were nothing more than human degradation. And he said something that stuck out to me, Chuck. He said that the men who preside over these infamous places know too well the failings of their audience. And I think he really hit the nail on the head. He wasn't accusing the showman because I think he understood that most of these people were just under contract. Right. And he wasn't accusing the actual human curiosities, the freaks themselves. He was rightly. Placing the blame for all this on the Observers, the gawkers. Right. Like, if there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't be doing it. Yeah. You're the one who is having the moral failing, who's paying to go see this person who may or may not be exploited? You don't know. Yeah. And it's really on you. Audience yeah. There's a lot of foresight for back then. I thought so, too. So the point is, it's not like everybody was just going along with this. People have had a problem with it basically the whole time freak shows were around. Right. All right, well, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the sideshow writer for this. We're back. I brought my pencil. What's that? Oh, van Halen, give me something. Right on, man. I didn't get that at first. I'm impressed that you did get it. Yeah. Nice. That was from Van Halen popular song Hot For Teacher. Yes. From 1984. And we are now 1980s DJs. So the sideshows became a legitimate thing, a big way to make money. There were different kinds. There was one called a ten in one show, which I believe the sideshow by the Seashore is today. I know you did it through my missing tooth. And that is when you have ten people on display on a platform at once, and people just walk by and look at them. It's not like a performance. It's just there's a bearded lady, there's the dog faced boy, there's the tattooed man. Right. And they're all to stand in there. That's a ten and one. Get your look. You Yoko. They had things and this was all to drum up more money. They would advertise something as adults only or a man only, even performance. Right. Well, the man only performance frequently had a stripper. Well, sure. Or stuff that they thought that a woman shouldn't see or children shouldn't see. I don't know if it was as much of that as if it was to just trump up like, oh, my God, it's so bad that a woman can't lay her eyes upon it. I see. I think it was all part of the show. That's my feeling, at least. One of the things that they displayed was something called a pickle punk, which is awful. Especially when you find out what it is. Yeah. It's basically an abnormal fetus and a formaldehyde in a jar. And you could go by and look at pickled punks and gawk at them for money. It's awful. Yeah. This is what people did, like, on Saturday nights in Kansas. So usually the side shows or the freak shows, at first, you would be some enterprising entrepreneur in some small town, and you would notice that a little youngster, had a third leg. Okay. And your thought was, I can really make some money with this kid. Sure. Go to their parents and you'd say, I will give you 20% of all of the earnings of your child if you let me take him on the road. And he will stay in the finest hotels and wear the best clothes as the human tripod. Exactly. And he will become famous and the world will love him. Just let me handle it. I'm going to be his manager from now on. And the parents would very frequently, especially if they were poor, would say, that's great. Yeah, do that. Give me some money up front. And though, by the way yeah. Especially because a lot of times some of these people were a burden on their family sure. Because of their health condition. So they were happy to be rid of them. It's all very sad. Okay. So that's how it definitely started out, and then it went on like that for a very long time as well. But once Barnum and Norman and some of the other guys, the big guys came around, they would just basically keep an eye out for that kind of thing. Or they would be approached by these guys who would essentially be middlemen, kind of like somebody who discovered a boy band selling their contract to a bigger record company. But this was with human curiosities, people with the third leg or hypertrichosis or what have you. And then Barnum would take them and would just take whatever exaggerated origin story that they came with and just throw it out and come up with 110 times more. After George Washington's nursemate Joyce Hess died. It was not George Washington. Right. He started looking around for his next collaborator, if you could call him that. And he found out that he had a distant cousin, a fifth cousin named Charles Stratton, who had stopped growing when he was about two years old. Yeah, he never completely stopped. He grew very slowly. Yes. He made it to, like, just over 3ft, I think, by the time of his death. Yeah, he died at 45 of a stroke. And he was 3.35ft tall, but grew so slowly. I mean, he was General Tom Thumb. Very famously renamed General Tom Thumb by his half fifth, twice removed cousin PT. What does that stand for? Even Paul thomas Anderson Barnard. So he said, you know what? This is great. You are a small person, and you're cute as a Dickens, so let me dress you up in little adult suits, and you're my new sidekick. Yeah, he collaborated with the kid's dad and said, let's make some money. And he taught him how to sing and dance. Pretend he was Napoleon. Yeah. He did impressions Cupid. He played Cupid sometimes. And then he told everybody that this little five year old kid was actually eleven, which made it all the more astounding that he was that small, which he didn't even need to do. No. And then, for about the next 15 or so years, turn Tom Thumb into what was essentially the first international celebrity. Was he the first international celebrity? Pretty much. Wow. Yeah. Tom Thom was a sensation. Queen Victoria was a huge fan. Met with him twice, at least twice. She apparently was really big into sideshows, but Tom Thumb was her favorite. And they made so much money off of their first European tour that Barnum bought his museum with the proceeds. Is there anything grosser than the Queen of England laughing at a small person imitating Napoleon for money? She may have even known Napoleon at the time. Oh, I'm sure that probably made it all the funnier to her. Yeah. Unbelievable. But he was a rich dude. He was paid in today's dollars, tom Thumb over $4,000 a week and retired and lived a high life in New York City. And he didn't feel like he was exploited? No, he actually got married. I saw that he had children, but I only saw that one place. I didn't see it anywhere. Else, but he was married and actually, right after the marriage, was brought to the White House to hang out with Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln. Yeah. He had 20,000 people at his funeral. Again, he was a very big deal. And from what I understand, at the end of the day, he shed his persona. He was just Charles Stratton, uber wealthy little person. And when he was doing his show, he was Tom Thumb who would dress up as Napoleon or whatever and take your money. Yeah. But he and PT. Barnum together really made a ton of cash. Tom Thumb was a little better at managing his cash than Barnum was, because Barnum fell in hard times. A lot of people don't realize this, but he made some actually really bad investments over time, too. Yeah. He invested a lot of his money initially back into his business, which was smart. Right. But a lot of times he would be like, this is going to be a hit, and it wouldn't be a hit. He didn't have the Midest touch, necessarily, and he fell on hard times more than once. One of the times. Tom Thom or Charles Stratton bailed them out. Oh, really? I get the feeling Barnum didn't know when to leave well enough alone. He had a big, thriving business, and he just kept wanting to push it further and further. Sure. Hugh jackman, I'm telling you. So now we will talk about a couple of people who are afflicted with something. Well, they were microsophalic, which means that they have a cone shaped head. It's smaller than normal shaped head as well. Yes. If you're a Howard Stern fan, then Beetlejuice, he has this condition, and they used to call them pinheads back in the day. Yes. Awful term. Right. And there were a couple of notable I'm not even going to keep saying that, but a couple of notable people that performed in these freak shows. One was Zip. William Henry Johnson. Renamed Zip Zip. He's from New Jersey, born to newly freed slaves. And when Barnum found him, he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make up the story that you were found during a gorilla expedition near the Gambia River. I'm going to shave your head, except for a little ponytail tuft on top. I'm going to address you in a suit of fur, and you get up on that stage and grunt like an animal. Yeah. He was paid a dollar a day at first to not talk to grunt and I guess to play the violin really badly. Yeah. I didn't get was he paid one dollars a day to start. Okay. I thought that might have been part of the story now that he was, in fact, paid $100 a day later. Okay. He became a very popular freak, I guess. The thing is, William Henry Johnson was probably not microcephalic at all. He microcephalic. Microcephalic is totally different. Microcephalic, they think now that he had just a slightly abnormally shaped head that was exaggerated by the haircut that they gave him. Oh, yeah. And that he actually had no diminished mental faculties at all. And he was just pretending the whole time. And not only fooling crowds, but he was also fooling promoters. Yeah. Because that's one of the hallmarks of that condition, is, I believe that usually it's accompanied by stunted cognitive development. Yeah. Usually very severe. Yeah. But not in his case. He was super smart, and when he died, said, we fooled them all. His wife? No, his sister. In his deathbed, they were also married. Not true. But he made a lot of money, too. He did. He apparently retired with millions. A millionaire. So he's not the only again, Pinhead is what this specific type of freak was called. Man, I can't believe I just said that. This feels so wrong. I know, but there's a very sideshow performer. Okay. And Chuck, another very famous sideshow performer who was also, I guess, technically under the umbrella of Pinhead, who actually was microcephalic, was Schlitzee. Yes. Schlitzi is one of my favorite people of all time. Yes. Schlitzzie. They don't know for sure his real name, but they believe it's. Simon Metz, born in 19 and one in the Bronx. And by all accounts, from everyone who ever met Schlitsey, everyone loved Schlitzee. And he was a ray of sunshine and a nice, sweet, caring, kind hearted man. Yes. Love life. Anything that you would take for granted, she'll see. Probably enjoyed the heck out of. And he was very frequently billed as a woman. I think he was billed as an Aztec warrior at first, and then maybe even an Aztec woman. But he wore dresses all the time because he was incontinent. And this just made it the whole thing easier. So he was billed as a woman for a very long time. And including in the movie Freaks, the Todd Browning movie from 1932. Schlitzzi was in that. And Schlitzey actually has this big scene that he has a whole speaking like a dialogue section, but to this day, no one has any clue what he says. Yes. Should we talk about Freaks now or take a break and then talk about it? Let's take a break. All right. All right. So the movie Freaks I've seen it. Have you? I saw it for the first time this morning. No way. Wow. Most people see it. It's so good. Yeah. It's a 1932 pre code film. There was a time between 1929, when they started making movies, to 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code kicked in. The Hayes Code. Yeah. Improperly called the Haze code. For five years there, you could do whatever you wanted, I guess. Yeah. And that's when this director named Todd Browning made a movie called Freaks about sideshow performers. And this guy was actually ran away. The director actually ran away and joined the carnival when he was. 16 and worked as a carnival barker and even participated in stunts. And he's a circus guy. Right. And he had a lot of sideshow performers as friends. And you can tell in the movie that whose side he's on. They're the heroes of the story. The protagonist antagonists are normals or whatever. Right. And it's a really morally fraught movie these days. But if you just step back and think of it as like this guy having an affinity for sideshow performers and giving them a shot at stardom being on the big screen for what they are for who they are, for what they can do, then it's really kind of a heart growing tale. Heart growing? Yeah, in a very weird way. Interesting. It's wrenching to watch. When's the last time you saw it? College. Yeah. It's been a long time. See it again. All right, I'll check it out. Like, it's tough to watch. It's gut wrenching. There are a lot of well, let's just talk about some of the performers in the movie. One of them who stands out is John Eckhart Jr. Who is a twin. And he was born with a condition. Everyone said that he was cut off at the waist. Not exactly true. We actually had unusable underdeveloped legs that you never saw. But it appeared as though he didn't have anything from the torso down. Right. And as from a young kid, I believe he was even walking on his hands before his twin brother was even standing. Oh, really? So he was very advanced in a lot of ways. Very smart guy. He's a painter. Yeah. Very accomplished magician. And he had a great personality, too. You could tell. Yeah. Apparently he was good buddies with Browning. And Browning always wanted him around and by side and was like, you need to come sit with me by the camera. And almost like his I don't know if you could consider him a co director, but he always wanted him nearby. Pretty neat. Daisy and Violet Hilton. Yeah. Conjoined twins. Right? Yeah. Which they called Siamese twins back in the day, thanks to changing bunker. Right? Yeah. They were actually some of the first super famous. They were from a Siamese fishing village, and that's where the term came from. Yeah. Siam was what we now call Thailand. That's right. And Chang and Ng were born in 1811 and they actually performed on their own for many years. Made a ton of money that got married, had kids, moved to North Carolina, all places. And that well, actually, interestingly, daisy and Violet ended up in North Carolina, too. Yeah. But under much worse conditions. Yeah. But to finish with Changing, they eventually lost their money. They were millionaires, lost their dough, and then worked for Barnum later on in life. But I get the impression that they did it kind of like, at their leisure, almost, and ended up reimassing another fortune. Interesting. From working with Barnum. And they fathered 21 children between them, married a pair of sisters. Man, I can join. Each had a house, and they would spend three days at one house, three days at the next house. And yeah, they had 21 kids. Pretty amazing. Yeah. So Daisy and Violet Hilton, they were known as Siamese twins back then. Of course, we don't use that term anymore, but, I mean, I remember that term when I was a kid. Sure. So it's definitely, like, held on for way too long. Remember Ronnie and dining Gallium? Yeah. Are they still with us? Let's find out. You're checking that? I'll continue. I believe that Browning spotted Daisy and Violet and said, you guys are great. You're pretty, you can sing. You'll be a big part of my movie. And they've been performers all along. By 18, they were on tour with Bob Hope as part of his dance troupe and made quite a bit of money. But sadly, their story ends in North Carolina because they made an appearance in 1961 at a midnight showing of Freaks at a drive in, and their manager ditched them. And this part I don't get. They had no way to leave North Carolina. So they just stayed there. Yeah. They had to get a job. That just seems odd to me. If you don't have any money and knowing to call to ask for money, you go get a job at a grocery store and I hope that you can eventually die there. Yeah. It seems like they would have gotten enough money to leave and go back to wherever they live while they died in Charlotte, North Carolina, of the Hong Kong flu. What is that? It was a flu epidemic. Jesus. That originated in Hong Kong, but it's a different world back then. Siamese twins died a Hong Kong flu. None of that seems politically correct. No, it doesn't. Who else was in freaks? Let's see. There were a pair of little people named Harry and Daisy Earls. And they played Hans and Frieda. Right? Yes. And Hans is like the ring master of the sideshow. And Frieda, in real life, Daisy was known as the midget May West. And in the movie, they're engaged, but actually, in real life, they were a brother and sister. Yeah. And they were in The Wizard of Oz, even as Munchkins, and were in a bunch of movies with Laurel and Hardy as well. So lifelong performers. Yeah. So this whole movie and again, we didn't finish with Schlitzie. Schlitzley was in it, too, and had this whole big speaking part. It was just adorable. In the movie, Schlitz's personality just shines right through the movie. Very likable. Yeah. And actually, no one had any idea who Schlitsey's biological family was. They were not around. So the people he performed with and worked for actually took care of him. And when his adopted father died, his father's daughter, biological daughter said, hey, Schlitzee, I'm going to commit you to an asylum. In Los Angeles, and that's where Schlitzee was until one day, just by total chance, chuck, another circus performer, I think a sword swallower, right? Yeah. Named Bill Unks. Bill? You're Schlitsey. Yeah. What are you doing here? You look so sad. And Schlitzy was like, I remember you. Let's go. So Bill UNK intervened and got Schlitzee out of the institution. And he got to live out his days hanging out in the park, being recognized by passers by. Yeah, he lived near MacArthur Park in downtown La and lived all the way up until 1971 at age 71. Yeah. You got to see Schlitze, you should see Freaks. But even if you don't see Freaks, look up Schlitzie's part. Agreed. It'll probably make you want to see Freaks. So, Chuck, the freak show is well, some people say that it's still around and that is just on TV in the form of reality shows. Like, basically that same sentiment and everything still is found all over television. Yeah. Exploiting people, like exploiting obesity and exploiting dwarfism. Sure, yeah. It's on television now. But the actual side show itself, well, it went away in a lot of ways, at least as far as, like, a traveling sideshow went, and it went away with the rise of the rights for the disabled. That movement that came along starting in about late 19th century, early 20th century, and then really gaining steam by about the time Freaks came around the movie. Yeah. There were a few things that kind of killed it, but one was definitely, like you said, science invented it and killed it. And here's something that is sort of reprehensible that I found out. A lot of these sideshows would try and keep doctors away from the people because they thought, I don't want a doctor coming in here and saying that the dog face boy actually has hypertrichosis, and it's a condition where you have hair all over your face. Yeah. I told everybody he was a caveman. Yeah, exactly. Did you know, actually, there was a woman named Julia Pastrana, and she had hypertrichosis, too, and she ended up marrying her manager. They were married, they had a baby together, and she died during childbirth. And the baby was born, still born. And her husband manager, who ostensibly loved her, said, show must go on. So he mummified his wife and they're stillborn baby and then took them around to display them in the sideshow, as ever. Unbelievable. So again, doctors would come along and start explaining these things, and that helped kill the sideshow. The rise of television and at home entertainment meant people weren't going out to places like Sideshows anymore. They could stay in their house and watch television. And apparently you could still find side shows like that. American Horror Story, was it? Freak Show? I think so. Last season or whatever. Yeah. I don't watch that, but, yeah, it was set in, I think the think at that time you could still see traveling sideshows here, there, but they were pretty broken down. Oh, yeah. By that point, they were pretty much gone. But by the 60s, there was a girl named Carol Browning, and all I could find was that she had deformed arms and legs. I don't know what that means, but that was the description that was given over. But she went to a sideshow, and when she visited the carnival in North Carolina, I think she lived in Charlotte. No, Raleigh. And Carol. What is it with North Carolina? That's where things begin and end with sideshows. Well, Carol Grant, I think, was her name. Carol wrote a letter to the agricultural commission, and the agricultural commission is in charge of sideshows at the time, at least in North Carolina, and said, this is wrong, this is beyond wrong. I'm offended by this, and this should not be allowed to happen. And she actually sparked a national conversation about whether sideshow should be allowed to be around, even if performers wanted to be a part of them. And that was the final death knell, that conversation. But a lot of people came out and said, hey, you know what? These people, you guys call them freaks, but you also empty your pockets to them, and they're wealthy, they enjoy the acclaim, they enjoy the money, and it's actually you who has the problem. And it didn't have much of an effect. Sideshow went away, and a lot of the sideshow performers ended up going from being pretty wealthy or well paid or having a steady income to being broke and ending up like being abandoned by their managers like Daisy and Violet. Yeah, it's a tricky ground. It is. It's pretty much sad all the way through, except for some success stories. Sure. And that makes the whole thing so morally ambiguous, if you think about it. It's just so easy to look from here and be like, you named your movie freaks. Right. Or you charge people to look at the elephant man. But what about those people who said, I'm cool with this, I'm signing on for this. This has made a lot of very wealthy. I'm happy. I've had all sorts of opportunities that weren't open to me before, and I love what I do. What do you do about that? Like, you can't condemn it. It's not an easy black and white thing to deal with. Yeah, it's called the moral ambiguity. You said there have always been them. Those the moral ambiguity. There always will be. You got anything else? No. If you want to know more about sideshow, freaks, that kind of thing, you can type those words into the search barhouseafworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Hey, before listener mail, what about Ronnie and Donnie? Oh, yeah, ronnie and Donnie are alive. Awesome. They are 64 years old as of last October, I think 21st. And they are the world's longest living conjoined twins. Wow. They're adorable, too. They're Ohio, right? If I remember. I believe so, yeah. Very nice. What documentary did we see on them or something? I can't remember, but we've talked about them a lot over the years. Yeah, so that's great news. Yeah, but they're still at it. All right, so listen or mail. I'm going to call this one Quick Feedback on the Bill Gates podcast. That is a quick turnaround. Hey, guys. My name is Brendan Cologne, pronounced like cologne. And I'm a PhD student at Hobbit Medical School in Pamela Silver's lab working on artificial photosynthesis. Shout out, Pamela Silver. How about that? I'm a long time fan of the show and wanted to say what you guys did. You did a great job covering renewable energy with Bill Gates. During the episode, there was a question about the current limitations of artificial photosynthetic systems. At present, the biggest issues are scalability, the cost energy in producing the building materials, and the efficient extraction of produced fuels. These are standard engineering hurdles, but like Mr. Gates said, we can call them bill, by the way. I don't think you can, Brendon. We can, but we can. These are standard engineering hurdles. But like Mr. Gates said, the final product needs to be viable. Specifically, such a product would need to harvest and store more energy in the short term than what was required to build it. Makes sense. And do so on the cheap. Fortunately, biotechnology and photovoltaic technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, so the future of this technology looks bright. As new biochemistries are discovered, more products will be available for production. And one vision of this technology is a local and individualized production of chemicals on demand. Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out. Cheers, Brendan. Thanks, Brendan. Yeah. Brendan Cologne, pronounced cologne. That's right. If you are an expert in something that we talk about, we love hearing feedback from people like you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushennow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at how stuffworks.com. Com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushennow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com." | ||
c4e91f7a-5460-11e8-b38c-1bda5aac5ece | SYSK Selects: Sugar: It Powers the Earth | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-sugar-it-powers-the-earth | Since sugar spread from Polynesia a few thousand years ago, the world has been crazy for it. Insanely high prices, wars and even slavery couldn't undo world's need for a sugar fix. Today that fix is responsible for the obesity epidemic facing the West. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Since sugar spread from Polynesia a few thousand years ago, the world has been crazy for it. Insanely high prices, wars and even slavery couldn't undo world's need for a sugar fix. Today that fix is responsible for the obesity epidemic facing the West. Learn all about it in this classic episode. | Sat, 26 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=361, tm_isdst=0) | 42955429 | audio/mpeg | "Hi, friends. Sugar is delicious and it is also not very good for you. And we did an episode on sugar from June 12, 2014. Sugar colon. It powers the earth and it truly does it's a lot to this one. We probably could have done it too. New parter. But we shrunk it down into one episode as we try to do. And here we go with sugar right now. Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of Iheartradios how Stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W, Chuck Bryant. How Dee. Hi. Sugar. I was thinking about it. It was Archie. That was an Archie song. Oh, sugar, honey, honey. You call your girlfriend like a sugar or honey or your wife or whatever and this is all sweet things? Yeah, it all makes sense. Do you hear your head? Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't call your wife something bitter, right? Like Korean melon. I was trying to think of something bitter. I couldn't think of anything. Arugula. Come here, my little Korean melon. I bet someone said that. Who? I don't know. Someone Korean. Well, in Korea they just call them melon. That's true. Man, this is the worst start ever. This is the worst ever. I knew we would achieve it. We've been building towards it. Well, we top ourselves every episode. Really. That's right. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever tasted sugar? I have. I'm trying to bring it back from the brink. Yes, I have. I have. Two. Sugar is a big popular sweetener these days. It is. And it's been around for a while. I don't know if you know this or not, but apparently they think sugar is indigenous to the island known as New Guinea in the South Pacific around Polynesia. And that as long as 5000 to 8000 years ago the Polynesians were cultivating it and going like this is the jam. Yeah. Sweet and yummy. And sweet gives us energy and makes us fat. Remember that Simpsons where I guess Bart grows up to be like a paid taste tester? Yeah. And he drinks that soda and turns into this horrible, huge disfigured thing and he goes, sweet. And the guy with the clipboard goes, pleasing taste. Some monsters you remember. I don't remember that. It's great. Was that the one where was there all of their future selves? No, it was like just a momentary daydream. Got you. And it goes back to his normal self and he's like cool. Like he can't wait to grow up to be a professional taste test. Awesome. You know the table reading we set out on that should be coming out. I can't wait this year, right? It was a good one. Yeah, it should be coming out. It's exciting. I'm excited. We can't say what it's about. No, we don't know if we can. We're just covering. We're going to err on the side of caution because the last thing we want is for the symptoms to be mad at us after all these years. For real? Yeah. All right, so where are we sugar polymersia? So I guess, apparently, island hopped from New Guinea across Polynesia, made its way up to Indonesia, and then finally landed in India. And when it was in India, it really started to spread. Everything spread from India back then, trade routes, and thanks to the Crusades, it was brought to Western Europe. Well, even before that, the Persians started conquering the land, and they encountered sugar and brought that with them. That's right. And then you got Columbus. That jerk brought sugar cane itself to the Caribbean and said, like, some roots samplings, and said, let's try and plant this stuff here. And it turned out it was a great place to plant sugar cane. It really was, because sugar cane is a tropical plant. Yeah. The cane, you can't grow it just anywhere. No, but you can grow it in places like South America, the Caribbean, south Africa, southern United States. Sure. Hot places. India, as we already mentioned. Yeah. And it just kind of spread like wildfire across the world, especially when it came to what's known as the new World, like you said, via Columbus. Unfortunately, it became an agent of slavery. Yes, it certainly did. It fueled the slave trade for quite a while. And then by 1750, there were 120 sugar refineries in Britain. They called it white gold. And it was up until that point, it had been kind of a luxury. Well, a little before that, it became a little more widespread. It was a complete luxury. Like, literally, it was for royalty, pretty much. It was so rare and hard to come by. Apparently, the first Seabourn International sugar exchange was between Venice and England in 1319. I saw that Venice was the first place where they were refining it really well. Right. And the Venetians, that was a merchant city if there ever was one. So they were selling it, and one of the places they sold the first place they sold it to overseas was England, and it was in 1319. And they sold 50 tons for what's, the equivalent of about $11 million today. And that's tons with an NNE, I'm sure. Yes. And right now, you could get that for about $20,000. It was $11 million back then, so it was very expensive. But then two things happened that opened the sugar industry and made it available to the general public the Reformation, which actually, strangely, led to a decrease in honey, because monasteries were the major producers of honey. Monks kept bees, and the Reformation led to a closure of a lot of monasteries. And secondly, sugar just became more available. Like, those two things happened at the same time, and all of a sudden, it was something that the average person could get their hands on. That's right. And it actually led to a huge increase in tea consumption. Oh, yeah. Because before then people drink tea, but once they started putting sugar in their tea, they were like, we love tea. And that's when it became like the national drink of Great Britain. Man, I love a good English tea with a little cream and little sugar in it. Just delicious. You're tea guy. I like the herbie kind more. No, I like it all, man. I love green tea. I love English Breakfast tea. I love black tea. I'll even do a little I'll chat it up every now and then. Oh, wow. I'm into all of it. It's a wild sidewalker. And from about 1792 to 1815, there was a lot of warring going on in Europe, and there were naval blockades by Britain that basically Europe needed that sugar fix. And they were like, but you can't cut us off. We love sugar now. Come on, man. And so in 1747, they realized that the sugar beet, which is the other way you can get sugar, was a great way to do it. And that's how they get their sugar today still. Yeah. And the beet is looks like a beat. That's not purple, it's a root. Right. And it grows up out of the ground. Looks like a little just sort of whitish, light brown. Looks like a turnip. Yeah, sort of like a turnip, but it's sweet. It is. About 17% of the sugar beet can eventually become sugar, as opposed to only about 10% in the cane. Right. Which I thought was unusual. Yeah. So you have these two plants that can be processed separately, independently, and both will produce sugar indistinguishable to the average person. Yeah. Can pretty neat. And the reason why Chuck, the reason why it would be indistinguishable is because all plants have sugar. That's right. It's a carbohydrate, a simple carbohydrate, and sugar is a part of photosynthesis. But you can't go out and get a blade of switch grass and get enough sugar out of it to make sugar. Right. Even though there's sugar in it, it's only abundant enough in the beet and the cane to really produce sugar. Sugar, exactly. But sugar is kind of this a molecule that powers the earth. Yes. Really? Like humans, plants, everything is powered by sugar. It's pretty neat. It is pretty neat. You can use it as a preservative. It prevents bacteria from growing and jam. Sometimes you can change the texture. They use it as like a food additive to make something look and feel different. Not only just taste different, they're like, this doesn't put fuzzy little jackets on people's teeth when they eat it enough. So let's add some sugar. And our favorite use of sugar is to make booze. It accelerates fermentation. My favorite uses of sugar are to make booze and to make Reese's Pieces. Okay, let's not leave that out. Yes. It's an important part of the production of alcohol and Reese's Pieces. And Reese's Pieces. And it does make the world go round and the world actually produces quite a bit of sugar. So in this article from a few years ago, it says that the world made about 78 million tons of 71 metric tons of sugar cane annually. Is that accurate still? Do you know? Well, it's just sugar cane, but I know that sugar cane accounts for 80% of sugar production. 80% about. And then sugar beets account for about 20%, the other 20%. But in, I think, 2013, the world produced 165,000,000 metric tons of sugar. Okay. Yeah. So I guess you'd have to be a mathematician to figure out that formula. Plus you probably have to have more info than we just gave. Yeah, the cane sugar cane looks sort of like bamboo. The stock does. It's a tropical grass at the top of it looks grassy, and it takes about a year to grow. It takes about 18 months from planting, but once it's planted, you cut it back to the root and it'll take another twelve months for that to grow back up to be harvested again. Right. So what's the 18 months thing then? The 18 months is if you plan it brand new. Oh, got you. Okay. Like from seed, I guess. I see. And it grows in breaks. They call them cane breaks, which I always think is like one of the neater, like, earth science terms. Cane breaks? Cane break, yeah. It is grown and not always refined near where it's grown, but it is harvested and processed initially close to where it's grown so it doesn't rot. Sort of like when we did coffee. Yeah. You want to do most of that stuff near where it's grown. Right. And there are some steps you have to take to harvest sugar, at least even get it to the raw state. But yeah, not every processing place refined it all the way to what we would call table sugar. Yeah. Sometimes it's sent to a refinery, so I guess we can cover that in broad strokes here, but it's pretty complicated. Yeah. If you're looking for the end all, be all of how sugar is produced, then go watch an hour long video on YouTube. Remember how incredibly complex chocolate making is? Remember cooking? Oh, yeah, I love all these. These are some of my favorite ones. Salt, sugar, coffee, commodities. Yeah. The Commodity suite. We got to do T. We haven't done tea. Okay. And wine. We still haven't done wine yet. Yeah, that one that just bugs me. We got a great offer from a nice guy. I don't have his name in my memory, but I have his email in the safe folder. And he was like, you need some help with this stuff? I've got experts who are ready to talk to you about wine. That should be a sweet that's a dense topic. All right, so sugar beets. Let's talk about that in the process. Okay. Usually they're going to extract over the winter months between September and february. And as we said earlier, sugar beet is about 17% sugar. Yeah. So not too bad bang for your buck wise, considering the cane is only 10%. Yeah, I mean, you could pick it up and eat it and be like, this is pretty sweet. I guess 70%. If you're in Russia, you could yeah, that's true. That's their racist pieces. Sugar beets going to start an international incident. No, things are tense right now, you know? Yeah. Between us and Russia, it's like 1977 again. Oh, they're kicking us out of the space station. I know. Star wars just came out. So if you're going to process sugar beet, you're going to slice it, and you're going to put it in hot water, and you're going to boil it, and it's similar to sugar cane. They're going to make a sugary juice, then they're going to filter it, purify it, concentrate it, isolate those sugars, and eventually you're going to get sugar crystals developing, because you send that syrupy juice through what's called a centrifuge, and that's going to separate the crystal from what is known as the mother liquor. Whatever is left, which is one of my favorite terms, whatever is left over that's not crystal is mother liquor, like byproducts and the original juice. And apparently that can be extracted a few times, I would guess. So to get all the crystals out of it. Yeah. And I think sometimes they need to add a little sugar dust to spur that crystallization. Wow, that sounds like a magical process. There's mother liquor, there's sugar dust. And actually, now that you bring up sugar dust, do you remember down in Savannah in 20 07? 20 08? That sugar refinery that exploded? Oh, yeah. It was sugar that exploded. Oh, dust in the air. Yeah. Sugar dust is particularly that matter, and when it gets into the air, it can catch fire and explode. That's crazy. And it did. It blew that place sky high. When was that? I wrote about it when I got here, so I would guess, like, 2007 or 2008. What was the article like? How Can Sugar Explode? I think I remember seeing that. Yeah. We should have touched on that, I guess. I just did. But, I mean, you should go back and check out that now that you realize that it was just sugar that blew the place up. It formed a crater, basically. It just blew the whole refinery. I knew flour could do that, too. Right. Same principle. Yeah. Any particulate matter can do that. I think that's nutty. Yeah. All right. So sugar cane is a very similar process. They're going to pulverize the stalk, add water and lime, and that's going to be your syrupy sweet juice. And not lime. Like limestone. Yeah, not like squeeze limes into it. I had to double check. No, you're right. Because it's tropical. Exactly. And they're also going to run that through the centerfuge, and you're going to get your mother liquor and your crystals. And that is also going to be washed and filtered and refined further until you get your sugary white. Goodness. Yeah. Evaporation is going on. It's one of those things that sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple. It's the same as when you're, like, making a simple syrup at home or you're boiling sugar and water, it evaporates off and you're going to end up with something super sweet. Yeah. So, Chuck, there are byproducts to this whole process. Yeah. Essentially, molasses is chief among them. Yeah. I never knew that. Yeah. It's a byproduct that comes from boiling sugar, right? Yeah. That's what makes brown sugar dark or sugar in the raw. Dark is molasses. Right. The molasses isn't extracted as much as it is with refined white sugar. Refined white sugar has zero molasses in it. Like sugar in the raw has more and more. It's less refined. And then the greatest byproduct of molasses is, of course, rum. Yes. I put a little molasses in when I make my own barbecue sauce. Oh, yeah. It's good. That's nice. Another byproduct is called bagasse, and that is the pulp, essentially, of the cane. Are you making these words up? No, those are rewards. Okay. What mother liquor and bagasse? Bagasse, I think another process we studied. Yeah. It's not central, just a sugar. It's just the pulpy fibrous matter left over from this kind of process. I wonder what we talked about that. And was it coffee? No. Maybe. But the gas is used. Is it bigass? Because I think I remember us discussing whether it was the gas or by. Gas. It's by gas. I listened to it today. Okay. Yeah. We definitely covered that before. I'm starting to feel like an old man, because when we have 700 topics or so yes. Vaguely familiar, but you don't want to sound dumb, so you don't say anything. And then you just spend the next week in your head going over this. I'm telling you, one day we are going to re record a show and not realize it, man. And we're going to hear about it. Well, what was it? It was Crystal Skulls. Well, we never released that one. Right. But remember, I was like, I thought for sure we recorded this. No dreams. That's what it was. We went to record dreams and it just wasn't there. Yeah. So the gas we definitely talked about, and bagasse is a great byproduct because that can be used to power the sugar refinery. They actually burn that as fuel to create the steam used to power some of these machines. So that is one way that sugar production can be green. However, mass production of anything like this isn't super green because they're transporting stuff over large distances and there's clear cutting of land. Well, that's a big one with sugar. Yes. Deforestation, like in the Amazon, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So even though they're using things like the gas as a byproduct to help power. Why is that funny to you? Because I always hear by gas in my head. Okay, any time you say it. But it is not looked upon as one of the more green products that is used and produced. No, like they have to use baby lambs to really refine it to its whitest. Not true. Well, it uses their souls, at least, I guess, if you want to get technical. The souls of baby lamb. Yeah. And then they're just left to wander the earth for the rest of their natural lives. Like not feeling anything. That's so sad. Capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services custom tailored to your short and long term goals. Backed by the expertise, strategy, and resources of a top ten commercial bank, a dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at Capital One. comCOMMERCIAL what if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to sex by cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate. Cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting so there's a lot of types of sugar there are. When you think about sugar, especially here in the west, you think, oh, that really white, like really pretty powdery granular stuff. And that's called table sugar. And that's what's known as sucrose. That's right. And sucrose is 50 50 glucose and fructose. Yes. Sucrose also apparently occurs naturally. There's a lot of different types of sugar that you're going to find in plants and from some animals, too. Cow's milk sure contains lactose and galactose. Yes. Both of which are sugars. Yeah. Sucrose. Again, that's typically table sugar, but I believe you can find that in plants. Yes. And that's glucose and fructose, like you said. Yeah. And it's 50 50, even one molecule glucose, one molecule fructose. Put them together, you got sucrose. That's right. Fructose is commonly found in fruits. It's also found in honey fructoses. Yeah. And then glucose. This is the one you commonly think of when you think the body and sugar, because glucose is what the body runs on. And we'll talk about that a little more in depth in a little bit. Yeah. And that's in honey and fruits and veggies and then something called xylos, which I'd never heard of. That's in wood and straw. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. There's a sugar alcohol called xylotal that's very sweet. Yes. There's sugar alcohols, and they supposedly circumvent your blood sugar, your normal metabolic blood sugar process, so they taste sweet but they don't have any impact on your blood sugar. And one of them is called Zyolidal Xylitol. Is that the name of the product? Yeah, there's a Danish or Swedish gum that's, like, the best sugar free gum you can possibly get your hands on. It's called Zyalidal. It's so good. Terrible name, though. It is. But it's named after the sugar, which apparently is based on I guess it's probably wood sugar alcohol. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty creative. I didn't I'm just recounting here. No, you didn't. Oh, you weren't complimenting me. No. Sugar comes in different granulations and from icing sugar, which is if you've ever heard of confectioner sugar that you daintily sprinkle on top of your what's it called that you get at the fair? Your funnel cake. Yeah, right. Those are so good. They are. I haven't had one in years. They're good. I don't indulge in that stuff. What is going on? Chuck? Well, you know, I'm overweight, and there's just like you don't want to be the overweight guy walking up to the funnel cake stand, you know? Well, that's why you sneak around the back, get someone else to go get it and eat it in the alley. Cry. I've never done that. Now. I avoid that stuff. Ice cream is my big downfall. Oh, what's your favorite? Well, Ben and Jerry's. Sure. But which one? Chubby Hubby. Oh, it's a good one. Ironically. Yeah. I got to tell you. Have you had Bluebell? Yeah. Okay. Bluebell is, like, the third best selling ice cream brand. It tastes just like the country, but you can only get it in, like, seven states. Oh, really? That's how good it is. Oh, wow. And they have a banana pudding flavor. That is, if you're in Nevada, and the closest you can get it is in Mississippi. It's worth driving there for, and it's like $8 for, like, a gallon or a half gallon. Ridiculously expensive. But it is so good. All of their flavors are good, but their banana pudding one is like I'm about to cry. Yeah, their radio commercials. Have you heard those? The songs? They're horrible. Oh, it's the funniest stuff you've ever heard. The TV version of it is even worse. Yes. It seems like a joke. Are they serious, or is this campy? Oh, they're serious. Yeah. It's like an 85 year old Baptist preacher is in charge of their ads. It is. It's campy, and they don't mean it to me. It is. For those of you who don't know the songs, it's literally like mama's baking the apple pie and putting it in the window sill, and the picket fence is outside, and we're eating Blue Bell Ice cream because it tastes like the good old days, right? It's really funny. It rhymes more than that, but that's the gist of it. I'm sure it's on YouTube. Just type blue Bell ice cream ad. Yes. It's good stuff, man. That was a nice sidetrack. So then you got castor sugar, which is larger than powdered sugar, but smaller than granulated sugar. Yes. Which I didn't know about until, like, a couple of months ago. I don't remember what recipe it was, but there was a recipe that Yummy was making that called for castor sugar. She's like, what? Yeah, both of us were. Yeah. Apparently you can make it. It's like with the coffee grinder. You can grind your regular sugar. Yes. She came across that. I think we finally found her. She ordered it online or something like that. Is she making a meringue? Because they use a lot of meringues, evidently. I don't remember. Maybe. I don't remember. Did she make a banana pudding? Why did she do that for? I'll figure it out on my own time and let everybody know in the next episode. How about that? Rather than all of us sitting here until I remember what the recipe was, and then I pick up the phone and call her and ask. Right. That's good radio, my friend. Yes. Then you have your granulated sugar, and this is your table sugar. And then you've got preserving sugar, which looks sort of like sort of rock salty. It's chunkier. Or like sea salt. Right, of course, sea salt. Sweeter than sea salt, though. And that's used to preserve yeah, much sweeter. Yeah. Because that's another property of sugar. It's a preservative as well. You can throw it into some jam if you want and make it extra sweet, but it'll also keep the bacteria away at bay. That's right. Which is why, as you said, simple syrup can last for so long. Yeah. You can just make that put it on your bar at room temperature. Right? Yeah, keep it in the fridge. But yeah, you keep it on hand, make it yourself. Yeah. Awesome. It's very easy. Plus, also, if you, like, toss some lavender in there. You got lavender, simple syrup, which goes with anything with gin in it. Yeah. Oh, it's so good. You can put in some, like, all spice and some anise seed and stuff like that. You ever use lemon Verbina? No, but I have made lemon just from the peel. Yeah, lemon Verbina is just the green leaf. We grow a lot of that in the herb garden. And if you smash it up, it smells so good. Nice. I imagine it would be good muddled in a drink if I was into that. Oh, you're not. You know that I'm not into the cocktails. I thought you were whiskey over ice. Yeah, but you can jazz it up a little bit here or there. No, not me. Okay. So I guess we should talk a little bit about high fructose corn syrup. We did a whole show on it, which you can go back and listen to, but it bears mentioning here because there's a lot of it gets a bad rap, and the evidence is sort of inconclusive right now. Yeah. I think what we determined is it's not necessarily any worse for you than sugar, but it's in a lot more stuff and you may not know it. I don't remember what we concluded. My understanding is at this point, and that was from 2009, there's a really great article on the New York Times called is sugar toxic? It's very long, but it's very in depth, and it really goes into the evidence that's out there that it really is. What are the highlights? Well, like you said, high fructose corn syrup isn't molecularly different very much from sucrose, which is 50 50 sugar. Most high fructose corn syrup or the stuff that's most widely used is like 55 45 fructose to glucose. Right. Okay. So that 5% difference in fructose shouldn't make much difference, but apparently it does. The other aspect of high fructose corn syrup is that the extra fructose or all that 55% fructose that is processed in the liver, any cell in your body can process glucose. Right. When you eat something that has glucose in it, your pancreas releases insulin, and insulin goes, hey, open up cells. And the glucose goes in and it's converted. It's biochemical energy is converted to ATP, and then you have this packet of energy that can be used by any cell. Any cell can do that, which means your entire body can metabolize glucose. Fructose has to be broken down into glucose. Right. And that's done in the liver. The liver has some options to it, Chuck. When it's presented with fructose, it can use it for energy. It can convert it into fats in the bloodstream, which are called triglycerides, or it can convert it into fat stores. Fat, yeah. Right. That's if you have too much of it. Right, yeah. Now, with high fructose corn syrup, apparently evidence shows that when it hits the liver, it's just automatically converted to fat and that the speed with which it's metabolized also has an effect on how much or how frequently it's converted to fat. And with high fructose corn syrup, it's syrup. And syrup apparently hits the liver a lot faster than, say, an equal amount of apples that you're getting fructose from. Got you. So it's being converted to fat automatically. Okay. That's why they think that high fructose corn syrup is actually far worse for you than just regular fructose or even sucrose table sugar. Right. Well, the obesity epidemic has sort of matched year to year with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup as far as increase. So that makes sense. Yeah. I read an article today that said that added sugars overall is the problem, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or regular added sugar. Well, that's added sugars in a product that's the USDA's line. And the USDA doesn't want to upset the sugar industry or the corner finers association. So that's kind of become the predominant government line, like, yeah, everybody's eating too much sugar. That's the problem. Right. Well, then there's. A whole group of people out there who are saying, like, no, sure, that's a problem. Right. But this is an even bigger problem with high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's different and it's affecting people differently. Right. And it's not the same as sugar. Well, I think a lot of people think we're ingesting too much corn based products, period. Sure. We need to do GMOs at some point, too. Everyone keeps calling for it. Some guy sent us on it. Yeah. Did you read it? No, I haven't read it yet. Apparently, 16% of Americans calories come from added sugars, which is just like, totally empty calories. So, again, there's an argument over those numbers. Yeah, sure. No one really knows, but supposedly the numbers are very artificially low and that the average American eats about \u00a395 of sugar a year. Oh, yeah. Wow. And the global average is something like \u00a366. But Israel eats something like \u00a3145. Really? Per person, per year. That's from sweets. Yeah. He eats a lot of sugar packaged foods. Yeah. Are we done with HSEs, then? For now, yeah. I go back and listen to that episode. It was a good one. One of my favorites. Yeah, it's been a while. I meant to re listen to that, but I didn't get a chance. Capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services custom tailored to your short and longterm goals, backed by the expertise, strategy and resources of a top ten commercial bank. A dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at Capital One.com commercial what if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. Hey, everybody. 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And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code S YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace. Comsysk. So, sugar in the body, and this also harkens back to our episode on taste. It corresponds molecularly with your taste buds on the tongue. Because of the shape of the molecule. We talked about that the molecules are shaped to fit. When sugar hits it, it matches up perfectly with that molecule and sends a message that, hey, there's something sweet, as opposed to salty or bitter or sour or, umami, the fifth. Right. This is four, and then names five, which I thought was, I even changed it on my sheet. And they recommend something that I do not recommend, which is if something tastes sweet in the wild, it's more likely to be safe to eat than something bitter. Right? Sort of true. But you should never, ever go in a survival scenario and just try and eat something even a little bit. There's a test you can do which I won't get into, but it involves, like, rubbing it on your skin first, waiting a certain amount of time. They may be touching it to your tongue, waiting a certain amount of time, but you should never just go like, I wonder if this is edible. Let me taste it. Right. It's not a good idea. Good going. Even if it is sweet, you're a survivalist. I know some things. So we said that sugar is found in all plants, just to varying degrees, and plants create sugar as a byproduct of photosynthesis, and they use it for energy, for growth. They also use it to take sugars and turn them into more complex sugars to use for cellular structure, like cellulose. But they also use sugar in their nectar to attract bees and other things to help them pollinate and propagate their species. Because it's sweet stuff. Yeah. I love it when I see the little bee getting in there, getting a little something sweet. Yeah. I feel like they're getting a little treat. That's right. And then they're vomiting it up, and we eat it as honey. That is true. Sugar is bad for your teeth. Everyone knows that. Specifically, when you eat sugar, it's going to form something called a glycoprotein, that little sweater on your teeth. And bacteria love to eat that stuff, and then they love to poop out lactic acid afterward onto your teeth. Yes. Specifically, streptococcus mutans. That's the culprit for cavities. Really? We've said streptococcus before. That's not a good word. No, but there's different kinds of strep. Okay. But when they poop out that lactic acid, that's what's on your enamel. That's what's going to wear down your teeth. Right. So eating sugary stuff really is bad for your teeth. That's not like something your mom tells you. That's a lie. No. And the bacteria also provides or produces a biofilm around all of this stuff, which traps it in there and traps in the lactic acid as well. So you're in trouble. Yeah. You're dead. Not dead, but you may get diabetes. Yes. You can get diabetes from too much sugar, apparently. It's crazy that there's a real parallel between the six country study and the seven countries study that we talked about in the Paleo Diet episode of fats. Apparently, there was arrival all along that said, it's not fat, it's sugar. We're both after the same problem, but this guy went after fats, this other guy went after sugar. And now they're starting to think, like now that they're thinking it's not fats after all that contributed to heart disease and obesity. They think it's actually sugar. And the way that it's sugar is through something called metabolic syndrome, to where if you eat too much sugar, your body becomes resistant to insulin. And remember, insulin gets glucose out of the bloodstream and into your cells and is converted to energy. Right. Well, if your body starts sucking at doing that, then you have a lot more glucose in your bloodstream, which means your pancreas is producing more and more insulin. Right. Insulin, remember, triggers fat storage. So you have more and more insulin, you have more and more fat storage, you have obesity, you have heart disease. And they think that possibly the number one contributor to heart attacks is metabolic syndrome and not necessarily saturated fats. Right. Interesting. But as a result of this, a side result is insulin. You develop diabetes. Type two diabetes is the result of insulin resistance, where you have to inject insulin into your body because your body is not producing enough any longer because it's overtaxed your pancreases. Yeah. We got a lot of great responses from the Paleo episode. Those are really interesting. Yeah. And people saying, like, dudes, we know so little still about nutrition. Right. And things are changing so much with the things we eat and put in our body that it's hard to keep up. Which is why it's so insulting when some industry that has a vested interest in yeah. So they got all figured out. Yeah. And don't worry about it, just keep eating it. That's insulting. All right. Can sugar power your car? Yes. How? I'll explain there's a couple of ways. So there's sugar based ethanol, which Brazil was basically running on for many years. Yes. I didn't realize that. They're big into flexiols and ethanol. They were basically energy independent in the first decade of the 21st century because they said, we're tired of being dependent on foreign oil. Let's figure something out. And they did. They put all their stuff that makes a lot of sense. They started looking into sugar cane, making ethanol from sugar cane, and there's, like, corn based ethanol, which Chris Paulette and I talked about in the grassleen episode. Yes, I remember that. And apparently ethanol made it from sugar cane has 800 times more energy output. And so they were making ethanol in 2000, and 850 percent of the fuel sold in Brazil was ethanol. That's awesome. Made from sugar cane right there in the country. Well, then gas prices lowered and people started using gas again because they'll use whatever is cheapest. Right. But Brazil, even though it's on its heels, the ethanol industry there is they proved it's a completely viable alternative fuel. Yeah. The problem, though, again, with refining more and more sugar for these purposes is deforestation and worker wages. And I feel like any time we've covered any commodity like this, there's some workers somewhere in the world getting screwed over, and sugar is definitely not any stranger to that process. Well, also, it drives up food prices, too, because if there's two different huge sectors competing for the same commodity, it's going to drive the price of that commodity up. Yeah, that's true. So if you have energy and food going after sugar, the price of sugar goes up. Right. I wish people could have seen that demonstration. Really brings it home. And what else is the other? I remember I think we talked about this, too. Sugar devouring microorganisms, basically feeding on sugar and making energy in the process. Yeah. That's a viable way in the future, maybe to power things. Yeah. So there's certain types of microbes are more sugar hungry than others. Yeah. But yeah, when they're eating sugar, they manage to separate electrons and loosen electrons. And as the electrons flow, as we mentioned in our electricity episode, the flow of electrons is electricity. So if you direct that flow across something that can use it, you create a current. And the cool thing about microbial fuel cells is when that electron makes it to the other side, it combines to form water. So that's the byproduct of this. So it truly is a very environmentally friendly alternative fuel. Yeah. We covered that at some point, too, I remember. Absolutely. Our world is getting smaller. Yes. Because we're explaining it. That's right. You got anything else? No, I don't think so. Mother liquor bagasse. All these words I made up just for the show. You did good with the making up the words, man. Thanks. Yeah. I don't have anything else, Chuck, but if you want to learn more about sugar, I'm sure there's some words we left out of this article. You can type sugar into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this refuting listener mail. We read a listener mail from a creationist not too long ago. Man, that got a certain response from some quarters. Yeah. So then a lot of people write in responding to that listener mail, so we might just continue this for the next year. Just reading rebuttals. Okay. Hey, guys. You received an email from a creation explaining that both creationists and scientists believe in natural selection and that both groups believe in micro evolution but disagree on macro evolution. What the person did not mention is that macro and micro evolution describe the same process of natural selection, just on different timetables micro short term, macro long term. It simply does not make sense that natural selection works on the short term but is somehow reversed on the long term. Natural selection introduces changes to a population subgroup as they adapt to their environment. If the changes are small, the population subgroup can naturally breed with the original population. That is micro revolution. Once the changes are significant enough that the subgroup can no longer naturally and successfully breed with the parent population, the subgroup is considered a new species. That's a special event. That is macroevolution. To believe in micro and not macro is to ignore how nature works. Say you put two separate populations of the same species put in very different environments. Each population would slowly adapt to its new environment and change over time. Microevolution each group will become better adapted to its new environment and the differences between the two groups will only grow in time. However, if you don't believe in Macroe evolution, you don't believe in new species. So you have to believe that no matter how different each group becomes, nature does not work like this. Also, the previous writer claimed to be a creationist botanist and that is like a doctor that does not believe in germ theory. I'm sure they might exist, but I would definitely take their expertise with a large dose of salt. Quite a rebuttal. Yeah, and I didn't have a name. I feel bad. So I'm just going to say thanks you thanks Richard Dawkins. Yes, I appreciate that. So the evolutionists have rebutted. What say you, creationists? Let us know. And everybody stopped tweeting and sending emails about how dare we put a creationist views on and listener mail. We got a way to go through life trying to silence your opponents. You debate and engage. I was surprised. There were a lot of people that said you shouldn't give equal time to this stuff because it's just not true. Yeah, somebody said, I thought discovery stood for something interesting. Yeah, well, hey, I think debate is healthy and they think you're not right either. Debate is healthy. Chuck. Exactly. If not, Bill and I wouldn't have done it. Boom. If you want to contribute to the debate, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at sisk podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And as always, check us out at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. Stuff you should know is production of iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet at Halo. We get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. 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a64fbbf8-5462-11e8-b449-ab6c4effe37f | How the U.S. Military Draft Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-u-s-military-draft-works | The U.S. military draft is far more interesting than you'd think. The process of conscription can get quite complicated, but we're here to clear it up for you. We'll also talk a bit about whether or not this could ever happen again. | The U.S. military draft is far more interesting than you'd think. The process of conscription can get quite complicated, but we're here to clear it up for you. We'll also talk a bit about whether or not this could ever happen again. | Thu, 02 Aug 2018 13:30:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=214, tm_isdst=0) | 52541315 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making small, smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com this July. Don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, season three zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographic. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. So this is stuff you should know. Military edition actually more bureaucracy addition than anything else. Yeah, and I found this for a bureaucratic episode. I found it way more interesting than I thought I would. Those usually turn out to be more interesting than you'd think. Yeah, I can't think of one that we've done bureaucracy than the Bureaucracy suite that wasn't like this is surprisingly interesting. Yeah, this is pretty good. Yup, agreed. Because I registered for the Selective Service. As did you, I assume. Oh, yeah. Unless you've been dodging all these years. Right. I finally made it, but I never really gave it much thought because dudes like you and I in today's modern era don't really when I registered, I was like, yeah, whatever. This will probably mean nothing, but it's really interesting when you dig into it and what it could have meant or could mean. When I registered, I was like, wait, what's going on here? Again? My dad was like, Just do it. It's fine. You'll get in trouble if you don't. I was like, oh, I don't want to get in trouble. Was your dad in the military? Yeah, he was Air Force during Vietnam. Right before Vietnam, because my dad did not go to Vietnam, and I think I always felt weird about it. He would never talk to me about that, but that's the sense that I got. Did you grow up in Canada for like, the first part of your life or anything? No, but he was. And as you'll find out throughout the course of this episode about the various deferments and exceptions and things, he was a lone breadwinner for a family of one, then two and eventually three in college studying to be a teacher. So he checked a lot of boxes that will get you out of the war. Right. Well, they probably talk to my buddy. Your life is hard enough as it is. Yeah. Maybe that would be a hardship to Ferment, right? Well, I guess it depends, because teachers were something, as we'll learn later in the show, we're very much valued. Oh, yeah. And if you were in college and if you were the breadwinner of a family so he had a few things going in his favor, I guess, if you're looking to not go to war. Yeah. All he had to be was a non US citizen living in the United States from a country with a treaty with the US who was also morally opposed to the war and with a criminal record. That would be about it. He might have been a little too old, actually, too, now that I think about it, he could have been if he was in was it grad school? I think he was in grad school. Yeah, he might have been, because I think it was back then we were talking nam. I think it was 18 to 25 is what it was. Yeah. So, yeah, he could have been beyond that. Yeah. Then all those boxes were checked. I think he probably was. So in case you guys didn't pick up on this yet, we're talking about the draft. That's what it's called in America. But America is far from the only country that's ever had a draft. It's actually a pretty old concept dating back as far I think I've seen as far back as, like, the second century BC. China, I think, the King Dynasty, or Jing how do you pronounce it, with the Q? I think I would have looked that up. How do you spell it? Jing. Q-I-N-G-Q-I-N-G. Well, I think it's Xing. I think So, anyway, one of the dynasties toward the second century BC. China had conscription, and I think just about every civilization with the military said, oh, that's a pretty good idea. Let's try that. So basically, everybody has tried it from time to time, and the US. Has had drafts multiple times. The Civil War. But the north and the south had drafts. In the, I think, the War of 1812, there was even one, the First World War, there was a draft. Second World War. There was a draft. And then most recently, the draft was in Vietnam from 1961 to 1973, I think. Right, yeah. And we'll get to the did you read that New York Times article? No. That I sent? Oh, boy, that was a good one. Well, we'll get to the ins and outs a little bit at the end with that article. But prior to Vietnam, the draft had generally been a sort of roundly accepted kind of good thing to most people. So it really wasn't until Vietnam where we found ourselves with a lot of different social forces meeting up with the war that a lot of people didn't believe in is where we had a sort of our first big backlash against the idea of a draft. The wards is being utterly unpopular almost across the board is where I saw was the big reason why the resistance to the draft first began. Because of Vietnam. Up to that point, wars were generally popular among the majority of Americans. Yeah. And we also need to shout out one Genghis Khan. Or Chinggus. Or Chingis Kahn Kane, because I think we mentioned in that episode that he used to draft, right? Kind of. I think that was more like a joy me or die kind of thing, which I guess that qualifies as conscription. Join me or go to jail. Yeah, it's close, so yeah, you're right. He definitely has that. And he's actually the tie that binds this episode and the next one, too, the one on the Pony Express because he had a fast mail service on horseback, remember? Yeah. And it's probably not fair to say that he had a draft, because you're right. It was more just like, come aboard or I'll have your head. Right. But I did want to mention that there was another movie that we missed. There was a movie not too long ago called Mongol. Oh, yes. Supposedly it was, like a good one with a legitimately good actor in there. Yeah, it was a weird they covered it on the Friendly Fire movie podcast that I listened to, and it's supposedly pretty good. I want to check it out. It was like a weird like a Russian Kazakhstani production that did feature Asian actors only produced by Barratt. I don't know, but it was supposed to be pretty good. I'll check it out. Yeah, I want to see it, too. Is it on Netflix or prime? I don't know about that. Oh, by the way, Chuck, I feel so remiss. Happy Prime Day. Is it Prime Day? Oh, of course. It's Prime Day. How could you not know? I already bought all my stuff. That was some buzz marketing of all time. Yeah. So let's talk about draft. Okay, sure. I think we'll hold, like, the pros and cons to date for later off. Let's just talk about what the draft is in America. How about that? Because I think it bears a pretty strong resemblance to drafts in other countries. Yeah. So in the United States, in our military now, this article is a little outdated, but I believe for this year, our budget is about 1.31 million active duty personnel and about 815,000 reservists. And this is what our volunteer military force looks like. But in certain times, we have a draft. They also call it conscription. And that's when we feel like there's debate on whether or not this will ever happen again. But that's when the president and Congress feels like we need to call up people involuntarily because we need more bodies. Yeah. The standing volunteer force that we have right now is considered more than enough or at least enough for the current peace time. Yeah, if you take the endless wars that aren't technically wars because Congress never declared war out of the equation. They were in peace time. Right. And so these guys, especially with our advancing and they use guys in the gender neutral sense, especially with the advancing technology that's being used in the military now, that's actually a pretty healthy amount of active duty people. But yes, if there were something that happened, say another world war or something, there's a pretty good chance that a draft is going to get started pretty quickly. And for that to happen the government would say, okay, Selective Service System, do your thing and the Selective Service System would kick into action. And this is what I did not know chuck, jimmy Carter is the one who activated the Selective Service System, did you know that? Oh, no way. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, because the last draft was in 1973 and it was just done and then in when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, carter was really on edge about that and in 1981 he just basically activated the Selective Service System. And that's what you were talking about earlier, where you're 18 or the first time you're eligible, between the ages of 18 to 25. You go to your post office, you go to your government website, you go, there's several places you can go and you basically fill out a card saying, I am an 18 year old American citizen or a resident alien or any number of things and it's specifically a man. And here's my info, give me a call if you guys ever run into any trouble. Yeah. And so the SSS, the Selective Service System is who is in charge of basically operating and plugging in the draft and overseeing it if it ever gets reinstated. Right. Ultimately this article does a good job of pointing this out. The Selective Service System is basically just a system of names and addresses kept on file of all American men eligible to be drafted. So basically between the age of 18 and 25. Yeah. So you mentioned women about five or six years ago there was the repeal of the ground combat exclusion and they since then have been working on basically opening up I don't know about all jobs, but I think most or maybe all jobs to women as well as men in the military. But you still despite that, they have not made the change where women have to register with SSS. Yeah, it came pretty close in committee, I think last year and it didn't make it out of committee but it showed like a lot of resolve to that's probably going to change in the next couple of years, I would guess, especially now that women are in combat roles in the military. That was traditionally the excuse for why they were not eligible for Selective Service, but now that they're doing combat roles in the volunteer army or the volunteer military, then it just makes sense that they would be eligible for the draft to you. Yeah. And right now I'm looking at the chart. This print out here has got 123-4567 eight categories where you do not need to. I was about to say turn yourself in. It's pretty and flip where you don't have to register. So if you're a member of the Armed forces on active duty, obviously you don't need to. If you're a cadet and midshipman at service academies or the Coast Guard Academy, you do not need to. If you are student in the Officer procurement program at the Citadel North Georgia College and State University, Norwich, Virginia VMI Texas Am, Virginia Polytech and State University. You don't have to. Right. If you're incarcerated or hospitalized or institutionalized, you do not need to under handicapped physically or mentally. You don't need to if you're continually confined to a residents, hospital or institution. But you do have to, if you were able to function in public with or without assistance. And then the newest, the latest and greatest transgender people category, if you are an individual who were born female and have changed to male, you do not have to. But if you're born male and change your gender to female, you do have to. So that pretty much flies in the face of trans. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I'm not surprised by that. But that seems a little putsy dims to rules right now. So one of the things that stuck out to me, Chuck, was that if you are a citizen of another country living in the United States, you have to register. If you're a male, you have to register for this for Selective Service. But if your country has a treaty with the US that says if you guys ever do the draft or whatever, we don't want our people sucked into that. The US. Will honor that. You still have to go register, but then when they draft you, you get an exemption. But if you do get that exemption, you can never be a citizen of the United States. And if you ever leave the country, you might have trouble getting back in. And it's how the Selective Service puts it. Yeah. Which I would say that means you will definitely have trouble getting back in. Probably. So you said 18 to 25 is the age where you have to register within 30 days of reaching eligibility. So in the case of your 18th birthday, within 30 days of that, or let's say you're in one of the exclusions, like you're in military school but you drop out but you're still 18 to 25, then it's within 30 days of that drop out date. Right. Whether it's 30 days of your 18th birthday or 30 days of the first time you become eligible up to your 26th birthday. Correct. And then if you just say, I don't feel like going today, and you keep putting it off for seven years. When you get to be 26, along the way, you can do it late and they'll say, hey, thanks for coming in. We're going to forgive this. Sure. If you wait until after you're 26 and you never get around to doing it, as it stands on the books, you can be prosecuted for up to five years in prison in a quarter of a million dollars. Fine. Yeah. You can also get that same penalty if you encourage someone not to sign up for selective service. Oh, really? But apparently they are not very big on prosecuting that kind of stuff. And instead, what they tend to do is they withhold federal job opportunities, some state job opportunities, federal Student Aid for College, federal Work training program. If you're a defense contractor or any kind of contractor, you need a security clearance. You can kiss that goodbye. So there's stuff they can do short of finding you $250,000 and putting you in jail for five years, but there are penalties for just not ever filling out this little card. Yeah. And I read, and especially in that Times article, that even during the Vietnam War, famous cases aside, like, let's say Mohammed Ali, which makes a lot of news, they didn't really want people that didn't like you, didn't have to be all gung ho, but they didn't want people that were just miserable about the whole thing. Well. Yeah, I saw that. That was one of the well, we'll talk about it later. That wouldn't make a good soldier. It wouldn't serve anyone. No. So generally, they wanted people who are at least like, all right, well, I'll do this all the way up to, like, sign me up. I want to kill. Right? Should we take a break? Yeah, let's I think that's our cue when I say I want to kill. All right, we'll be right back after this. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated us based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity Theft protection starts here. I saw that the head of Selective Service said basically it would take a Martian invasion to activate the draft again. I think it's how she put it. That's good. So if that happened, if we were invaded by Martians and the draft did start, one of the things that Carter set up in 1981 by activating the Selective Service was it's basically this government bureaucracy that's just waiting to spring into action. And it's kind of like, kept on ice. There's a hundred people working at this agency. They got about $23 million a year in funding, and they just keep it at a ready state. But it's not actually doing what it's designed to do. It's just taking in information, names, addresses, and all that stuff. But if it were ever activated, it'd be like one of those little dinosaur sponges. You put water on it and it grows into a big dinosaur sponge. That's basically what would happen with the SSS. Yeah. Like our article points out, they would kick into what you would call draft mode, and they would conducted national Draft lottery. And back in the Vietnam era, this is a dicey proposition to watch on television what looks like a money lottery, picking numbers. And this is how it goes. It's developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And I assume this is how it would still go today, right? Yeah, this is the current incarnation of the SSS. All right, so computer is going to print out all the dates in the current year in random order. Put those dates and little capsules. So interesting how they do this. They really look more like ping pong balls to me. I know what I'm saying. It looks like you could be a winner, right? Except you're not. But who calls it a capsule? I don't know. Whoever is. Tom Harris. He's old school. Yes. I guess he's weirdo, too. Maybe he's never played ping pong. Then the computer prints out one through 365 for each day of the year in random order. Puts those in ping pong balls. The cap stools containing dates are loaded into one drum. The others are loaded into another drum. They spin that thing. They spin the big wheel. I think it's puffed by air. Oh, is it? I think so, yeah. I was just trying to make it more fun. Like I said, 23 million in funding a year, right? They can afford the air puff. They're being inspected and observed this whole time to make sure everything's going as planned. And then what happens? On TV, okay, so the official who's running the thing and again, they have TV there to make sure that this is documented and above the boards and all that stuff. And when the official pulls out the ball or the capsule I'm sorry, from one machine and then a capsule from another machine, and they read them out loud. So, for example, the number from the one machine with all the dates of the year in it says April 22, and the other machine has 365 or 66 if it's a leap year. And that says number 42. And that means that every male who is eligible for the draft that turns 20 on April 22 of that year will be in the 42nd group to receive their draft notices. Yeah, they start I guess the ideal age that they feel is fair is 20 years old. Right. So that's where they start with the draft, because, again, remember, it's between 18 and 25 you're eligible. But yeah, they start with the 20 year olds, and then they do this. So over and over again, for all 365 or 66 days of the year, they pair a date of that year with a number, and that's the people whose 20th birthday falls on that year are the ones who get that number. They're in that number group. So if January 15 was number one, then anybody born on January 15 would be the first to get the draft notices. And when they're doing this, they're probably calling up enough people that multiple groups say groups one through 150 are all going to get draft notices right out of the gate. But then Congress and the President ask for a specific number of troops. And then once they reach that number, the draft notices stop getting sent out. And then if they say, well, we need more people, they'll start going back to the sequence of call is what it's called. And then they go to the next group in the next group or the next group, until they keep fulfilling these numbers. And then when they run out of 20 year olds, then they go to other age groups. Yeah, they move up from that point to 21. And let's just say they keep needing people. It would go 21 through 25. Then if they run out of 25 year olds, A, that means we're in big trouble as a country. The Martians are winning. Then they hop back to age 19. And then if the most dire circumstance comes around, then they hop back finally to 18 year olds. Yes. All of our 18 to 25 year olds have just been gone through in the military, basically, is what just happened. If they go get down to the 18 year olds. Yeah. So then if your name is called, you are sent to your report, I guess, to a regional military entrance processing station. And I'm sure they call it something different, like they have some cute short name for it. And this one is a Remax. I'll bet it's Remaps. You think maybe, you know, my brother in law is in the Marines. It's astounding. How many what are those called? Not contractions, but acronyms. Acronyms? Oh, yeah, for everything. It's unbelievable. They hate saying whole words in the military. Well, it's like another language. And then when he's talking to me, he'll say the acronym and then the real thing. But he can't help but say the acronym. Well, sure. Do you ever point out like how much time he just wasted saying both? Yeah, I do that all the time. He loves it, sir. So then they report to this Remapp or Remapp. Now it would be REM apps. You undergo your physical, your psych evaluation, your mental and moral evaluation, and the doctor says you can either keep going forward or hey, you're wealthy and you have bone spurs, so maybe we'll hold you out. You really wanted a bigger response on that one, huh? I don't know. I don't know what I want anymore. But if you are fit for service, then you have ten days. From that point, if you want to file an exemption, a claim for exemption or postponement or deferment. Right. And then from that point forward, if you want a special classification, then you go through that whole process. Yeah. So one of the other things that the Selective Service System does is it's bringing in all the people who are eligible for the draft and making sure they get evaluated to see if they're fit for service. And then it's also handling and administering the exemption and postponement and deferment process too. It's like two separate streams. It's one stream and then it breaks into two streams. One stream goes into the military, the other one gets sorted out, right? Yes. So if you're say like a high school student or something like that, and you file that ten day claim for exemption or whatever, you'll just send in a piece of paper, maybe something from your high school that says, no, Josh is still in high school, so he shouldn't be going into the draft. And they will say, here's your exemption. Kid actually 20, he's in high school. Don't ask. That would be right. Don't ask, don't tell. That would be a postponement, I think is what that would be. Because they're saying, Great, finish high school, we'll see you right after. Yeah, if you're ready right then and you're fit for service, you're classified as one A, right. Something you heard a lot about in the Vietnam era. If you get picked and you are one A, you're getting shipped out pretty quickly, right? Exactly. Like, you would go home, they would send you your letter and probably in the letter they would tell you where to report. Yeah. So high school is covered. If you're a college student, you can postpone for the remainder of that year, or if you're a freshman, that's if you're a senior, if you're a freshman, sophomore or junior, you can postpone till the end of the semester. Yep. There's an exemption for religious ministers and people studying to become ministers and recognized religions. I thought they needed the father mokahes. Yeah. I think you ask for a deferment if they find that you're one a even if you're any of these, I think they will just take you regardless. Sure. But if you say, Actually, I'm a religious minister, I don't feel comfortable about this. You can get a deferment like that. But if your Father Mokey and you're like, I'm a religious minister. Kill. They'll say, Come on in, or counsel the men who kill. Kill. Sure. Father Moko. He was a good character, wasn't he? He's a good dude. One of my favorites on Mash, actually. Weirdly. Yeah, because he's just such a side character. But I liked him, now that I think about it out loud. Yeah, me, too. I watched Barney Miller last night for the first time forever. If you want to see a TV show, like a bona fide TV show, where there's a script and actors and they've all rehearsed and there's, like a plot and there's jokes and all that stuff, and a laugh track. A laugh track, too, watch Bonnie Miller and you will be it's wonderful. Yeah. Which is to say, it was like every other show on TV at the time. At the time. Tried to find one of those. Now you can't do it. Well, I mean, they're on, but you probably just don't watch sitcoms anymore. I guess they are, aren't they? I'm told. Yeah. Well, anyway, Barney Miller holds up, and maybe it's even better than ever. Yeah. That was a great show. Who are the side guys? Well, there's fish able to fish. Hojon. Wojo. Wojo hojon. I'm aware. I came up with that. You're thinking a little, John. Yes. And then who was the other guy? There was Chano. Yeah. I can't remember the Asian guy's name. That was Wojohn, right? No, he was like the young kind of like, bachelor dude with the terrible haircut. Oh, yeah. He was probably like Wojjakowski or something. Yeah, that's exactly what his name was. Okay. Yeah. And then the Asian man I can't remember what his name was, but he was such a great character. They would reference him when he wasn't even in the episode. They'd talk about him. That's a good character. And then Ron Glass. I can't remember. Ron Glass. What the name of the detective Ron Glass played was, but great television show still. And maybe the best television theme song of all time, too. Oh, yeah, I love that one. If I'm not mistaken. Didn't it have a slap base in it? Oh, yeah. Do you want to do it? Ron Harris. Ron glass played ron Harris. Okay. And Nick Yamana was the character's name. Okay. And who played nic yamana. Jack sue. Okay. Cool, man. Great. How. Linden. Man, what a classic. Where are you watching that? Where? Yeah. You mean what station? There's something called antenna TV. It's all awesome reruns. There's something else called cozy C-O-V-I TV. They basically do the same thing, and you'll find them in the non HD channels a little further down the dial, but they're good. And now they each owe me a $20 Target gift card. That's a hot tip. So back to the draft. Oh, yeah, we got off track with Father Mokey. So if you have dependents, like I was saying, like my father with a family of two or three, if you are a government official, like if you're a judge, which would be unusual, that young, but any kind of elected official governor would be a young mayor. State legislature. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of I'll bet that rankles a lot of people, because those are the very people who are sending the military into war. Yeah, I guess the idea of a 24 year old mayor who gets a deferment wouldn't go over super well in times of war. Yeah, I guess not. And then finally we'll get into this pretty in depth but conscientious objectors, which is a whole ball of wax right there, but that is when you hold religious or moral beliefs, then you can well, I guess we should go ahead and get into it, huh? Well, do you want to take a break and then get into it, or you want to get into it and then take a break? It's your choice, buddy. Let's get into it, then take a break. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So do you remember our Pacifism episode? I do. That was a great one. And I know for a fact that we talked about conscientious objectors in that as well. But if you are drafted and here's the thing again, you still have to register for selective service. If they ever initiate the draft, you will still get a draft notice, and then you'll report to the regional center. The remaps, right? Yeah, a remaps. And you will say to them, I am morally opposed to war. And they'll say, this war, which is a trick question. And you say, no, all war. And they'll go, okay, well, that's a bird of a different feather. Let's get this thing started. So you have ten days to file this claim for exemption, and then that's going to kick off, basically an interview process by the local board. These local boards are another thing that gets activated by the SS being activated itself. There's five civilians who sit on the local board, and each local board serves X number of kids in an area. Yeah, those are volunteers, it should be pointed out. And they're there to hear special cases to decide whether or not you get that exemption for things like a hardship, like if you're a father sole breadwinner kind of thing, or if you're a conscientious objector and with a conscientious objector. Specifically, they're going to ask you, well, which kind are you? Are you opposed to carrying a gun and shooting at people on the front lines? Are you opposed to combat or are you opposed to being in the military at all? And there's actually two classifications for that. Yes, at this point they have called you down like certain things like high school or maybe if you have a family of six, they can just go ahead and rubber stamp you, but you're going to get called down there in person and you'll want to as an objector. And the two classifications that you mention is, one AO if you're morally opposed to serving in combat or 10 and this is if you are saying, I don't want to be in the military, I don't want to be a chef, I don't want to be a cook, I don't want to be a priest or deliver mail or write for the newspaper. I don't want to write for the Stars and Stripes. Is that what it was called? Is that still around? Probably. I know Voice of America is is that the current main rag? It may be different. Well, they're everywhere. They're like big time media outlet for the military. Good one. Each branch has their own rag, too. Well, the Stars and Stripes. That's what Matthew Modine was the writer for. And Jackie Great photographer though, right? No, he walked around with the photographer. He was the reporter. Got you. All right. So in the draft, if you are classified as one AO, which is morally opposed to combat only then they will probably try to still assign you to some sort of service like we were talking about, like in the mail room or whatever. There's plenty of stuff you can do besides being on the front line in the military. Plenty huge machine that has a lot of different parts to it. So yeah, they will definitely find a spot for you if you're morally opposed to serving the military, if you're saying like, I'm totally opposed to war, I don't agree with what you're doing. I don't agree with any war whatsoever. So I don't want to help out in any way, shape or form, let's say, okay, you still have to serve. You're still going to have a tour of duty. Just like anybody who is one A and goes into the military to serve. In the draft, you're going to have a tour of duty too. But instead they will assign you to basically what's called the alternative Service program, where you contribute to the country for X number of years, like in healthcare or in conservation is another big one too, where they basically just put you to work to keep the country, make it better. Yeah. And like you said before, it has to be opposed to all war and it can't be because of political beliefs, right. So it has to be based on moral or ethical or religious beliefs. You can't just say, hey, man, if there was a 911, I'd be down. But I don't like this jerk who's in office, and I don't agree with their politics, so I'm not into this war. They'll say, Sorry, that doesn't really count. I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Well, at any rate, you have to appear, explain all this stuff. You might want to bring in some friends. You might want them to ask or to maybe write something for you ahead of time. You will probably want to demonstrate through historical evidence that you have always felt this way. Like, look, here's me at a peace rally nine years ago, eight years ago, and seven years ago. You want to really build up your case that this is something I've lived with my whole life, right? I'm a Quaker. And see, here are my Quaker friends telling you that I'm a Quaker. Here's my funny hat and belt buckle shoes. Did you start eating handfuls of dry oats during the interview to prove you're a Quaker? You might get a different reclassification. So you're doing all this stuff to build your case. If they deny you, you can appeal the decision. So it's not like the final word, but I don't know how many appeals you get. My guess would be one. Yeah, and I'm not even sure if you necessarily get one, but ideally, this board of citizens are going to say, this guy actually is morally opposed to war, and then not say, But I'm not, and I don't think he should be. So he's going to go anyway, right? They're supposed to just say, is this person morally opposed to Ward? Do you buy that? Yes. Okay, then they should get this deferment. But this is set up so that if they say, there's a place for you to serve your country even if you don't believe in war or even helping a war effort got you. You want to take that break now? Let's do it. Okay. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft. A dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses, but everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock. Identity theft protection starts here. All right, Chuck, so I think this is a really, really controversial topic, the idea of a draft, and I think it would be far more controversial if it looked like it might be coming down the pike at any given point. Yeah, but there's a lot of reasons that people point to that. They say what we have now is totally awesome. For one, what we have now, again, and we have had since 1973, is an all volunteer force, which means that every single person who is in the military, in any branch of the military in the United States, is there on their own volition. No one's forcing them to. Even if a judge said either join the army or go to jail, they still had a choice. So that makes it what's called a professional volunteer army, where they get paid, they submit themselves to serious training, and they are about as good a soldier as you will expect to find in the world. That's the current state of our military. And they say, this is plenty, we're doing fine with this. We don't need any kind of draft, so why would you even bring that up? And there's a lot of people who say, well, there's some real pros to having a conscription. Yeah, I mean, that article you sent, some of the pros were as follows promoting national unity. And all of these are subject to opinion, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a debate. It's a controversial topic. Yeah. It maintains an active military force, obviously. That's kind of inarguable. It ensures high levels of participation in government. This makes a little bit of sense. You'll probably pay a lot more attention to what's going on if faced with the threat or I don't know if that's the right word, but if faced with the prospects of a draft, that to me, is probably the best argument for a draft. It's saying, like, if you are possibly going to get drafted and go to war just by being born as a citizen of this country, you're expected to be part of the military at some point in your life. You're going to pay a lot more attention to what the US. Is doing around the world with its military, and you're probably going to stand up and make your voice heard. If you disagree with what the US. Is doing with the military, that definitely makes sense in some ways. But at the same time, that argument, what you just said, is it's for proponents of conscription, of a draft. But you can also make the opposite case, too, that people have said, well, when we had a draft before, we prosecuted at least one, by definition, unjust war, the Vietnam War, and it was prosecuted by Johnson and Nixon, and they just kept sending wave after wave of American soldiers into harm's way. And some historians and some political scientists say they might not have done that had they not known that there was a virtually unlimited pool of soldiers that they could just send into Southeast Asia over and over again and that we wouldn't be prosecuting wars that way. Okay, I'm sorry. So the 27 years before 1973, we were engaged in 19 overseas military operations. Between 1973 and 2012, we had 144. And so a lot of people say, no, man, if you have a professional army, they're divorced from society. They're basically like, here, military, go handle this. Like, we don't like these people anymore. We want that oil. Go do this. What do we pay you for? Go do it. And the people who are doing this have never been in the military, haven't been exposed to military life, and hence maybe a little more insucint about sending the military in to other countries using a military option. So it's like two of the best reasons for or against conscription, but they totally contradict each other. And it's just fascinating to me that you can have something that's just that ambivalent or ambiguous. I mean yeah, right. Yeah, I know what you mean. Some of the cons I mean, the cons are all pretty obvious. It violates someone's free will. It may keep you from going to college, puts lives at risk for young people. This one compromises the quality of military service. That's one that's a big con to me is you're getting sometimes people in there that aren't cut out for that and couldn't find a way and didn't have the wealthy father or the shady doctor to get you out of it. That is a big one, especially if you're one of those people who points to the American military and say is, we've never had a better this is the best version of the US. Military in the history of the country, but let's dilute it with millions of conscripts who don't want to be there, who we have to spend an inordinate amount of time training and sending out to the front lines basically as bodies. That's a terrible idea. It dilutes the professionalism of the military. Yeah, for sure. That's another one that's got two all of these have two pretty clear sides to every point. Yeah, I agree. And then I think the other thing I've seen, too, is this is not like a huge hot debate right now in military and political science quarters, but it is currently debated. It's just the people who are against conscription are not worried about this at all. It's just not going to happen anytime soon. Right, yeah, there's just no reason for it to happen. But the people who are in favor of it are being accused of this being a backdoor way of changing America's interventionist, military usage, that they're basically saying, let's get a draft going. And then people wake up and say, oh, we shouldn't be using the military like this. And that's their real aim. Which I guess trying to change strategy by introducing conscripts. It's a way to go, I suppose. Yeah, it is interesting to just be like, to learn about something that you have no ideas being discussed or talked about, and then when you start looking in, it's like, oh, there's even stuff below the surface. They're talking about grand military strategy, really, not just whether people should serve their country or not, which is another pro that it creates a unified sentiment among Americans or any country. There are plenty of countries out there who do this. North Korea, you're conscripted for ten years as a man, and I think six years as a woman. There's a sense of, like, I was in the military too. Where did you serve? I served here. Oh, really? Did you know this guy? There's that common ground, and there's also that mixing of all different Americans to where you're meeting with them and living with them one on one, and you're forming a bond, a kinship, just through being in the military, that if everyone has to go through that, it will create like, this kind of sense of national unity that America is lacking right now. That was another pro that I saw. Very interesting. I'm all out of pros and cons, Chuck. Well, I read this New York Times article that was really interesting, talking about Vietnam and then the Cold War and how that complicated things. And since World War II, I think the selective service was operated by General Louis B. Hershey. And like I said earlier, it didn't face a lot of criticism until Vietnam. And that's when things got really hinky because a lot of people were against the war. And B, it became pretty clear even though the Department of Defense didn't keep records on socioeconomic status beyond like, are you white or are you African American? It was pretty clear that if you were white and middle class and up, you had a much higher chances of getting a deferment. So the Cold War complicated things further because it wasn't a war war, and it became really clear that we needed to like it was all about the space race or the military race with the Soviets. So all of a sudden, Hershey said he didn't say this out loud, but he said, you know what, I'm going to use this, as they called it. We could be the storekeeper of America's manpower supply. And basically it's up to us how to tell these young men what lives they're going to live. Let's forget the military for a second. They needed a big supply of men in Stem fields to develop weapons and science and everything to keep up with the Soviets. So all of a sudden, the deferments, they started channeling these middle class aged or college educated white men into what they called manpower channeling into all of these other areas of study and research and design and manufacturing. So it was just a really interesting time. So all of a sudden, during World War II, if you are a factory worker or an agricultural worker, you might get a deferment, and chances are pretty good that you might because you're really needed after that, if you had a farm or you worked in a factory, you were out of luck because you weren't like, into physics or other Stem fields or in the medical field. So by 1965, all these middle class white men expected deferments, which is really interesting. And then you had Robert McNamara, secretary of Defense. He started using what they call he wanted to get basically black men out of what he called squalid ghettos of their own external environment and into the internal and more destructive ghetto of personal disillusionment and despair. So basically his idea was we have all these black men in this country that would do much better in life if we put them in the military. Wait, hold on. So this is just this one guy deciding this? Well, I mean, I'm sure it went through channels, but Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, was very powerful. Okay, I thought this was hershey. This is McNamara who took it over at this point. Yeah, this is McNamara who created what was called the new standards model. Okay, so these men, they were called new standards men who were otherwise ineligible for military service all of a sudden were eligible. So he started had basically 354,000 of these men between 66 and 77 who were not previously eligible under the new standards program were. And 40% of these men were black. And this is when the military was about 9% African American. So he basically was saying a stint in the military as a new standard soldier is much better. It will make you a better husband, better father, a better breadwinner, ultimately in a better citizen. And you are basically an infantryman in Vietnam all of a sudden when you previously would not have even been in the war. So this ran for five years. And like I said, 354,000 men ended up on the front lines of Vietnam and had a decent chance of dying. Yeah, I saw that. I think like 25% of the troops in Vietnam were draftes, but draftees made up like 30.4% of the casualties in Vietnam. Which goes to kind of point out, like, if you have somebody there who's not like, yes, I want to be a soldier, teach me how to be a soldier. But they're there against their will. There's a really good likelihood that after just six months of training, they're going to go out there and get killed, which is a big mark against conscription in just about anybody's mind. Yeah. That's crazy man, McNamara, he was did you ever see Fog of War? Oh, yeah. Did you buy that it dawned on him what he had done or what he was really responsible for, like, there on camera, or was he just putting on a show? I don't know. You know what I'm talking about, where he kind of breaks down toward the end and it seems like it's an Arrow Morris flick, right? Yeah. Very compelling. Like, it sort of lulls you in to some great insider information. It's definitely worth watching. It's just basically like an interview with Robert McNamara, and in it, errol, Morris basically leads him to the conclusion that he really was responsible for a lot of unnecessary death because of the Vietnam War and how he prosecuted it as Defense Secretary. Yeah. And I kind of mangled that Oped in the Times, but it's called and you should read this out there in podcast, Lane. It's called how the Draft Reshaped America by Amy J. Ruttenberg from October of last year. And she does a much better job than I just did. I'll check it out, too. I'm so ashamed that I didn't read something in Prep. Don't be. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, everybody, that was the draft, and if you want to know more about it, go type in Draft in the search bar@housestephers.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. And we didn't get into stuff like the fact that Elvis was drafted and weird things like that happened back then. Well, yeah, and, I mean, that was the demonstration for how everybody is supposedly eligible for the draft, even though that's not really how it's always worked out. Yeah, I think we talked about that in Pacifism, too. Yeah. All right, I'm going to call this cute kid email from Scotland. Nice. And this is from Noah in Scotland. Noah. Noah's writing in again, remember? Did he write in before? Oh, yeah, noah has written in plenty. Okay. Yeah. Hey, Noah. Well, Noah and his mom added a little postscript. Dear Josh and Chuck, I'm using my mama's email address again. She's helping me type and she's helping me type. But in getting Better, my next email will be typed just by me. Wow. I really liked your Skyscrapers episode and wanted to tell you a cool fact. The Shanghai Tower in China is 128 levels high. It's my favorite tower because I think it's engineering is the best, and it's the thing second highest one. And she said she just typed exactly as he said it's. Damper is my favorite part. It's a new type called a tuned mass damper. This stops it from going too far to one side by using 125 super strong magnets. The thing my mama likes is that the big empty space they need for the damper means the sound is good. And there's a musical in there. I got Mama to put on a diagram of how it works from a magazine called Popular Mechanics. I'm six now. Wow. And on my summer holidays, when my cousins come around and are being too noisy, I go to my room and listen to your next episode or my new Roll Doll audiobooks. Nice. You're still funny, but sometimes I don't know what you're talking about. Love from Noah in Scotland. And then from mom. Rachel she said. Noah's mom here. I hope this makes sense. Tried to type it verbatim. When your six year old's knowledge of physics vastly outreaches your own, it's time to call in the big guns. Have we read one from Noah before? Yes. I can't remember what he wrote in about, but yeah, he wrote in back when he was five. Maybe four, but definitely five. Yeah, he's written in and mom typed it verbatim then, too, and then kind of added a little pigeon saying virtually the same thing. I hope this made sense. All right, well, Noah, we will read one of your emails a year until we stop. Or until you stop listening. No. Is the new Sarah the amazing eleven year old fan? Let's try too. Is she 21 now? Yes. She should be coming back into the fold again soon. Yeah, we lose them in high school and then get them back as grown up. That's the idea. Yeah. Well, anyway, Noah and your mom, thank you very much for writing in. And if you want to get in touch with me or Chuck or Jerry, you can go to stuffiesto.com and check out all of our social media links. And also you can send us an email directly to stuffpodcast@housestuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgara and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandtalopets.com." | |
How the Space Race Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-space-race-worked | In the 1950s and 60s, the United States and the Soviet Union battled it out to see who would dominate the race for outer space. The Soviets got out to an early lead, but the U.S. would ultimately win. Learn all about the Space Race in this week's episode. | In the 1950s and 60s, the United States and the Soviet Union battled it out to see who would dominate the race for outer space. The Soviets got out to an early lead, but the U.S. would ultimately win. Learn all about the Space Race in this week's episode. | Thu, 05 Jun 2014 13:46:34 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=13, tm_min=46, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=156, tm_isdst=0) | 54473533 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles. Debbie, chuck Bryant. There's Jerry laughing at me. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. That's right. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, friends. That was one of the best false starts we've ever had. It was like four in one. That was weird. Jerry hit record and Josh went chuck. That was a false start, going to welcome people to the podcast. I forgot. Hey, man, your shirt is taking me back, man. Oh, yeah. It's taken me back to July 21, 969, exactly five years and 360 days before my birth. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I just calculated that really quickly. Yeah, that was pre Chuck as well, believe it or not. No, I was born in the know. Is it 70 or 71? 71. Nice. It's a nice round number, 71. I do remember all the space race stuff, though, from Being young. Yeah, I remember the tail end, obviously, for sure. Well, we'd already won when I was around. Yeah, we kind of already won since I was around, but it was still, like, a big deal. It's still doing the victory lapse, basically. Yeah. When I was around, it was space shuttle. Space shuttle. Space shuttle. And as an adult, I've now seen two of the space shuttles in person launches, or just, like, in the hangar. Decommissioned ones in the hangar. That's pretty cool. Those things are huge. Very cool. Yeah, they're really neat. I never seen one. You definitely should. There's one at the new Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. Okay. I think it's Enterprise. Maybe. Or Endeavor. And then you can also see one at Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center, which I highly recommend to anyone who's even remotely interested in space exploration or the history of space. Kennedy is the place to go. It is awesome. I've been to and can recommend the Naval Air Station Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Okay. And I've been to Huntsville. Have you been to Space camp? No. Oh, man. That's where Space Camp is, right? Huntsville? I think so. I don't know if it's did you just get outside the chain link fence and look inside? Yeah, that movie did all the privileged kids that got together. That movie was big. I never saw it. Yes. I mean, I was at the right age. Where a movie about kids in space was kind of perfect. So what's, at Huntsville then? Is it like just like the rocket place? That's where they did the original stuff, right? I think Huntsville is before Kennedy. We should know this stuff. I think it was in conjunction with it, if not before, but yes. So it was a space center, and I think it still is. Marshall is in Huntsville. It's getting off to a great start. Anyway. You like space. I like space. We're not like space junkies or anything like that. We don't like intravenously inject space. No. Like Tom Hanks. Right. We never produced a miniseries about it or anything like that. But it's an interesting thing. I think after researching how the space race worked, it occurred to me that there's at least two other episodes that we should do the moon landing work. Did they fake the moon landing? Which was a pretty good one. Yeah, that's old. But we should do one, like, assuming that it actually happened, which it did. And then the International Space Station, or just space stations in general. Like the history of Skylab mirror the ISS. Totally should. Okay, so we'll do those people. We have committed ourselves, like John Kennedy committed America to put a man on the moon by the end of the 60s. So we're going to do our podcast on space stations. Yeah. So, like I said, you took me back to July 20, 1969. Yeah. Let's take everybody back. Do you want to get in the way back machine? Oh, man. Yeah, blow the dust off this thing. Did you leave, like, a half eaten cheeseburger in here? Something is funky. Yeah, I thought that might keep. It's not keeping very well. Sorry. There's a mongoose in here. We can just go back in time to when that burger was fresh. Oh, good thinking. Were you sure with me? You obviously only wanted half. Well, that's why we all know we're kidding, because Chuck didn't leave behind a half burger. Silly. Okay, so, Chuck, here we are, I assume. Yeah, it's July 20, 1969. Sweet. And we're going to listen in as you and I do a dramatic reading of the transmission between Mission Control and the lunar landing module. I'll be Mission Control. And I'll be Eagle. 30 seconds. Imprint of fuel remaining. Contact light. Okay, engine stop. The sentenger command override off. We copy you down, Eagle. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot, Smellertime. Yeah, it is. We're all wearing short sleeve shirts with ties. We're all cool under pressure. We got flat tops, and a lot of people don't know. I didn't know, actually, until I read this. That when the landing module for Apollo Eleven, the first time humans stepped foot on the moon that we know of, there was a really tense moment where they were about to run out of fuel as they were trying to land. That's what that 30 seconds thing was from. And had they run out of fuel, all two astronauts aboard who landed would have died. Yeah. I mean, they basically had to do it manually. Yeah. They took over. That's why they had, as Tom Wolfe put it, the right stuff. Great book. Great movie. I've never read the book, but the movie is amazing. So good. If you're out there and well, if you're a fan of space, then you've seen The Right Stuff. That just reminded me. Remember when I told you about garbage pail stew? Yeah. So I guess it must have been for my dad's birthday or something. My family rented the right stuff. And we made garbage pails too. That was part of the thing? Yeah. Every year? No, just once. Yeah, we didn't like my dad that much. Yeah. We got a listener mail from someone in Michigan that did the garbage can. Awesome. I did not see that one, so it must have been a Midwestern thing. Okay, good. So I'm not insane and neither is my father. No, but see, the right stuff, people. Really great movie. It is. It encapsulates the Mercury program and the Mercury Seven and plus Levon helmets in it. Is that right? Yes. Great. Who did you play? He was not one of the Mercury Seven. He got cut. You're cut. No. I don't think he was even an astronaut training. I think he was just part of the support military crew. I can't remember exactly. It's been a while. Yeah. That's an odd cameo. It wasn't a cameo. It was a genuine part. Right. But I mean, like, why Levon Helm? He acts oh, I didn't know that. Yes. He was in Coal. Miner's daughter and stuff. And he was in that Marquee Mark movie a couple of years ago. Shooter. Shooter. Sniper. Sniper. Okay. Are we done? Yeah. All right. Be. We got way off. Anyway, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, buzz Aldrin was close on his heels. That ended effectively more than a decade of what was known as the space race. Yeah. Very exciting time in the United States. People were way into it. Yeah. It was like people cared. Yeah. It was like how the voice is viewed now. Boy, that's sad. I guess I've never seen that show, if it really happens. So the space race was this kind of this we should define it. It was this Cold War by product of the tensions between the US. And the USSR, which were competing for utter dominance over the world one way or another. Yeah. And out of that quest for dominance came an uneasy balance of polarization, and you're either with one side or against them. There was very few neutral states, and from this came kind of just a constant challenge. Each country drove the other to try to advance technologically economically in just every single way. It was kind of a really fruitful time, especially if you are into the whole military industrial complex gig. But from this competition, we reached the moon. The Soviets ended up building mere space station. Like, everything we know about space came out of this race, this tension between the US. And the USSR. Yes. And it's pretty neat. Like, the early space programs, it was all brand new. So it wasn't like, let's see how much work we can get done up there. Let's see if we can get up there. Let's see if this guy won't die if we shoot them up there. Yeah. And it was like logical steps. Like, can we put a chip up there? Can we put a ship with a jump? Can we put a ship with a human? Can we put two humans? How long can they stay right? Can they dock with other ships and meet other astronauts? Can we actually trick them into drinking tanks? Yeah, exactly. And then eventually we feel like, we can get up there. Now we need to start accomplishing some things besides just getting up here. That's right. And they brought back lunar rocks and things. Don't get me wrong, they had goals aside from hitting a golf ball on the moon, but I just find it really remarkable that it's in logical that it was all just a series of steps. And each time we try to one up one another, it was progress for the world. Yeah, exactly. For mankind. And it's really difficult to overstate the effect that that rivalry had. I mean, we'll kind of see that if one achieves something, the other one is like, we've got a top you somehow by ten fold. Yeah. You send the man, we send woman. Right. Yeah. That was a good one. Everyone was trying to get a first in there. Exactly. I thought you were doing Sean Connery doing the right October. No, they bring a knife, you bring a gun. No, if you thought that was my Irish accent, then I'm worse than I thought. Maybe I just am not hearing right. Okay, so the space race put us into space. Everything we now understand and know and have in space and a lot of stuff on Earth is directly related to the space race. And the space race we traced back to the Nazis. Yeah. It's funny, the space race between the US. And Russia, but it was really Germany that kind of started everything. During World War II, Nazi Germany had a world class rocket program led by a guy named Werner von Braun. Yeah. And von Braun, at some point during World War II, I guess, saw the writing on the wall. He came up with the V Two rocket, which was the scourge of Britain. Yes. It was the first ballistic missile. And ballistic missile means it's not steered. It's fired on a trajectory and then just regular forces of nature and mechanics run the show, as opposed to a cruise missile, which is steered, but it could hit London from a launch pad around the Baltic Sea if they did their calculations, correct? Right. Yeah. So von Braun had developed the V Two rocket, and at some point during World War II, I guess he saw the writing on the wall that and he lost faith that the Germans were going to win. So he got together some of his fellow rocket scientists, literal rocket scientists, and said, hey, let's surrender to the Americans. I'll bet you if we come to them and bring some knowledge and schematics and stuff, that they'll just totally ignore the whole Nazi thing. And they were right. And Hitler pouted and died. Yeah. And then we got these dudes, Van Braun in particular, and took them to White Sands, New Mexico, and said, you now work for us. And they said, great, because you guys got better food and cool cars, hot women. Yes. There's, like, everything you need in New Mexico, land of plenty. You ever been to White Sands? No, I haven't. It's pretty cool. Van Nostril no, he went to the Trinity testing site. Not White Sands. No, I don't think so. No. White sands. Relocated to Huntsville, though. In Marshall, right. Yes. So I was right by calling it Marshall. Yes. Marshall Space Flight Center. So the Soviets did the same thing. They poached a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists and created their own program under the leadership of a very talented and apt Russian named Sergei Korolev. Yeah. And so basically, it was von Braun versus Korolev. Teams of Nazi scientists working in the USSR and the USA, working with, obviously, American colleagues, Soviet colleagues. Germany is like, what about our space program? They were like, you're lucky we even let you have a flag right now. And that was the start of the space race. That's incorrect. There was a program developed, a rocket program developed, another rocket program developed. And at the time, both of these nascent US. And Soviet rocket programs, they were designed to blow each other up. But at some point, the scientists said, hey, how about rather than pointing them over Earth, how about up? Let's shoot these things up and see what we can do. Yes. Like maybe carry a satellite into outer space. Eisenhower and this is jumping ahead a little bit. He also had the foresight to say, you know what? Space is fun and all, but we can use this for military purposes. So he started a couple of national security programs, one for the military potential of using these rockets, and the other one with the CIA to say it was called the National Reconnaissance Office. And that was secret until the 90s. Yeah. Is this still around? I don't think so. It's codenamed Corona. And that was Eisenhower saying, well, if we can get satellites up there, maybe we can start spying on the Russians with these satellites. I was kind of surprised to learn that intelligence was behind some of this that early on. Yeah. So the beginning, what's called 1957, it was the International Geophysical Year, and that was when a bunch of scientists got together and said, hey, let's get together from all over the world and let's all put our heads together to do some serious studying of our planet. Is that that neat? Yes, super neat. They said, okay, well, we've got these governments, these incredibly powerful governments behind us. Let's see if we can use it for some good. Like, yes, we'll create their spy satellites and whatnot, but let's also see if we can funnel some of that funding toward space exploration, putting satellites into orbit. Let's see what we can do. And they did. And as a result, both the United States and the USSR, as a result of this International Geophysical Year, said, we're going to be the first to launch a satellite in the orbit. And the race was on. That was the beginning. What was that? 1957. That's right. And one thing is clear, if you know anything about the space race, is that the US. Was getting your butts kicked in the early part of that game. Yeah. Like, if this is a four quarter game, I would say at the half time, they were probably losing about the half somewhere and a half, they started to come back and maybe change momentum around the half. Okay. They have definitely lost all of the first quarter. Okay. But if this is basketball, they had to run late in the second quarter, maybe, to get the fans fired up. Yes. Okay. Exactly. The Soviets definitely were winning early, though, with their Sputnik One, which means traveler in Russian, and they launched that on October 4, 1957. So they were the first ones to launch a satellite in this space. That's right. They scored that first point. They did. It was a big one. Well, it's a big one. They seem to want to do things a little more robustly than Americans. Americans seem to be a little more conservative. Like, with how many rockets can we put on, how fast can it go? How should the payload be? And the Russians were pushing the boundaries a little sorry, the Soviets, but they were Russians. Yeah. Rusk keys. Yeah. But they had a payload much larger than the Americans were willing to try. Right. But we weren't too far behind. About four months later, on January 31, 1958, we launched our Explorer One. Right. And actually we launched Explorer, which is finally attached to a Juno rocket, which is von Braun's design. And the reason we didn't launch them first was because for some reason, america had decided to go with a different rocket design and ignored von Braun. Oh, really? Yeah. And space experts, historians say we most likely would have gotten one up there before the Soviets had we just stuck with von Braun's design. Because it would have been ready earlier. And it proved that it could have worked. So we could have beaten them, but we didn't. And that's actually the first points scored by the Soviets. So after that, it was like, okay, well, what's next? What's the next logical step from there? Start NASA. Yeah, I guess so. We need a bureaucracy here. Yeah. In 1958, Congress passed the Space Act, and that's what created NASA and the Soviets created their space program. Russ Cosmos and said, let's do this in earnest. Let's do this. And it's pretty interesting. We're going to go over some of the differences here. It's interesting to see this early, some of the different approaches, just some of the basic approaches to what each nation thought was the way to go. Yeah. So here's one of them. The Soviet rockets, like I said, were more powerful. So right off the bat, they were using more juice. Right. The Soviets were using what are called Vostok rockets early on in the beginning of their program. And the Americans were using Redstone and Atlas rockets. Yeah. And this is when we started the Mercury program. Like we referenced in the right stuff. The Mercury Seven. Scott Carpenter heroes gordo Cooper, john Glenn gus grissom Waleshira alan Shepard and Deek Slayton. Those were some brave, like, they would be the guys today that are wearing, like, those wingsuits and jumping off mountains. They were the early what do you call those? Thrill seekers. What's the word form. Thrill seeker. Okay. Early throw seekers. No, extreme. That's what I was looking for. Oh, mountain Dew. Code Red. Mountain Dew. Go ahead. So I was going to say you can kind of like the programs were started and finished roughly at around the same time. So you have the Mercury program going on in America initially, and at the same time, the Soviets are carrying out their Vostok program. Vostok. Okay. So another difference is that the Soviets were like everything that they did, super secret about it all. And it was tough to you couldn't turn on the TV and get a lot of information about the cosmonaut of the month, which, by the way, I was like, how do you pronounce that in Russian? And apparently it's very close. It's kazumanoth. Oh, really? Yeah. What sounds Russian? I was curious about the word not as a suffix. And apparently that came from the Greek for sailor. Yeah, like nautical. So they're space sailors, essentially. Don't you think it would radically alter our view of space and the International Space Station and everything if everyone were called cosmonauts or astronauts? You basically took away any kind of national or ethnic identity once you got out in space. Like, everybody was an astronaut. Oh, yeah. I thought you were going to say if they use sailor instead of not. And it was astro sailor. Cosmosaler everybody was a dream sailor once he got on his face. No, I think you're totally right. I mean, I think that's like naming your teams. It is. Because even now, China sends tykonots in there in this space, so you can say just by reading a news report, you know, who's up there. There's a Taco knot, a Cosmonaut, and an astronaut. Well, yeah, you're totally right. There's no accident. No. So divisive. Well, it was a space race. Yeah. It's not a shuttle relay. That's true. And not space shuttle. You know what I mean? I knew what you meant. Okay. I'm sure most people out there I hope so. The Soviets were secret. The Americans were not. We proudly broadcasted our successes and failures for the world to see. And there were some failures. There were we should say that when the USSR launched Sputnik, we had not one, but two major failures, the kind where the rocket will go up and then just come right back down and explode on the launch pad. Kind of failures. And they were dubbed things like flopnik and kaputnik, and it was very demoralizing for America. Yeah. Or a pre launch test, catching fire and losing three of our astronauts, including Gus Grissom. Well, that was the beginning of the Apollo program. Yeah, but that one didn't even that was on the launchpad. That was a test. Was that televised? I don't know about that. But they still don't know what caused the actual fire. But the 100% oxygen chamber did not help. No, they used to pump 100% oxygen rather than an air mixture. I think now it's like 34% aboard, like the ISS, but they would have 100% oxygen, and there was extremely flammable and yeah. Don, during a test, I think, in January of 1967, the Cats caught fire and killed all three astronauts inside. Within, like, five minutes, the fire burned itself out and they were dead. Wow. Luckily, they supposedly died from smoke inhalation, which is what? Quicker. Yeah. But I don't know. Well, and the Soviets were actually the first ones to learn that pure oxygen wasn't a good idea. And they didn't tell us that. No. Obviously. No. Because their program was in secret. Yeah. One of the other differences I thought was pretty interesting was that the Soviets used a spherical capsule in which the Cosmonaut just rode along and they ejected and parachuted out, and the capsule crashed onto land, whereas we had our funny shaped capsule that the astronauts actually drove. So they were pilots, and they splashed down into the sea still in the capsule. Right. So, again, two completely different approaches. And I just find it interesting that the Americans like, no, we want our pilots to fly and fly into the ocean because it's a soft place to land. And it worked. I think one of those guys, Jeff Bezos or somebody like that, found one of the original Mercury capsules at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah. Isn't that neat? I sent pictures of it underwater. Well, the benefits of a spherical spacecraft is that it can enter the atmosphere just however it wants to. Right. Whereas you got to kind of nail that. With the Mercury capsule conical, you couldn't just go in there, like, upside down. Yeah, you have to use your boosters to thrust into place in just your yard and all that stuff. Real pilots, dude. Yeah. Well, it's like Apollo 13. That was one of their big concerns, was being accurately angled to reenter the atmosphere. They were in big trouble. That's scary. That was such a good movie, too. Yeah, that was good. The Vomit Comet. Yeah. Do you remember that? That's what they use to train and to shoot. That's how they simulated. Oh, did they? Poor guys. Yeah. I still love to write on the thing. I bet it's awesome. Have you ever seen that footage of those girls, like, on The Vomit Comet or something? Similar girls? Yeah, there's three girls in the seat, and one of them throws up, and it just goes right back into her face and just kind of hovers there. Have you not seen that? No. I got to send that to you. Is it real? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, man, it is gross. What are they doing? Putting girls in the vomit comment. What? No, I mean, not like seven year old girls. Women. Women. Okay. We heard from our feminist listeners, and they said girls is better than females. Girls is acceptable. I'm just going with that. No, I'm still amazed that people just say female as they're not talking about, like, a study or something. You know, I've been listening out over there. Did anyone say that it's actually very common? Female. Male, yeah. Interesting. It's very common. You've done your own an impromptu survey just by being alive, man. Being awake. Yeah. And it wasn't like the vomit comment. I don't think it was the one that Ron Howard wrote on. It was a ride at Disneyland. It looks a lot like a light aircraft that's doing a nosedive, but they're basically weightless for a second. Wow. So it's obviously not a light aircraft, but it just looks small. That girl just pukes in her own face. It is so gross. All right, so just to clear it up, chuck wasn't saying that women should not be allowed in vomit comments, and Josh wasn't saying that the women in the vomit comments were seven year olds. Right. Okay. I think that's well put. Thank you. So the Soviets scored the second point as well. Second touchdown, big 1, april 12, 1961. They actually put Cosmonaut Yuri Gegarin into space, and he was the first man in space and the first man to orbit the Earth. And there was egg on the face of the US. At that point. Yeah. 14 nothing. Yeah. If you could give them a couple of touchdowns for that one, you should. 21 nothing. Yeah. Yuri was the first person in space, and, again, apparently, America could have been the first, but it's actually better that, I guess. Von Braun said we need to schedule one more test. I'm not 100% certain about putting a human in here. And they added one more test, which pushed Alan Shepherd's Freedom Seven flight back by a couple of months, which put it a month after Yuri Gagarin's flight. Right? Yeah. So we could have done it, but even if we had, the Russians still would have basically beaten us. They would have gotten at least some points even for being second, because Alan Shepard's flight was basically shot up into a suborbital position and came right back down. It was a 15 minutes suborbital space flight, which you can do now if you've got, like, 100 grand. Pretty much. Yeah. What Yuri Garin did was he shot up in the actual Earth orbit and orbited the Earth, the entire Earth once and then came back down 108 minutes later. 15 minutes touchdowns. Yeah. Straight up and down in 15 minutes, or up full orbit of the Earth and back down 108 minutes. It's actually good that we came second in that, anyway. Yeah, true. And that chuck that lit the fire beneath America's bottom. Yeah. Like, we got to get going. Yeah. Because think about it, we're down three touchdowns. Who wrote this one? Craig Freud. Rich. Yeah. The dock. Right. He points out, like, this is the time of this followed the McCarthy trials. People did not like the Soviets. America really wanted to dominate, and we were getting our butts kicked publicly by the USSR, and it was demoralizing. But rather than let ourselves get beat down, kennedy got with NASA and said, what can we do to beat these guys? Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. That's right. Because not only with those two things were they beating us, but they at one point during this time, had more hours in space. This one rocket than all of ours put together. Yeah. So we were getting trounced bad. So they were basically just doing, like, victory lap after victory lap. Like, they would send guys up and orbit the Earth one after the other. Yes. At the end of the Vostok program, which was their first program, I believe. Yes, their first program. By the time they finished it, they had not only sent the first man into space, they sent the first woman in space, valentina Tereshkova, and she orbited the Earth 48 times in Vostok six. During the Mercury program, I think the best we came up with was Gordon Cooper doing 22 times around the Earth. So they were just crushing us and just racking up the points left and right. That's right. So America says, you know what? We should develop a new program. And that's how it works. They have a program. It does what it does over a period of years when they retire that, they start up a new one. The new program was the Gemini program, and the Soviets started the Vascod program. Yes. It's a tough one. A little bit. And they again got out to a little early lead with that program because they were the first to send multiple cosmonauts up and three into Volkswagen One and then had a spacewalk before we did Alexei Leonov and Volkswagen 2, March 18, 1965. So they're still beating us at this point. They are, but by this time, just a couple of weeks after Alan Shepard's first flight, and while we're still just reeling from the Yuri Gagarin flight, kennedy came out on the news and said, you know what? We're going to be the first to put a man on the Moon, and we're going to do it before the decades out. He kind of declared that the finish line almost too, like, whoever does this and it's going to be us will win. And this is a substantial goal to set. I mean, we've been beaten twice, and, like you said, trounced by the Soviets, and now we're suddenly saying, like, oh, yeah, let's go to the Moon. Let's see who's first to the Moon. And that set the foundation for everything to follow that began the Gemini program, which, like you were saying, the Mercury program. Each program was designed to kind of prove that we could do a certain step. Yeah, the Mercury program proved that a human being could go into space and safely come back down, could orbit the Earth. These next two programs, I guess the next Soviet program what is it again? Warshield. Yeah. That one proved that a person could survive out in space outside of a space capsule or space transport. And the Americans had Gemini, which ultimately bridged the gap between Mercury program and the Apollo program, which would put us on the Moon. And both the Voxshad and the Gemini programs were like putting multiple people in space together to work and do neat stuff. That's right. So with Jim and I, early on, we were like, all right, you guys are beating to the punch. You're getting people up there, and you can fly around the Earth a bunch of times, you got the quantity part down. Right. But we're going to focus on quality here in the US. And learn how to do things up there, like change orbits. Can you do that? Rusky? Yeah. And they said yes. And so all of a sudden, we were flying around up there, changing orbits, rendezvous with other spacecraft, docking with rockets, and you can fly around Earth as much as you want, but we're actually putting our work into practice. Like, what's it going to take to get on the Moon, send someone up there for two weeks and dock with someone else. Right. Change orbits, fly that thing around. And we were able to do that successfully. And that's when we started pulling ahead, because the Soviets were just doing laps around the Earth. Well, they were doing some other stuff they did do, like, space walks and stuff like that. But yeah, of course, these two programs are where we started to pull away, and it was that Gemini program that we used to prove that we could do things like spend two weeks in space, which is how long it would take, like you said, to go to the Moon and back. Yeah. The Soviets were doing a lot of unmanned missions at the time, or sending animals up there, data gathering, stuff like that. Yes. There were a lot of animals sent to space that perished that never came back. No. Or that came back as fireballs. Sad. I went to this museum you mean I did in La. It's called the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Yeah, I've heard of that. You should go. It is the most unique, peculiar museum you will ever go to in your life. But one of the exhibits is a hall of portraits of Soviet space dogs. Oh, really? Pretty neat, interesting, and sad because they all ended up dead. Yeah, it's sad, but the tone of them more is national pride. Got you. These dogs gave their life the advancement of humans. Yeah, but I mean, if you step back and really think about it, these portraits are very much like human portraits. Like, the dogs are looking up into the future with their chin raised and like they're breast proud. Yeah. The way they're done it's neat. Well, what they're looking at is a dog treat. I thought they're staring at the effect. Yeah, that's pretty neat. I'm going to check that out. Oh, you need to go, man. Go with a child's heart. Well, I have no choice, then. Okay. That's the only heart I have. Nice job. All right, so where are we? Project Gemini. We have a little bit of momentum. We have what it takes. We have the right stuff, if you will, to make it to the moon and to walk around up there. And that is when Apollo One caught fire, which was a pretty big setback in January of 1067. Yeah. I mean, not only did we lose, like, three of our great astronauts yeah. These guys were some of the originals. I imagine that it scared the living daylights out of all the other astronauts. Sure. And all of the people in Mission Control in NASA and Americans. Everybody knew it was dangerous, but now it was proven like it's deadly. This is a deadly endeavor that we're undertaking here. Yeah, they knew that. They knew how dangerous it was. That's why otherwise were just no, I don't mean that. I mean more like the American public. Oh, yeah, you're right. We're losing people now. These aren't like dogs. These are three guys. Yeah, totally. And people that America had grown to love, like national heroes at this point. Right. Like the voice. You got to quit saying that. And so after the fire, actually, they disassembled the launch pads, but left the posts as a permanent memorial to the Apollo One astronauts. Yeah. And rebuilt launchpads elsewhere. Yeah. Wow. All right. So at this point, the Soviets are concentrating on, like I said, unmanned spacecraft. They're like, all right, you can go walk on the moon, but we're going to orbit the Moon, at least, and we're going to develop some docking systems and see how long we can stay up there. Other David Blaine esque feats of strength. Right. Which is kind of neat. Like, at some point around 1967 68, the Soviets said, it's obvious the Americans are going to make it to the moon. We're not going to send a man to the Moon right now. Within time to be first. So let's pursue some other stuff that the Americans aren't doing, like, what's the big deal about the moon anyway? And it turns out it's kind of right. Kind of. But humanity as a whole benefited from that decision, because while the Americans were perfecting what the Americans were perfecting things like space shuttles and that kind of stuff, things that came directly out of the Apollo program and the lunar landing and just that science. The Russians were, like you said, experimenting with things like docking systems, space stations. They ended up building the mirror. They had Skylab. Yeah, we had Skylab in the 70s again. Go to the National Air and Space Museum. There's two there's one at Dulles and then there's one on the Mall in DC. Yeah, I think I've seen that one. Yeah, it's one of the main Smithsonian museums. They have, like, a model of skylight that you can walk through. It's so 70 terrific. It's awesome. So we were experimenting with space stations, but at the same time, it was very apparent after well, it wasn't the end of the Cold War. This is before the end of the Cold War, but after we won, after we landed on the moon. Apparently the Soviets and Americans said, hey, let's see if we can work together. And they actually did, in a very symbolic but also technically proficient manner, the soya's Apollo mission of 1975. Yes. And we'll talk more about that right after this break. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Man, this got me fired up. I know. Wow. We already won even. Yeah, at least the first time. All right, so we left off. You were talking about the joint Apollo soya's test project, which was a really big deal to get together on this. And I'm kind of surprised even back then that they had the foresight to work together. Yeah, because we still weren't, like, great friends as nation in the early 70s. No. And space was still a huge question as to whether or not it could or should or would be weaponized, too. Yeah, exactly. So for the two dominant superpowers on the planet to get together was a big deal. Yeah, and that happened in 1975. They literally got together in space when an Apollo craft carrying three of our astronauts hooked up and docked with the Soyuz spacecraft with two cosmonauts. And they spent a couple of days working and probably getting to know one another, maybe drinking vodka. Yeah. We're not so different. We have to go to space and get drunk. Exactly. It's the best, right? I like Tang. You like tang, right. Let's put some vodka in it. Exactly. So that was a big deal. And at least from that, it proved that we could work together, our space agencies could work together, and it led to this age of cooperation that grew directly out of the rivalry. Yeah, and like we said, the Russians were kind of paying attention to living for the duration and space. The Americans big thing was this space shuttle. We basically had some cars that we could drive to the moon or space and back, and we kind of put the two together. The Russians had the Mir Space Station, and in the 90s, their crews had worked. In the 80s or ninety s I don't remember. At least one crew had spent more than a year in space. Yeah, that was huge. It's super huge, because part of the goal of all of these is, can we one day live in space, period. And so ultimately, this led to this joint cooperation led to the International Space Station in the 90s. Yeah. And if you go up to the International Space Station, you're going to see Russians and you're going to see Americans, and they're all up there working together still. Oh, but Chuck, that is possibly changing. Yeah, I guess I should have said had been working together nicely, like good neighbors, because is it Russia trying to evict us now? Well, they're basically saying, like, hey, you guys can't get up there anymore because and we're not going to give you a ride. No, they will give us a ride, but it's $71 million a ride now. What? Yeah. Wow. And at the very least, it's humiliating that Americans are having to hitch a ride from Russians who are basically extorting money from us. So is this all at the root of it? Is it like, just tensions between Putin and the US. Yeah, it all came from the Ukraine stuff and the sanctions. One of the first Russians to be sanctioned was the head of the Russian Space Agency. So they were like, oh, really? Got you. You know that space station up there. You guys are in trouble now. So I wonder, is it not going to be the International Space Station anymore? I think what Russia is basically saying is, watch what happens when we stop giving you guys ride. Right. And then we say, you know what, let's just let the space station fall out of orbit. Wow. We, Russia will still have a spaceflight program, a human spaceflight program. You guys won't because the International Space Station is the only piece of human spaceflight equipment that the United States has because the space shuttle program was scrapped. Right. Wow. So the space shuttle was scrapped, like you said. Bush, before he left office, sort of had a directive for NASA moving forward that is moot now because Obama scrapped a lot of it. Bush wanted to go back to the moon, basically. And even some of the people within NASA said it's like Apollo on steroids, and do we really need to go back to the moon? What can we gain from that at this point? So Obama scrapped it and redirected NASA's funding toward more rocket technology research. Like, how can we fire rockets farther, and can we refuel them in flight? And not just for military, but maybe this stuff can be useful in the space program as well. Right. So that is the current space program. But there's a new space race. Yes. China has come along and very methodically and plottingly has followed and met its space goals. 2003 put its first man in space. What do you say? They were taco nuts. Yeah. One of the I read an article about China's space race and they said so far their space program is roughly equivalent to the US and Soviet space program circa mid sixty s. I saw the two. Yeah. So they're clearly behind, but apparently they are making a lot of headway in a short amount of time. Plus they have the luxury of not having to invent items like microchips from scratch right. That people, the Russians and the Americans in the space race had to do. The fact is though, if you read anything about China and its space ambitions and the United States and the state of its current space program, you basically find you're sitting around reminiscing about the golden days of Tang and Guscrasome. Really? Yeah. China is basically going to dominate space. They're poised to dominate space. They very cleverly have started a space station program that will come online the same time that the ISS International Space Station makes its fiery arc into the Pacific somewhere, I read. Oh, really? Yeah. The ISS is going to come down sometime after 2016, probably 2020. Wow. And the United States will have no presence in space any longer. China will be the only game in town with the space station. And I don't know if this is true, but I feel like in something like space exploration, that's kind of something that you have to build on momentum. Once you use momentum, you really are set back. Like all of these people who are working for NASA, who have been laid off recently as they age out and retire, all of that cumulative knowledge and organizational memory is lost totally. So even if we come to ten years from now, five years from now and say, whoa, we're a space faring nation, we need to get back out there, we've lost quite a bit already, not to mention in the ensuing five or ten years where we start to lose exponentially more. Yeah. It takes a while to ramp that back up. And I agree. My fear is this that we're going to take our typical or what's come to be our typical Kleptocrat view of things and just let private business handle it. We'll just let SpaceX handle it for America. Right. They're addicted to money. So in their pursuit of money, we'll benefit as a nation. Well, that hasn't necessarily worked out for us with like, housing markets and stock markets and dangerous chemicals and that kind of thing. So while I do think that the true space race right now is between private industry amongst itself and private industry and China, I don't think that as a nation, by sitting back and just leaving it to private industry and virtually withdrawing our federal dollars from space exploration that the United States is going to benefit in any way, shape or form. Well, yeah, especially when you hear Aston Kutcher is going up on Virgin Galactic. How's that helping us? It's not Angelina Jolie's up there, though. That's what matters, doesn't it? I don't know. I think it's neat. But it's one of those private space travel for the super rich. It's just like another thing for the super rich, like owning a yacht. How does that benefit me? That if you've got several hundred thousand dollars you can take a suborbital flight, which is basically like a tourist that's not advancing thing. I don't think that's advancing our space exploration at all. Just leave it to business. We'll see. And that's not to say that SpaceX or any of the private space industries aren't working to do things beyond send movie stars enriched people to space. No, they're working to send the rest of us to space, too. It's just the rich people and movie stars are the ones who will have the money to hit that first price point. But surely they're doing other things too, though, like research, or are they not? That's what I need to look into. I would imagine that probably most of the goals of anything like SpaceX or any company like that is to make money from space. So I would guess mining basically selling services to space agencies, colonizing and selling moon condos. Sure. Like India, Iran. These countries have space programs as well and are entering space themselves. SpaceX can go basically contract for them. Yeah, they're doing stuff, but they're not doing stuff necessarily just for the pursuit of science. Right. Like for the US. Even. Yeah. I got a couple of things before we finish. Let's do it. There's some inventions that sometimes are mistakenly attributed to NASA which aren't necessarily true, but our favorites in space. Yeah. Velcro is the one. I've always heard that's wrong. Is it? Yes, it was invented in the 1940s by a hiker who noticed that little birds were stuck to his socks and wondered how they stuck. I've heard that story. Look closely. This is the true story. Looked closely and saw that burrs have little hooks and socks have little loops, and that gave rise to Velcro. And Velcro is used a lot by NASA, so it's often wrongfully attributed to NASA. All right. This is a fun game since you know this stuff. Okay. How about M and Ms? No. The popular candy that melts in your mouth and not in your hands. No. They also don't like squish around in space. The candy coated shell makes it great for space travel, but not in vintage for space. No. What about the joystick? Yes. Okay. That is the direct result of the space race and the space programs. What about GPS? Yeah. Okay. Because you can't spell global positioning Satellite without positioning. Yeah. Without solar system, isn't it? GPS's system? Yeah, it uses satellites. Yeah. So we also have the space race. You just watch that one. We also have the Space Race to think for satellite TV. What about smoke detectors in your home? Yes. Because of Space Program Base. Yeah. What about Tang? So the dip and dots, the free stride, the dipping dots. I don't know, ma'am. That was supposed to be like the outer space ice cream. It's what the astronauts and supposedly but I don't know if it was developed by NASA for them. Okay. Tang? No, it was the freeze drying process was already around a freeze dried blood to save for later. But then NASA adopted it to start freeze drying food. So technically you can thank NASA for freeze dried food. Yeah. And while Tang was not invented by the space program, it was definitely heavily marketed as being tied to the space program. And it was a big deal. People gave it to their kids because they thought it would make them go into space. Yeah. Like stronger and smarter little astronauts. Yeah, pretty much. What are some other I have one more for you. Have you ever heard there's like, this urban legend that the American space program and the Soviet space program both had this problem? The Americans, they needed to be able to write in space. But if you use a pens are functioned by gravity, and if you're in zero gravity, you can't use a pen. Seinfeld had an astronaut pen, right? Yeah. So supposedly NASA spent millions of dollars in coming up with a zero G pen while the Soviets had a much better idea. Pencil. Pencil. Is that really yeah. Wow. So apparently that's an urban myth. Both programs use pencils to start, but the Apollo One fire showed that you don't want anything that's even remotely flammable like a wooden pencil aboard your spacecraft. That makes sense, too. Sure. So NASA started using mechanical pencils, which were a couple of piece. They were way overpaying for them. And then a man by the name of Fisher, who owns Fisher Pen Company use his own millions of dollars to create a pressure functioning pen rather than gravity functioning pen, a space pen, which he in turn sold to the US. Space program and eventually the Soviet space program for just a few dollars each. So the millions of dollars space pen is a myth. That's your Paul Harvey moment I like. But you know me. I like pencils. And, hey, shout out to our buddy David Reese, who wrote the quintessential books, how to Sharpen Pencils. Book, not books. But if you want to know about sharpening pencils, that's the way to go. There is a book, and he will explain that. And he's a great, funny guy. Then a friend. Yeah, he's good guy. I always like to plug that. He's got a new show coming out. What? Matt Geo? Yes. What's it about? It's called Going Deep with David Reese, where he each episode is like, how to open a door, how to make ice, how to swatify nice. Where he goes deep into the how to use a very mundane task. Nicely done, Reese. Yeah, I can't wait to see it. Yeah, for sure. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So if you want to know more about the space race, you can type spaceandrace in the search bar athousetoforce.com and if this fascinated you, you should go back and listen to our was the Moon Landing Hoax episode and our episode did Reagan Star Wars program in the Cold War. Both of them. Excellent. Excellent episodes. We've done. And you can find them both at stuffyshoodnow. Compodcastsarchive. And we did a very special television episode about the private space race. So one of our ten TV episode Stuff You Should Know featured John Hodgman. And the gist of the episode is we have been invited to do some training for private space flights. SpaceX? Yeah, SpaceX. Yeah. And it's a fun episode, so you can get that on itunes and Google Play, or you can stay up until four in the morning and watch it on site maybe. Yeah, apparently they do show them late night regularly. Yeah, cool. For weirdos, I'll have to watch those. If you already said all that, I think it's time, buddy, for listening to mail. Okay, I'm going to call this breastfeeding from Becky. Hey, guys. I'm a newer fan. I'm so glad to find you all. I discovered your shows while looking for ways to spend the vast amount of free time I have during my day. Now, my husband and I just had our first child, Penelope. Do you have free time? Well, you know, raising a kid sure. Not free. I wouldn't call it free time. I agree. I've discovered that breastfeeding is very time consuming. I think she means while she's breastfeeding is not a lot of time. Oh, I got you. Okay. Basically forced to sit around for long stretches of time, unable to do anything besides think, read, or listen to podcasts. I feel as if our daughter is already leaps and bounds ahead of all the other four month olds out there. This is a while ago, so she's even older than that. Wow. She's been educated about how meth and crack cocaine works, sign language, human cannonballs amputation, castration, diplomatic immunity, etc. For the list is growing longer as we work through the archives. Made me wonder if you ever thought about doing a show on breastfeeding. I thought at first it would be a super weird experience, but I've come to really be fascinated by the process. And let's be honest, it's something with which the vast majority of humans have had firsthand experience. So we didn't do breastfeeding. No. We totally should, though. That's a great suggestion. That's a huge Ford snack, too. Oh, yeah. Well, let's step right into it. Let's do it. That's from Becky breastfeeding. Becky. Thank you, Becky. Thanks, Becky. If you want to suggest an episode? We are always up for that. We love great suggestions like Becky's, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. And last but not least, you can hang out with us at our home on the web, the coolest location on the Internet. It's called Stephishando.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
Body Odor: You Stink | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/body-odor-you-stink | Chuck and Josh end up making reduxes of past episodes on things like sweating and deodorant in this all-new episode on the science beneath what makes people smell. Learn all about your odor in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Chuck and Josh end up making reduxes of past episodes on things like sweating and deodorant in this all-new episode on the science beneath what makes people smell. Learn all about your odor in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:39:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=20, tm_min=39, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=102, tm_isdst=0) | 43620800 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworks. Comm. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles Dove to be Chuck. Brian is with me. If my nose doesn't deceive me, I didn't do my cheeks today. That's bad luck. Don't know. Thank you. I don't think that that's going to save this episode, but it will make it from being the worst. Probably like the one the unreleased one. Yeah. In case of break, we'll make that when we retire. That will be our final episode. We'll go out with a whimper. It's not a bad idea. Yeah. There's a lost episode, everyone that only Jerry, Chuck, and I know about. Yes. In case of emergency brake glass episode, it is so bad that if something happens, we release the emergency episode. That's right. Yeah. That feels good to have. Does it? Yeah, I guess so. I feel like we have a margin of error. Yeah. Of one. Yeah. All right, Chuck, let's get this started. You stink. Thank you. I stink? Yes. We all stink. Jerry doesn't stink. Cherry smells like lilac. She does. Wow. You threw me off with that one. Sorry. But your sync and my sync are unique. It's called an odor type. Right. So an odor type is, as I said, very unique. It's so unique that there is research into figuring out how to identify somebody through their odor. Yes. I thought it was interesting. It's like a smelly fingerprint. Yes. And no matter what you do, it can't be masked. Like, you can't alter it to where a machine that's designed to molecularly analyze odors can't say, oh, it's Josh Chuck. And they're really laying on the polo cologne today for some reason because it's like, man, I remember the day did you wear that bottle of polo? It's like the size of my torso. And I was so excited. I only wore one cologne in my life for, like, two years in high school. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Benatin colors, fancy pants. But I haven't worn cologne since literally I was 17. Yes. I went through maybe, like, three periods in my life where I wore cologne for a little while, and finally I'm like, I don't wear cologne. What am I doing? Not many guys do anymore, do they? Yeah. Really? At the gym I go to, it's like, get out of the sauna now. Wow. It's bad. Yeah. When I told you I think one time when I lived in Arizona for a year. It may be cultural, but those dudes work alone a lot and hair gel, don't they? I seem to remember a fair amount of dippedy do. Yes. Arizona is like New Jersey west. Wow. So anyway, we all have very distinct odor types is what it's called. Oh. And not only can you not alter it with the machine, but if you're a mouse and you try to mask your scent, other mice can still see who you are through their notes. Yeah, I saw that study. Should we tell them the technique they use, even though I don't understand it, involves tickling volatile BOCS, like you get in paint. Volatile organic compounds also in your body, which is just something that turns to gas at what we consider room temperature. Exactly. They can analyze these scents in your sweat, saliva, and urine using gas chromatography mass spectrometry. That's good stuff. I'm glad you got hung up on that one. Yes. I don't know how that works, so I didn't have enough time to look into that. But that's what the Pentagon and the Homeland Security are using to try and sniff out terrorists. Yeah. And also, apparently to figure out if someone's lying because there are different kinds of sweat. There's different kinds of sweat glands. As you know. We've actually kind of covered some of this. Remember we did that. What's the difference between any per sprint and deodorant? Was that me again? Yes. Okay. I didn't think that was me. And you were wildly impressed with, like I had a theory about deodorant stocks going up. Oh, that's right. Hormones and milk are making kids hit puberty younger. Yeah. In my opinion. And then with global warming, people are going to need more deodorant. So deodorant stocks were the way to go. That's not as good as my early man theory. What happened? They melted. Yeah. What happened to neanderthals? These are the old days. Yeah. I think that deodorant was, like, one of the ten minute shows, wasn't it? It was pretty quick, like, really early. Yeah. But we're going to revisit it because even you don't remember it and you were in it. I remember now. So we're going to talk about the different kinds of sweat clans, because we've also talked about this before. Can you sweat colors? Yeah. Okay. But let's do it again. You want to? Sure. That was the introduction. That's great. I love it. They also have studies that say that little babies are more attracted to their mothers, obviously because of their scent. And, like, early on, humans can sniff out their parents. And I don't think it's a theory of mine. I think it's pretty well established that if you're like a smoker, even if you're like, oh, I don't smoke around my kids, they still sniff that stuff out. And they are more likely to smoke later on because of that. Is that true? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Children of smokers are way more likely to smoke. I know. In studies of babies born eyelids and as worms, they'll sniff their parents out and just wiggle over toward them even though they can't see, usually can't hear. That's a neat study. There's a lot of stuff in here like that. Yeah. So let's talk about the different kinds of sweat glands. Okay. You got echoing glands. Yeah, those are my favorite. Same here, because they cool me off. Yeah, they're innocuous. They basically just secrete water and electrolytes. If you've seen Idiocracy, you know how important electrolytes are. That's right. And yeah, it's used to regulate body temperature. Your hypothalamus says, hey, you're getting a little warm here. Let's get rid of this perspiration the water. The water and electrolytes on your skin, when they evaporate, it's going cool you down. Love it. And sweat doesn't stink. I think we've pointed that out before, but it bears repeating. The sweat itself is not smelly. No, and I like saying that because, for obvious reasons, it's well established that I'm a sweaty guy, but I'm not a smelly guy. No, you really aren't. I was thinking about this. I was thinking about you as I was researching this. Sure. And I was like, you know, Chuck doesn't smell. I've never smelled Chuck. And I've been around you when you're sweating. Yeah, I've been around you when you were wearing nothing but, like, shorts and a Hawks jersey. Sweating. Sweating. Yeah. Well, you better be sweating if you're wearing that. Yeah, that's because I take exactly that's, because I take care of myself and do all the things that we're going to talk about. Like bathing. Yes. So in Ecuador, sweat, there's nothing to smell. Electrolytes don't smell right in the other sweat glands. In Ecuador, sweat glands are found all over your body. The other sweat glands, apocrine sweat glands, they don't smell either. I know what you're saying. Like, you produce sweat, but it has a lot more than just water and electrolytes. Chuck. Anytime a cell excrete waste, poops something out or is destroyed through maybe auto lysis or whatever, there's a lot of little cellular detritus, and that stuff has to leave the body because you don't want it to build up. You want to get rid of your broken up, dead cells, and they enter secretory cells in the skin and hike along with your sweat. So the apocrine sweat is a means of disposal, cellular detrious disposal in your body. But even that doesn't smell. Yes. What produces the smell? Well, and we did cover this before, but it is bacteria that basically eats those proteins that we sweat out, and then they poop them out. Essentially, they poop out fatty acids. That stink. That's great. That's the smell. It's not us. It's the local flora, the bacteria. I don't even like the word flora. I know, and it doesn't even make sense because bacteria aren't plants. And even if they were plants, flora apparently refers to multicellular plants. Oh, really? Yeah. I was wondering that. But they call local flora bacteria, local flora, and little protozoa on your body, those are called fauna. Local fauna. And I can't figure out why. Well, I bet the answer is out there. I looked, man. Really? Yeah. If anybody knows this is the one, I'd really like to know from this episode. Well, what we do know is that these nasty apocrine glands are found in some pretty unfortunate places, like you're growing or you're growing. Excellent. And your hands and your feet gross. That's where you're going to smell in your feet. Interestingly. The reason they don't smell quite like your armpits is because they also produce fungus in addition to the bacteria pooping out fatty acids. Yeah. So that's why your foot odor is going to be a little different. It's not really a coincidence that all of these places are hairy. Well, except for your hands. Yes. And I guess the soles of your feet. But your armpits and your groin are hairy. I'm five years old. I'm sorry. Naturally, they're hairy. Yes. And when we wear shoes, socks, whatever, we are providing these great places for bacteria to thrive and eat the stuff to their hearts content. But it takes about an hour, apparently. Yeah, that's the good news. So when you start sweating, apocrine cell detritus through your armpits, it takes about an hour for the local bacteria to digest. I mean, they'll eat it immediately, but then they lay around, have a siesta, watch a little too, and then they wake up and they're like, I got to poop, and they poop. And then you start smelling the other gross thing. And there will be many gross things, but to me, one of the gross things is the echoing glands secrete kind of clear liquid, but the apocrine glands excrete liquid that can be thicker and milky and yellow, which is why, if you've ever had the old mustard stains on the undershirt, which are really unsightly they are. That means it's time to get rid of that undershirt. Yes, it is. Or if you're like me, then it's time to keep wearing it until it's crunchy. Yes, I know the crunch you're talking about. Yeah. I think that's the deodorant as well. I hope so. In combination with the milky yellowish secretions. Yeah. God. Yeah. So that's the gross stuff. That's where your pit stains come from. Yeah. And the smell, also, one of the big guys of the smell world, as far as the waste products that the local flora are producing is e three methyl two, hexanoic acid. That's what's making you smell friends. That's the one. It's one of. And the bacteria that's producing this are called microcoxi or staphylocoxi. And like I said, this is where they love living in your armpits. And I don't know if they live in our armpits. Like, over time, they've become attracted to human armpits through evolution. They're like, oh, well, this is where we eat, so we live here. Right. And they never learned you should never poop where you eat. They do the whole gambit or poop where you live. Yeah. No, it's poop where you eat. I think it's both. Is it? Yeah. Okay. I wonder if they were attracted to humans over time, because are we born with these things in our underarms? I don't know. How do we pick them up? How soon after birth do we pick them up. Well, I don't think we're born because newborn babies don't have the African sweat. So that's why little babies smell delicious. And unless they're pooping, which is like, an ungodly thing for such a small chicken, what is wrong with babies? I know. So weird. Yes, you're right. We aren't born with apocrine glands. We develop them around puberty of puberty. You probably won't start the body odor, the bo, as my mom always called it, puberty till your teen years. And that's when you start getting stinky. And there's not just a difference between little kids, between teens and tweens. Yeah, right. Teens stink. That's right. Supposedly, there's a distinction among races. This is highly controversial. Is it? Yes. It's not nearly as cavalier as it might seem in this article. You can't just say, like, oh, well, Asians are the least stinky. There is fewer epic wrinkles. Right. Supposedly. Okay, here's the problem that the field of anthropology has with this. Right. It's possible that there are differences among races. Sure. But you can break it down even further. Is it food based? Is it diet based? So if you are in northern India, you're eating less curry than southern India, or vice versa. Right. Whatever. So are all Indians all Indians share a similar smell that's more pungent than, say, Europeans. And even within that, it's like, how many vegetarians are there that hate curry that live in India? Well, the reason you point out curry, we should point out, is because that's mentioned specifically in the article as one of the more highly pungent foods that will eventually come out in your sweat. Exactly. Like garlic. Right. But I guess the point is, when you differentiate among people whether it's smell, especially if it's something as unpleasant as body odor, then you're creating a disparity. You're propagating the possibility of racist attitudes. Because if this person is different from me and how we smell, how else is that person different? Sure, maybe I don't really like that person. Well, it's not even endorsed. Well, you have to be careful with it. Plus, the other problem is, most of the research that is cited these days for difference among races and body odor was last compiled in the 1930s. Wow. And then also, for example, Asians have fewer actuary glands. Do they? I don't know. When's the last time anyone checked? And then some of the other old data suggests that half an estimated half of Koreans don't even have auxiliary gland. So they couldn't even sweat if they tried. Right. You see the point? So you're saying it's just hinky data. It's old data. Yeah. And you're not supposed to cite data over ten years old. Well, why don't we just, as a show, as a part of the public spectrum, say some people stink, some and some people don't. Yeah, people are people. Some stink, some don't. So why should it be? She saw where that was headed. Yeah. Men definitely are stinkier than women. Now that is true. In general, we don't mind a little sexism, especially when we're throwing it on ourselves as stinky men. But it's not sexism because it's true and there's no disparaging that comes along with that. Right, that's true. And this is actually backed up by some science. We have more testosterone, which is going to up your production of the apricreen sweat, just going to lead to stinkiness. Another theory is that women are more efficient regulators of their body temperature because they have less core heat going on, because less muscle and fat than us dudes. And conversely, you can make the case that men are more efficient at cooling themselves via sweat. True. Because women don't just don't sweat as much. And I thought this is really interesting and so did Emily because I was throwing some stuff at her today while I was researching. Okay. Women actually need one degree higher body temperature in order to start sweating to begin with. Yeah, I thought that was interesting and must be significant. I found a selling a hypothesis that based on her attached to that and that women have less body fluid than men and so have evolved to sweat less. Okay, that makes sense. And so that would be the mechanism that evolution has taken the form of. Well, lucky ladies is what I say. But what's interesting is no, because if you are working out in your lady, you suffer hotter. Longer. Yeah, you get hotter. And there's a study in Japan, of all places, because they can't even sweat, where they found that women could train themselves just by working out a bunch, like forming a workout routine over time to start sweating earlier than women who were just working out for the first time. Got you. Yeah. Well, since you brought up Japan, this is a sidebar, but we'll throw it in there. Okay. And I thought this is interesting. Apparently they take their sweating and their stink pretty seriously over there because they have a couple of interesting products. One company, Aoki, has developed a deodorant suit that uses fabric with silver ions impregnated in it to fight off this bacteria just by wearing it. Right. And then they think they have determined a cosmetic company thinks they have found the fatty acid responsible for old people smell, which I thought was really mean to say yes, and noneal is the fatty acid. And in Japan they call old people smell carriers and they are trying to combat that. And I guess as you say though, grandkids all over the world are just going to be like spraying their grandparents when they walk in or when you inherit the house, you just walk around and spray carriers you off. True. It's interesting though, I went over to my mom's last night and I realized that her home is not the house I grew up in. She's been there for a while though, probably 15 years. It smells like my grandparents house that I went to growing up in Tennessee. That's interesting. Like, a lot like it. Yeah. And? I don't know. I mean, it's got to have something to do with heredity or maybe products or furniture. Some of their stuff, too. Odor types are genetically based. Yeah. So it would make sense that your mom inherited some of her odor type from her parents. Not at all. Now it's what it was very comforting, though. It's like, wow. Yeah, man, I'll bet granddaddy's house. Unless your grandparents stunk like oxen. I'm sure it's very comforting even then. Or were abusive and hated my gut. Yes, which is true. The scent of gardenia makes you drop into the fetal position. You never hear that of, like, abusive grandparents. That would be the worst thing ever. I'm sure there are some. They got to be out there. Yeah. But you don't hear about it much. Yeah, thank God. Thank God everybody keeps that secret. I've been around some mean old people, though. Everyone has that capacity. It's true. And that's why I quit Boy Scouts in protest. Oh, you had a mean old person? No, I just didn't like the idea of respecting your elders, no matter what. I was like, no, you got to earn a person has to earn respect. Agreed. Thank you. All right. I finally vindicated after all these years. We did talk about this in another podcast about women able to pick up I think when we talked about it before, it was a study about women able to pick up clues through scent about whether or not someone's a good reproductive partner. Yes. They would have a different immune system than you put them together and form a super baby. Definitely. One that wasn't born without eyes, with a worm like body. We also kind of debunked that. Oh, did we? Yes, the research we found was that we don't even have the capacity to detect pheromones any longer. Most humans don't. Right. So that whole idea is a little it's hit or miss. Like, there's some studies that suggested yes, this is true. Others that didn't. If you read the release, though, on this study that this guy's talking about yeah, the Monell Center study. Yeah. The researchers just totally leapt to a conclusion. I hate this study. They were like, women can differentiate. It's tougher to mask a man's odor to a woman. And he basically said, ergo, women can detect body odor better, which means that they must be detecting something, like, immune system robustness or something. Right. It was like, where did you get this extra stuff? It drives me crazy. I'm on a tirade today with bad research. Yeah. I'm sorry, everyone. I'm very sorry. Well, speaking of that leads us right into this article, actually. We like to point out when our own articles are quite up to snuff, and there were a few interesting things, and it's a shame that we can't find verification on these because I thought it was very interesting. Really interesting. A tribe in New Guinea says goodbye to each other by rubbing each other's armpits before they leave so you can keep a little piece of the other person to sniff. I thought that was really sweet. It's not a bit gross. And you said that it might be bunk. Sources I found virtually no support for this, and everything I found was not a reliable site. And then Austrian Tyrol, which is a very specific place to BS about, but they supposedly men would dance with handkerchiefs tucked under their arms and their armpits and I guess work up a real sweat and then be like you and point to the girl he was going for and wave the handkerchief under her nose. She would swoon, and they'd get married and have babies, in that order. Wow. You couldn't find verification for that either, right? No, same thing. But I found even less for that. What about the last one? This one appears to be true. All right. I misinterpreted this because I told Emily this one this morning, that in Elizabethan times, they would soak peeled apples in their armpit sweat and give them to their lover when they parted. And I, for some reason, took the leap to mean that they would eat them. And I thought it was the grossest thing I've ever heard, too. And Emily's like, no, I don't think they eat them. I think they just keep them. But they're called love apples, by the way. Well, that's not what I call love apples. What do you call love apples? Apples that you give to the teacher on their desk. It seems odd. That's an apple for the teacher. I love apples. Because you love your teacher. Were you home schooled by your mom? No, but my dad was my principal. I know that. I don't know. Did they eat them? They just kept them. I'm sure some sicko ate them. And how about Oscar Wild ate them. How did they collect enough underarm sweat to soak them is what I want to know. Here's. Victorian. This is Elizabeth. Soak it up in a hanky and ring it out, maybe? No, I think they just sat there for a while, but it doesn't drip out if you're dripping from it and rub it around. All right. Who knows? We'll try it. We'll try and make a video of it. So maybe they would rub the apple on their underarm. That would make sense. Yeah. I imagine they collected you just, like, hover over a table with an apple on it. Well, no, I imagine they collected the underarm sweat in a dish and then soaked it in that. But that's why I was thinking, just ignore me for the rest of the show. What was it? Was it a kid in the hall where they had some guy's body odor was so beautiful that they had this guy, like, some perfume company bought him, basically, and they had him running on a treadmill. Really? It was either Mr. Show or Kids in the hall. It was hilarious. Not cabbage head, clearly. No, it was like a segment, like an additional segment. You can tell where they put some money into it. Oh, yeah. All right, where are we? I did think this was interesting. The term bo, of course, comes from an advertising agency. Oh, yeah. It didn't surprise me at all. Deodorant and I love how this ad goes. Remember that wonderful man you met? The way he danced and the telephone number he asked for and never used? You should take the armhole odor test. Stinky. Yeah. Like you stinky, woman. That's why the man didn't call you back. That's why you're an 18 year old. Spencer yeah. Products in 1919 were not afraid to be sexist jerks. No. And I went back and remember this? Back in 1888, they released a product called Mum and think back with me to the anniversary. And Deodorant, one, you had to apply it with, like, a swab on a stick, and it worked, but it also would burn a hole through your clothes. And that was the first deodorant, right? Yes. Wow. Mum. I think it was still around for a while. Well, in Tussy. What was that? I don't know. Or what was the sprinkle of day one? Just a sprinkle a day. Was that for under arms or was that for feet? Have you had your sprinkle today? It was like a general body deodorant, I don't think sprinkle your body. Yeah. Like Gold Bond. Yeah. I like the gold bond, though. Oh, yeah. That's a lifesaver with certain things. So, Chuck yes. Have you ever seen that one, Simpsons, where the homer in March have their kids taken away from them? Yes. And they have to go to the government parenting class. That's what this next segment is going to feel like. What do you do if you find that you have body odor? Well, one thing you can do, Josh, because interestingly animals would use their scent to broadcast, and scent would get tangled up in the hair, so they stick around a little longer. Sure. So obviously, if you have hair and you're growing, which you do, and your underarms, like we pointed out, the smell is going to stick around longer. So if you keep that area trim, then you're less likely to have odor in those places. Yes. That's good advice. And I'm a believer in keeping your body neat, as a general rule, regardless of the scent factor. Right. Take care of yourself. Well. Yeah. Manage your hair, your ear hair, your nose hair. And there is nothing shameful about a man getting a manicure and or pedicure. Okay, that was supportive. Well, I mean, it has nothing to do with body odor. Sure. There is nothing wrong taking care of yourself. Well, I bite my fingernails, so there's really kind of no point for me, you know, remember Kerry Grant took a bunch of acid? Yeah. Well, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader published a list of some of his best quotes while he was tripping, and the psychiatrists wrote them down, and one of them was, if I have to look at a man, shouldn't he have to comb his hair and brush his teeth? So Kerry Grant was big time into taking care of yourself, too. Wow. And look what happened to him. He had a long, successful life. Exactly. He's an acting legend. Bathing. Josh we said it takes an hour for the bacteria to do its thing. So if you've got a big interview or something, you're a little nervous, take that shower. Less than an hour. Yeah, because I don't know if we mentioned this. ECLIN sweat is triggered by body temperature. Apocrine sweat gland is triggered by emotion. Yeah, we didn't actually anxiety specifically is a big one that makes you start sweating. Yeah. Boy, I sweated a lot when I interviewed here. Oh, my God. It was July. Yeah, me too. And it was so that was August, and I couldn't figure out where this building was. Connolly just said it's like, by Lennox, parked at Lennox Mall and walked in like 100 degree heat, like half mile. And my shirt was like a dark blue, even though it's supposed to be light blue. And I'm like, hey, I'm here to be interviewed by you. I remember the shirt I wore, too, and it was light blue, which was a big mistake. I don't know what I was thinking. And I have not dressed that nice at this job since that day, which is, I think, how it should go at every job. Wait a minute. Are you wearing a suit? Brown? No. I should punch you for saying that. I didn't wear a tie or anything. It's like a nice shirt and pants. Got you. But look at me now. I'm glad you didn't punch me. By the way, what are some natural remedies, Josh, to avoiding this kind of thing if you're not into the chemicals? Boric acid. 20 Mule Team. Our good friends at 20 mule team. Yeah. Sprinkle a little powder under the arms. Yeah. It's actually a low level acid, and I think probably what it does is just makes your armpits inhospitable local flora. There you go. Yeah. Vinegar, which is just like the most amazing thing in the history of the world. Do you drink that stuff? No, I mean, we use vinegar for everything. You mean it's gotten me into, like, drinking diluted vinegar? Yeah, drinking it weed killer. You can kill weeds, like big time. Yeah. Not any, but many chemical remedies. I bet you if you look up on these homespun websites, some kind of vinegar might help you out as well. Well, it's changing the PH. Every time you change the phenomena accustomed to it's probably going to just die. Witch hazel. Yes. I like that smell. Do you? I can't stand it. I like it. Baking soda. As the article points out, it works in your fridge, so it will work on your armpits. Yeah, I've never done that, ideally. Theoretically, rosemary oil, dilute that in some water, little sprinkle on your underarms. Have you done that one? No. You know, it does work, though. Tea tree oil, because it's an antimicrobial. Right. So it's just going to go in there and destroy everything it sees. Yeah. That'll dry out pimples too. Big time. Well, since we're on deodorant, we might as well talk about some of the controversies with Annie perspective. Well, let's just give a brief overview of the difference between the two. What's the difference between deodorant and Annie Park print? Well, any perch sprint contains things like aluminum and what's the other one? Aluminum is the big one. Hydroxy bromide. Yes, hydroxy bromide. And they will essentially close up your sweat glands so they don't work. It plugs them for a little while. And not only no, eventually it is overall temporary, but the length of time between the application and the time you would start sweating again becomes longer and longer with repeated use because it actually shuts down your epicrine gland. It plugs it, swells it, and basically says, all right, I'm done trying. I worry about it some, to be honest. A lot of people do. A lot of people. Mine can reach 25%. Yes. Which is a lot. Oh, really? Yeah. That's a lot, dude. I know. And there's been plenty of studies that have linked aluminum to breast cancer. Aluminum has been shown to mutate cells into cancer cells, but there's never been like the smoking gun. Like, oh, yes, this person has breast cancer because they use deodorant. Well, yeah. And the cancers are hard to nail. That too, because there are so many things that could be contributing. Sure. And there's so many different types of cancer. Exactly. And then also with what? Alzheimer's. Yes. But I think that's just a general tenuous link between Alzheimer's and aluminum. I'm surprised that the studies are from the 19th 60. They've done something since then. I don't know. I think everybody's been focused on BPAS. Oh, really? Well, all the breast cancer links, they're newer than that. But no one's been able to produce a study that's definitively linked deodorants or any perceived, I should say, to breast cancer. Right. But there's a strong correlation. There are chalky deodorants, there are the liquid jelly types. You don't see the aerosols anymore, thank God. Right. And then there's the disgusting roll on that I'm not sure who uses still. I don't know either. Didn't Tussy make a roll on? I think so. Ban was big. I think they innovated the roll on. Did they? Sure. And then also, we should say deodorants are different from antiperspirants and that they don't stop you from sweating, but they make it so that when all your cell Derius reaches the skin surface in your underarms. There's no local Florida to eat it and then produce terrible smells as a waste. Tom's of Maine. Yeah, it's very popular. Natural deodorant. I love the apricot one. That my underarms laugh at. Yeah. And then the crystal stuff that makes your underarms too salty for the bacteria to live, right? Yeah. It's like a mineral crystal deodorant. I've never used this. Do you want to talk about any of that? This is not necessarily body odor from sweating, but there are some other smells that one can produce, like Asparagus pea. If you are interested in learning about why asparagus can make your pee smell, you should check out our video podcast, because we explained it. That's right. You specifically explained it. We did it together, and I think was it only a percentage of people believe that their pea smells don't give away. Don't give it away. Okay. But if you want to find it, you can find it on itunes. Just look for stuff you should know. Video podcast. That's right. You can also find it on RSS feed on how stuff works. It's short and kind of fun. Like, we're having a good time doing them, and they're really loose and, like man, they are so loose. Yeah. The things we're getting away with saying, I don't think people understand. Yeah. What else you've got? Asparagus pea. You have maple syrup urine disorder. We've talked about that, too. Yeah. It's a real thing, and there's no other clinical term for it. Like, that is the name of it, and it's actually kind of a big deal. Like, you have problems with your metabolism. It's a metabolic disease, and these amino acids can build up and kill you if you're not careful. Yeah. And it's in kids, and I think adults have a similar condition. You can make it to adulthood. Okay. But it won't smell like maple syrup anymore. It'll smell like, say it burnt sugar. I'm not sure what that smells like. Oh, what's that wonderful dessert? Creme brulee. Oh, well, that's lovely. Yeah. Okay. No one's complaining about the smell of their pee, but it's very worrisome. Got you. Okay. If you are around a diabetic, a person with diabetes who suffers from ketoacidosis, you might say that they smell a bit like nail polish remover and that their breath smells kind of fruity and like, Juicy Fruit. Kind of got you. And then what else, Chuck? Fishotor syndrome. Yeah. That means you lack the ability to metabolize something called TMA, and apparently you smell like fish. I don't know what kind of fish, but it's fishy. Yeah. And that's pretty what do they call that? I'm daring you to try and say that word. Trimethylamineuria. Nice. Thank you. That is the word. That's the primary trimethylamineuria. And that is the condition which means you can't metabolize the TMA, and that means you will smell like fish. Yeah. And then if you have phenylkenuria, you might have a barn like smell. Musty barn like smell. Can you imagine if you had the fish odor disease? You sweat blue and you had that condition that makes your face silver? What kind of life would that be? That would be a heck of a ride. I'm praying that none of those things are compatible. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. The blue skin thing, that's just from too much copper, right? Yeah. So there could be some comorbidity silver. Silver, yeah. Sweat blue. I got nothing else. Well, hyperhidrosis just for my friends out there who suffer from hyperhidrosis. I don't think I have hyperhidrosis. That's like I'm just extra sweaty. hyperhydrosis is really abnormally high. Right. Like these sad cases you hear about. And it can be men and women where your palms literally sweat all the time, just like, leaking water. And there's a variety of things you can do to treat that from surgery to ion tofursis which is using an electrical current to disable your sweat glands. Right. You can also have them surgically removed. Yeah, I wouldn't mind that from tiny and the neck up. Really? Yeah, because that's where my sweat bothers me. I don't mind, like, sweaty body, but when you're like, oh, you can get Botox to fix that. Nothing. Well, it works in my face. I do have one more thing. Brom hydrophobia. I thought that was interesting. So it's the fear of sweating. Oh, I thought it was the fear of stink. Oh, yeah, you're right. The fear of stinking from sweating. Brom hydrosis is yeah. Your body odor. Yes, you're right, Chuck. And somebody who suffers from brom hydrophobia will take a lot of showers every day to the point where it's been linked akin to OCD. But there's no other behavior except for taking showers or trying to or your fear of smelling. You're not messing with light switches or anything else, too. It's just the fear of smelling. I had that with poop smell specifically. Do you oh, man. If I walk in the bathroom and someone's taking care of things, I leave immediately. Oh, yeah. Or I will often put my shirt over my nose, and I do that when I clean up the litter box. And when I do the dog poop on the walks, I put my shirt I can't stand that. Yeah, because anybody who's seen The Ice Storm knows that those are the volatile organic compounds of your poop that you're smelling. That's what the odor is. It's your poop. What was that about? Ice Storm? I've seen that movie ten times. Some kid says it like in a school report or anything like that. I don't remember that part. I've never even seen the movie. I know that. Oh, man, it's great. I've heard angley. Director of the Hulk. So what else? I got nothing else. Let's stop talking about this then. Yes, please. If you like this one. There's a surprising amount of stuff about sweating on how stuff works.com. Sweating colors, the difference between any person deodorant. You can listen to those old podcasts. They're good too. And there's just a lot of sweating stuff if you have sweating problems. I personally wrote a lot of sweating things, too. Didn't you? No. Ironically, there's a push about. Yeah, remember that stuff. But just type sweating, S-W-E-A-T-I-N-G in the search bar athowstepworks.com. And that'll bring up some cool stuff. I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one on Guard. I think that's a fine one. Hey, guys. Through college, I was really active in fencing, the sport generated by the ancient duels and honor code you guys mentioned. One interesting symptom from engaging in fencing through, though, was an ultra critical eye on sword place shown in films. Oh, I bet. Movies like Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Highlander are examples of what is called, quote, show fencing, the art of making the largest flashiest attacks without ever threatening either actor. Show. Fencing is sometimes slanged as Flynn after Errol Flynn or Mark Hamilling. Hameling. He says that Aaron's Flynn pioneered this technique. Yeah, he's a swashbuckler. He was and still is, I think. Well, he's dead. He lives on now as a swashbuckler. Sure. If you or your listeners want to see excellent representations of Hollywood showing true fencing, I have two recommendations. First is the black and white version of The Three Musketeers. I think it's from I can get the other one riding in Cars with the Boy, how to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. The rape of your duel on the staircase at the tail end of the film is still admired of some of the best fencing on film nice to this day. The other film I'd recommend, and we got a few people tell us about this one is Ridley Scott's directorial premiere based on the true story of two Napoleon area Napoleon era French officers with a feud lasting for decades. The film accurately shows multiple types of duels and weapons, including foil, cavalry, saber, pistols, just to name a few. Foils the really thin, long, thin fencing? I think so, yeah. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that without looking it up. Well, we got some fractions. Coming to the film is simply a must for those who want to see great fencing and accurate dueling. And that is from Josh. That's from me. Yeah. Thanks, Me. Thanks, Josh. While we're on this, that joked my memory, the dueling reminded me of a movie that we well, not just a movie. Wow. I'm a hick. A movie and a book that we left out of the revenge podcast The Count of Monte Cristo. Sure. I don't know how we did that because that is like the quintessential revenge plot. Yeah, that's true. Also, I want to say in the beer episode, I wrongly attributed the superhuman hoppiness to one of the guys in the band Superhuman Happiness, when really, it was a super fan named Kurt Schlector. Well, and since we're on that, you also called New Belgium New Amsterdam. Oh, yeah, that was a big one. I'm really sorry, guys. They've even sent us to your New Belgium, makers of fine Fat Tire 64. Now, that's cronenberg. Let's just stop right here. Sorry, guys. And you do have to pay all kinds of money for covering songs, too, by the way. That was completely wrong. Okay? Yeah, that was a huge sidebar in the Spell it out. Like, no, you don't have to spend money. That's crazy. That's wrong. Okay, well, good. So I feel clean. Like, we just purged ourselves of all the correct yes. And not only that I didn't realize this, but clubs that have cover bands that play there actually pay yearly licensing fees so they can have the Kiss tribute band play. Got you. Oh, man. So I don't think the band plays. I think it's up to the club to take ownership of that. People will pay anything to have the Kiss tribute band play, especially if it's Strutter. Yeah, that's all done. So let's see if you're related to a member of the band Strutter or Kiss, or you have a correction for us, send it along. Just don't be a jerk when you do. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Facebook. Comstuffyou should know. And you can also reach us via email at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, stuff from the Future join House to work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
a7d2b076-361e-11ea-938d-2fd68063fd1b | Short Stuff: Teresita Basa | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-teresita-basa | In the annals of American justice there is a 1977 case where the police were tipped off to the identity of a murderer by a woman who said she was possessed by the victim. | In the annals of American justice there is a 1977 case where the police were tipped off to the identity of a murderer by a woman who said she was possessed by the victim. | Wed, 11 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=71, tm_isdst=0) | 13345478 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Dylan. Of course. This is Short Stuff. Short stuff now. So, Josh, I have a question for you. Okay. I know that every time we've go to Chicago, you're always like, this is the creepiest place I've ever been. It feels haunted. Forget New Orleans, right? Forget other creepy places. This Chicago is the scariest place on earth, right? I do say that. And you know what? After listening to this story, you might be right. Yeah. It is a surprising town. Like, that's kind of where the Dunes murders started. That's where the Tylenol murders were, I think, was in Chicago. I just realized this is the third one, huh? Yeah. At the very least. At the very least. And in fact, part of this episode takes place in Edgewater Hospital, which look up abandoned Edgewater Hospital. There's like 50 pictures of this one. Maybe abandoned hospital. Oh, my gosh, those are the best. And I think it was abandoned maybe in the 90s. It's like this empty, abandoned hospital in a high rise. But it's where Hillary Clinton was born. And where John Wayne Gacy was born. Really? Yeah. Are they creepmates? I don't know. I didn't go to the trouble of checking out their ages to see how far apart they were. But wouldn't that be weird? Has the alt right linked them together? Eventually. If not, they will now. We just gave them a little piece, a little shred. No. But we'll look into it. So, at the Sedgewater Hospital, there's a woman named Teresita Bassa who worked there, and she was 47, she was Filipino, and apparently she was a well to do Filipino aristocrat ex pat who lived in America and worked as a respiratory therapist nurse in at Edgewater Hospital. And she lived in Chicago. In Chicago property, not in the suburbs. And one day, she is discovered in her apartment under a smoldering pile of clothing, naked, with a kitchen knife sticking out of her chest. She had been murdered. I think the fire department found her, and they were really surprised with what they found. Yeah, it was a pretty routine call for them of an apartment fire on February 2, 77, and like you said, under a mattress. Oh, that's right. A clear murder because of that kitchen knife sticking out of her chest. Right. That would have been a heck of an accident. Sure. You stab yourself in the chest and then set your clothing on fire under a mattress. Yeah, it would have been heck of an accident. Right. So, unfortunately, it just goes unsolved. There's like, six months in. These detectives who are working the case. They try out every lead. They start doing some investigating. They find maybe there were people who wanted her dead. Nobody had the right motive or opportunity. There was no good suspect, and they reached a total dead end within six months. That's right. So Detective Joe Statula of homicide came in one day about six months later, saw a note on his desk that said, call the Evanston Police Department about the Teresita Basic case. He called Evanston, and they said, hey, you need to call Dr. Jose Chua in Skokie. And he said, can't they have just put that on the note? He would have saved me a phone call. Right. And they said, we wanted you to know it came from us. Right. So skokie, Illinois, which always reminds me of usual suspects. Oh, definitely does it to you, too. Barbershop quartet. That's right. Skokie, Illinois. They went to see Doctor Jose. We call him Joe Chua, who was also a Filipino, as we'll see, and they interviewed him, and he said, a weird thing has happened here. My wife, she's 38 years old. She has gone into trances three different times, saying in Tagalog that she is Teresita Bassa and she needs help solving her murder. And here's who did it, right. Which is very, very weird and kind of something that you would probably ignore, especially if you got a call from somebody saying, yeah, my wife went into a trance and said that she's a murder victim. But there were two things going on here. One, statula and his partner had reached a total dead end in this case, and really any lead was worth pursuing at this point. Right? And then two, not only had the doctor's wife what is it? Removasa? No, Remedius. Remedius Ramadius Chua. Doctor Joseph say to his wife, not only had she said that she was this murder victim, she named the murderer. And she also said that the murderer had been in Terrifica's apartment and had stolen things from it, and that some of that stolen goods were jewelry that he had given to his girlfriend. So the fact that this voice from the grave was saying that she was a murder victim and also saying who did it and what they did with the jewelry, that was enough, apparently, to convince the detectives to follow up on it. And not only that, before we take our little break, she gave names of people who could identify this jewelry and telephone numbers of those people, which is pretty nuts. Yeah. Ron, Samara Kinbasa, Richard Pacify and Ray Kings. And that's not even the murderer. So that's a pretty good set up, I think we'll take a break, okay. And we'll tell you what happened right after this. All right. So she says in these trances in Tagalog that she is this murdered woman, Teresita bossa, this guy broke into my house who works at my hospital as a respiratory technician. He comes in to ostensibly fix the television, murders me, steals my jewelry that was given to me in France as a gift from my father to my mom. He stole the stuff here's. The people that can verify it. Here are their phone numbers. They decide to investigate, and it checks out. It checks out. That's the crazy thing. That's the crazy thing. The detectives start looking into this and they're like, there is this man named Alan Showery and he did work with Teresita Bassa, so let's go visit him. And they went to because she named him. We've got across. Right? Right. She said Alan shower killed me. Right. That this woman in the trance said, this man Allen Showery was my murderer. Yeah. And she gave enough information. The detectives followed up on it. They went to visit Alan Showery and they said, hey, will you come down to the station with us? And he went with them voluntarily, which is very important, as we'll see in a minute. And they started interviewing him about Teresita Boss's murder. Apparently, they read him his rights. They did everything by the book. They didn't arrest him or anything like that. But he started answering questions down at the station. And the more questions he answered, the more they started to suspect that he was lying because they were actually catching him in lies and contradictions and things like that. And eventually he admitted to having gone to her apartment to help her fix the TV but that she had called and canceled before he got there. So he went home instead. Well, the second thing they did was they went to his apartment and talked to his girlfriend and said, hey, has your boyfriend given you any jewelry recently? She said, well, yeah, he gave me this pendant and this ring as a late Christmas present. And I love them. Don't they just look divine, the late Christmas present? And the detectives say, well, yes, it does look very nice, but can we see these things or take pictures of them? I don't know if they took them from her. And they had Teresita Boss's relatives that had been named, apparently by Rami Chua to come down and look at this jewelry and say yay or nay? Whether it was Teresita's. And they said, Yay. This is remarkable. So this is all plowing ahead. He is arrested and charged. There is a trial hearing. Hold on. He confessed? Oh, yeah. So he confessed. Sure. Right. So they have a trial hearing on a motion from the assistant public defender, William Swano. And he says, you know what? There's no probable calls here. They got a call about a trance that I think this woman faked. And that arrest was illegal to begin with because they liked probable calls and, quote, never, to my knowledge, has a man been arrested because of a supernatural vision. Police have never been informed of a criminal's name by a voice from the grave. And the judge went, except until now. Because that's exactly what happened, dude. Yeah. The judge upheld it in this hearing to throw out the entire arrest because, again, Chuck, regardless of whether this trance was Teresita Bassa possessing Raimi Chua, regardless of what you think of that in the annals of American justice, there is a case where a man was arrested strictly because of a tip that detectives received from a woman claiming to have been possessed by the murder victim. That happened. Yeah. And the judge said, I see no reason to restrict the investigatory power of the police. Whether they believe the voices or not, they had to check it out. And that was sort of the party line, which was like, hey, man, it doesn't matter if a dog came out and peed out a name on the street. Like, they went to this guy's house and he did it right, so who cares? That was basically the whole thing. Because the police followed proper procedure, because they advised him of his rights, because Alan Showery went with them voluntarily and answered their questions voluntarily. And the fact that he confessed all of this, it doesn't matter, as far as the law is concerned, whether Teresita Bassa possessed Ramachi or not. They followed procedure, and they followed up on this tip. And so there's a trial. And during the trial, Allen Shower, it looked like he might get off. There was a mistrial, in fact. But then he surprised everybody while he was awaiting a new trial. He pled guilty and didn't get a second trial and instead was given something like 14 years for the murder and then four years each for robbery and arson. But he only served, I think, something like five. Yeah, which is crazy, too. In and of itself, it is crazy. But he was caught strictly because of that call from Ramyua's husband, Dr. Jose Chua. And so now you have to go back and say how much of this is true? And apparently everything we said is true and verified that there were reports done on it. That thing about that hearing, that was from a Washington Post article we found from 1978, I believe. Yeah, this is all true. Then no one came out later and said, my wife's actually an amateur investigator, and she thought it would be kind of fun to solve this case and then present it and wrap it in the enticing book jacket of a trance. Right. I think we found some guy in a story from Chicago wrote a post about it, and he kind of captured what I suspect. One thing that gets left out very frequently is that Rami Chua was a coworker of all three. Kind of friend. Yeah. Of Teresita Bassa. Went to a party at her apartment, so knew where she lived, and then also knew Alan Showery and was actually scared of Allen Shower. So the historian posits that she was actually so afraid of coming forward, but so overcome by the guilt of keeping this thought to herself that it came out. It just came out like that. And that makes sense. It would be more culturally acceptable to do that than to just keep it to herself. Interesting, that's where the trans came from that she somehow acquired all this knowledge. If that's the case, that's still pretty interesting, too. Yeah, she could have been sleepwalking and talking, sure, which appears like a trance, but either way, it's all pretty remarkable. It is pretty remarkable. One of the most remarkable cases in American law enforcement and justice. And that's why we dedicated twelve minutes to it. More than that, man. 13 and a half, baby. That's it for this short Stuff, right? That's right. Short stuff away. Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
4112a3e6-53a3-11e8-bdec-c756e5938fde | How the Spanish Flu Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-spanish-flu-worked | The Spanish Flu killed anywhere from 20-100 million or more people over 1918/1919. All of this played out with World War I in the foreground, one big reason why the flu spread so far, so fast. Learn all about this devastating pandemic in today's episode. | The Spanish Flu killed anywhere from 20-100 million or more people over 1918/1919. All of this played out with World War I in the foreground, one big reason why the flu spread so far, so fast. Learn all about this devastating pandemic in today's episode. | Tue, 08 Jan 2019 14:50:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=14, tm_min=50, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=8, tm_isdst=0) | 55603695 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant right there. There's Jerry over there, and we're well, you guys are feeling fine. I'm a little under the weather, but it's still Stuff You Should Know. The 2019 Flu edition. That's right. And this is dangerously close to publish date for us. Yeah, a little close for comfort, if you ask me. But you know what? This gives us the opportunity to do real time stuff. Yeah. Like, say, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. Yeah. We're going to be in your town next week. No, you're right, dude. Next week when this comes out. Yeah. So more theater on January 15 in Seattle Revolution Hall in Portland on January 16. And then our annual sketch fest show at the Castro on January 17. That's right. Tickets are moving kind of slow, guys. And I think there's been people writing in saying, I didn't even know that you were coming. I don't know what the problem is. We're coming. We're coming. Yeah. We're still troubleshooting what the deal was, because we don't ever want to to happen again. But I just feel good knowing that everybody's not mad at us out in the Pacific Northwest. Well, I hope not. I would hope not, too, but it was kind of looking that way for a second. We think it might be something to do with our promos. Who knows? So we wanted to put it in this episode, right? Like in the body of the episode. Like you can't miss it. So now, you know, go to Sisklife.com and there will be links out to go get tickets, info, all that stuff, and we'll see you guys next week. So hurry, hurry, hurry. Go get your tickets. We'll see you next week. Yeah, next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Right. And I will be feeling better by then, I'm hoping. Yeah, I hope so. Chuck is kind of appropriate that we're talking about the flu, because I don't have the flu, but I'm a little sick, a little funky. I'm not contagious, so don't worry. Well, I appreciate you wearing the face mask anyway. Which it turns out, according to this article that Ed wrote yeah. Useless. It doesn't do anything. Yes. I don't know if that's truly useless. Is it? Yes, I think it is actually quite useless, really? If it's a bacterial infection, it might do something because bacteria is much larger than viruses. But viruses are very small, certainly small enough to be expelled through the mesh of a gauze when you cough or sneeze into it. So you sneeze and that mass puffs out and little particles spew, maybe just not as far. Yeah, they might be slowed down a little bit. Who knows? Maybe like being pushed through, like a little channel speeds them up and increases their tradition. Oh, my God. We don't know yet. Yes, but this is a flu centric episode. And I can't remember. I think I was turned onto this idea. You were turned on by this idea? No, to this idea. Oh, I see. I think it was when I was sort of going down a World War One rabbit hole. Oh, yeah, you're talking about that in some episodes. I think that was what it was. So this is pretty appropriate that we're talking about this because exactly 100 years ago today, basically, the United States, the world really was standing there stricken, picking up the pieces of basically shattered societies all around the globe that has just been leveled, absolutely leveled, by a flu epidemic that came through and killed so many people, made so many people sick. It's widely seen as possibly tied for first. If not, it's a very close second to the worst natural disaster and the worst pandemic to ever hit humankind in the history of our species. Yeah, that's how bad it was. And it happened just 100 years ago. Yeah, I've seen estimates as high as 50 million people dead. Yeah, I've seen it up to 100 million, I think 50 million. It used to be like the low end and now or the high end, and now it's starting to become clear. It's probably about the low end. I think the low end is 20. Is that right? And I'm going to name the high end 500 million people that's supposedly, from what I've seen, how many were actually infected? Well, possibly. And not only that, when that many people die, it changes the course of world history. Yeah. Basically, it unravels the fabric of society as we'll see. Yeah. Society and cultures and rules and just how humans looked at the Earth. It really turned the forward march of humanity in a certain direction. It definitely did. And it's really difficult. This is one of the most fascinating pieces of world history to me because it was like it's pretty well documented because it happened only 100 years ago, and because it's just so insane what happened. Like, the Spanish flu was so bad, Chuck, that people were dying of thirst because there was no one around them to take care of them. The people who were still healthy were so afraid of catching the flu, they would basically let their neighbors die alone in their homes rather than go help them and take care of them and give them water. That's how bad it was. People were dying of thirst from being so laid up by the flu and not being able to get water themselves and not having anyone to take care of them. And it happened in the United States 100 years ago and all over the world. And despite all of this horrific thing that we're about to talk about, the Grabster started his article writing about hockey because he is from Buffalo, and then later on he's like, it's the third wave that canceled the NHL playoffs. Yeah. I mean, it is a footnote, though. The Stanley Cup, the very famous Stanley Cup, the trophy of the NHL that has all the winning teams etched into it says, Series not completed. That's all it says. Unless you know what's going on, you might just scratch your head and say, why was the series not completed that year? And the reason is because the Spanish flu literally killed one of the players and got quite a few of them sick on both sides of the Seattle Metropolitans and the Montreal Canadians. Yeah, I guess right before the fifth game was going to be played or the 6th game was going to be played, four of them were in the hospital, one died and they were like, yeah, we'll just go ahead and cancel the series this year. Crazy. But what is crazy is, like, that that's pretty bad because think about it, you're a hockey player, you're probably young, you're probably pretty healthy. That's really weird to die from the flu. And that was a big hallmark of the Spanish flu, as we'll see. But this was also like a third wave. This is the third round house that the Spanish flu had delivered to the global population when the Stanley Cup was canceled or the NHL playoffs was canceled that year. 1919. Amazing. So let's talk a little bit about flu normally, shall we? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone understands that the flu is not bacterial like you were talking about. It is a virus and ordinarily like the flu that you have. Is it the flu you have or cold? It's just like a cold. It's just funk, you know what I mean? You mean I went to Vegas for her birthday to go see Dave Chappelle and John Mayer and I think just being on the plane and being kind of run down and everything, we both kind of picked up a little bit funk. I think it's the time of year, it's a funky kind of year. It only gets sick every January. Yes. I think it also has to do with the holidays, just because they're as fun and unadulteratedly enjoyable as they are, they're also a tad stressful sometimes. Oh yeah, that's her busy time of year for her business. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. It's almost inevitable that she'll get sick every January. Just like her body is fighting and fighting all through December and then just goes literally the day after Christmas. It's like sniff. Yeah, you just crash. Here it comes. Yeah. So the flu is a virus, and in most cases, like I was saying, you have your aches and your fever and your coughing and you're tired, and sometimes it may affect your stomach, some, sometimes it may not. But it's usually in and out in a few days and that's sort of the end of it. Like you mentioned, if you're elderly or if you're a little tiny one, the flu can be pretty dangerous in any case, but ordinarily in healthy adults is just a regular sickness that comes and goes. Yeah, especially like if you look at a graph of ages starting at an infant all the way, say 200 year olds. If you look at flu deaths, it goes down in the middle and then goes back up. It's high on one end, high on the other end, very low to nonexistent in the middle. Like, healthy middle aged and younger adults don't die from the flu normally. Right. So there are many types of flu. Many strains of this virus. And in 1918. For the Spanish flu. Which we'll get to the odd naming of that in a second. It was type A. Subtype H one. N one. Because they have subtype designations. And then within those subtypes. There are other strains because the flu is constantly trying to outrun humans and humans trying to beat it down. Yeah, I guess so. So it's like, I'm just going to change a little. Yeah, watch this. And it goes and now it's Bumblebee from Transformers. Exactly. So this was a genuine pandemic called the Spanish Flu. And I never knew this at all, but it really had nothing to do with being out of Spain, or have anything to do with Spain, other than the fact that Spain was neutral in World War One. And while other newspapers around the world were really censoring things and not so free, spain was just the only country really reporting about the flu. Yeah, right. They call the Spanish flu. I didn't realize this either in the Spanish were like, no, wait, you guys aren't getting this. It's all just disproportionately on us. But it started in Kansas, right? It seems like Spain had the worst of it because, like you said, they were the only ones who are openly reporting on it. And some of the axis and allied. Actually, that might have been world war II, but like france, Germany, great britain, the US. The governments were at war and their propaganda machines were in full swing. They didn't want to do anything to impact morale. They also didn't want to give the enemy any indication that their troops were sick, that there was a flu virus spreading through their ranks. So they just downplayed it at home and everywhere. But since Spain was neutral, they talked about it and it seemed like Spain had the worst of it. That's totally not the case. It was all just reporting. Spain just reported on it openly. That's fascinating to me. Yeah, totally fascinating. And it was a legit pandemic because it touched kind of every corner of the globe, except for notably, two places that were able to successfully quarantine themselves. What was that? American Samoa. Yeah, in New Caledonia. Are those even places? They still are places, thanks to those quarantines. Yeah. It could have wiped them out. Oh, yeah. I think some places did get wiped out. I believe Western Samoa was basically wiped out by the Spanish flu. There were plenty of settlements, especially Native American settlements in more remote places like Alaska, that were almost entirely, if not entirely, wiped out. And then, depending on where you went around the world, like Japan got hit, but they had like a 1% infection rate or something like that, where other places had, like I think globally, it was about 30%. So it was strange how it hit people differently, but it was definitely, like you said, it was a real pandemic in that it was everywhere around the world. This strain of the flu was leveling people. Yeah. And there's a couple of other kind of startling stats. That 500 million infected that you were talking about, not dead, but infected, that was about a 33% of the world's population, which is startling. And in the United States, life expectancy, you know how it talked about it just changing everything? Oh, yeah. It actually altered life expectancy in the US. By twelve years. Yeah. From 1918 and 1919, the average expected, or the life expectancy, like you said, it went to 36.6 for men and 42.2 for women. Man, which is pretty like what it had been before was still pretty low. But to drop by twelve years overnight, basically, because I don't think we've gotten this across yet, Chuck. What we're talking about happen in less than a year. In less than a year, a third of the world's population came down with this very virulent flu, and as much as 5% of the world's population died from that flu in less than a year. Yes, and we'll talk about the different waves, but the second deadliest wave really was about four months, and the amount of people that died within a four month period all over the world is just like it's hard to really grasp. It really is. And the other thing about it, too, is largely because of that propaganda machine, the propaganda machines that were in full operation in all those different countries, along with kind of exuberance for the war being over or just basically being focused on the war, because the Spanish flu happened at the same time World War One was going on and ending. It's not remembered like you think it would be. You would think this would be like everyone would know about this and be talking about it, and it's not. It just kind of got swept under the rug, historically speaking, in a lot of ways. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, I think that was a wonderful long winded set up. That's what we do. That's how we do things. All right, Chuck, so let's start at what may be the beginning. There's this guy named John M. Barry, and he is not embarry, by the way. His middle initial is M, and his last name is Barry. He is an historian, and he wrote a book called The Great Influenza. And he wrote an article based on his research called how the horrific 1918 flu spread across America on Smithsonian magazine. And this guy has done some legwork, and he has created a theory that starting in about January of the beginning of 1918, there was a flu outbreak in haskell county, Kansas, which is a very rural agricultural area, and that some of those farm boys who came down with the same flu made their way to camp funston, which is part of Fort Riley, Kansas now. Yes, santa Fe in particular is the town, if you want to even pinpoint it further, in Kansas, not New Mexico. Yes, Santa Fe, haskell county, Kansas, 300 miles west of camp funston. Yeah. So some of these farm boys who were sick with this flu ended up being drafted and sent to camp funston. And it was camp funston where they think the first cases of the Spanish flu started to break out. That first wave happened in about the spring and then traveling over to Europe into the summer of 1918. And that first wave wasn't particularly bad. It wasn't even particularly noteworthy. And it was mostly confined to doughboys, basically people who worked on military basis as well, and then maybe towns near military basis, but that was about it. And then it went away. And it wasn't like had it just been that, it probably would not have been remarkable historically at all. Yeah. And we may not even know about any of this as far as its origin. And there have been a lot of other theories over the years about its origin, but this one seems to hold the most water now. But we may not have ever known anything about any of the origin if it had not been for doctor Lauren Minor, who was for a small of a county in town as this was. He was a really great town doctor, and he was like, at the time, flew just would come and go, like I said. So it was never reported on in journals. It was never really a big deal. It was never published. But Dr. Lauren minor was so alarmed at the rate of spread in his small town and how much of a wallop that it packed, he actually published his concerns in a journal called the public health reports journal has a different name today, but he was the only person in the world expressing concern. And I believe this is still the very first case of influenza being reported because of how unusual and deadly that they thought it could be. Yeah, I saw that, too. The very fact that this guy reported it at all is remarkable. Yeah. So they kind of trace it back and say, we now think we know where ground zero was. Haskell county, Kansas. So from haskell county, Kansas, it went to camp funston, and then it went over to Europe. This is the first wave that we're talking about. They had to change their name because that used to be we put the fun in Fenston. Right. And then after that they were like that anymore. Yeah, we got to go to Fort Riley. So over in Europe, something happened to this flu. It mutated in some way. It did something it mixed with some other flu, maybe from Asia, maybe something that was present in Europe, who knows? But there was a flu outbreak over there in Europe, particularly at one called Atapada. I think I added a little extra mustard on that. But it's generally how you say it, it was a huge British camp that held up to 1000 troops and it was packed elbow to elbow in the summer of 1918. And so that definitely did not help keep the flu under wraps. It spread pretty quickly and then some of those American soldiers fighting in World War I who were in Europe made their way back to the United States. And so this strain of flu that had made its first wave out of Kansas over to Europe came back. And when it came back, it was different in all the worst ways. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about how it got overshadowed by World War One, but it may not have even happened had it not been for World War I because the conditions of army boot camp and shuttling soldiers overseas, like you were saying, it's tight quarters. It's like just dudes stacked on each other all up in each other's faces. And it was just sort of a recipe for disaster. While this war was not unfolding, it had unfolded by that point, but it was really just a confluence of factors. It was really kind of staggering. Well, plus also you can make the case that those Kansas farm boys never would have made their way to Camp Funston and they certainly never would have made their way to Europe. Yeah. So it probably wouldn't have happened, especially if the thing mutated in Europe and got worse. The Spanish flu. Yeah. Probably never would have happened had it not been for the First World War. Yeah. The other problem was, and there are a lot of factors to why it spread so quickly, but one was because it didn't really look like the flu in a lot of cases, doctors really quite they were slow to diagnose as a flu and then as an epidemic because a lot of people were dying from pneumonia and for a while they thought it was bacterial in nature. So they were coming up with vaccines and all this stuff and none of that was working. And so it kind of took a long time. Even though Dr. Minor in Kansas was kind of ringing the bell, no one was still paying attention. So it took a long time for them to kind of sound the alarm and say, all right, we got a real problem here. Right. And at the time they knew that viruses existed. But they still weren't sure what they were they called viruses. Filterable agents. Because they had figured out. And I think back in 1892. That if you filtered an infection through something called a Chamberlain candle. Which can filter out any and all bacteria. Some infections still persist. Which shouldn't be the case because you've just filtered out all the bacteria. So that means that there's something smaller than bacteria that we don't really know about that can cause infection. There's some other pathogen out there, and this is the way that they approached viruses. I think by the time the Spanish fleet was still around, we knew that there was something out there. But no one had actually ever seen a virus and wouldn't see a virus until, I think, the 1930s, because they're too small for optical microscopes. So the idea that this was caused by a bacterial agent, it makes a lot of sense. That's what humanity had experience in dealing with and treating. But then on top of it, like you said, so many people were dying or getting pneumonia that it just appeared like it was a horrible bacterial pandemic rather than a viral one or typhoid or cholera. It was misdiagnosed all over the place because some of these symptoms were just unusual. Like bleeding out of the ears. It's so bad when you're bleeding out of your ears, things are going badly for you. It doesn't get much worse than bleeding out of your ear. You have serious issues if you're bleeding. Unless, of course, you've nicked the inside of your ear with your fingernail. If you're bleeding out of your ear from inside of your head, that's bad news. Yeah, for sure. I just want to make sure I'm on the record as having that position on bleeding out of your ears. Anti ear bleeding, pretty much. And with the war effort again, it's just all these things are kind of happening at once. So it was sort of just kind of sneaking through the back door in the worst way you could ever imagine. So this is all going on. The reason we do know so much about it, and I know that it hasn't gotten all the attention of the plague and things like that, but in the medical community it has. They weren't like, all right, well, that went away. That's great. Here in modern times, starting in the 1930s, they started on the download, collecting blood samples and examining tissue slides and getting either from people who had died, like, from the bodies, or from people that were still alive that survived it. And they have really been doing all this kind of cool, almost like a criminal case like this research to try and learn, because you don't want something like this to ever happen again. Right. Well, one of the scary things, Chuck, is that most people who are in public health and epidemiology and vernogy say, like, yeah, this could totally happen again. And it would probably be way worse because of our connectibility how connected we are, we probably have a greater chance of containing it just because of the advances in public health that we've undertaken thus far. But it could happen. I actually talk about this a lot, including the Spanish flu and this one biotech episode of The End of the World. And from what I saw, it could very well happen just about any time. Well, this other part I don't quite get. Does this strain still exist or not? Because it was a little confusing in that part. Okay, get this, dude. It had gone totally extinct. It had come and gone as we'll see it. Just basically, maybe it burned through everybody. It killed off everybody so fast that it couldn't spread any longer. And like you said, flu viruses mutate very frequently. So also our body, like, if you survive a viral infection, you typically are conferred immunity for the rest of your life. So the people who are left were not going to catch the Spanish Flu again. Right. Okay. So it had run its course, gone extinct. So much so that not even just the strain of flu, but all H one N, one flu left human circulation by the 19 and 50s. Somebody this dude named Johann Holton. Who is a microbiologist in the then later on in the 90s. He went to a little town called Brevick Mission. Alaska. And he dug up the corpse of a Native American woman and an UPC women's who had died and had been buried in a mass grave from the Spanish Flu and took samples of her lung tissue and took it back to another microbiologist whose name I cannot remember. Who basically synthesized the genome of it. Okay, great. We understand it genetically. We've got it now. They went one step further and actually created the Spanish flu virus again, resurrected it from extinction. And yes, the Spanish flu is still around because humans brought it back to life. All right, well, that makes more sense now. I mean, in one way, right? It's a great thing to do. Well, what's funny is, depending on what you read, if you read, like, a Popular Mechanics article about it, it's like, this is an amazing, great achievement, but for my money, it was a terrible achievement. I really don't think we should have taken an extra step and resentmentised it. Although, admittedly, we have learned a lot about the Spanish flu from that process, but I think you could have still stopped short from resurrecting it from extinction. Jeez. Yeah. All right, so we've talked a lot about the three waves, which is really unusual for an epidemic like this. It had happened before. I'm thinking the 16 hundreds and 1800, but this was a whole different sort of beast. So that first wave hit in the spring of 1000, 9018, specifically like March and April. It was in the US. It was in Europe and it was in Asia. So it's already, I mean, that's some serious ground that it's covered already. Thanks again to World War I. Yes, exactly. So this one wasn't like super deadly. Military bases and camps was where it was mostly found. But again, with these troops moving everywhere, it was really kind of moving fast. The second wave was the really deadly one. And that's one where I mentioned it over about a four month, 16 week period, it did most of the killing that fall, with October being the most deadly month in the United States. In the history of the United States to this day. It's the deadliest month. 195,000 people died in America from the flu in October of 1000, 1918. Yes. Literally everyone was touched in their family. Like there's no way to escape it almost at that point. Yeah. And we'll talk about it later. But that's how a society can crumble. That's how a small community can crumble. When that many people die that quickly, things just get out of whack, to say the least. Yeah. So this one I think the reason this one came back so deadly was because it mutated over that summer and came back even more lethal than it was before. And some people who had been infected by the first wave did have some immunity on that second wave, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. I guess if you survived the first wave, especially if it was just a slightly mutated version of the exact same strain, I could see that. Well, that's what I wondered, though, is like, how much does something have to mutate before that immunity doesn't count? Well, I don't know. We should say Chuck too. We're speculating here that the first wave and the second wave were the same strain of flu. Yeah, that's true. That's never been proven. Like fluid samples and the tissue samples that you said they took back in the 30s, those were all from second wave victims and survivors. We don't have any samples from the first and maybe not even the third wave, but definitely the bulk, if not all, of the samples we have. And so all the studying we've done has been from that second most deadly wave. So they may not have been the exact same strain, but it is weird that people would have had an immunity to that second wave if they've been through the first. Yeah, I think it was connected, for sure. I do too. So third wave hits after a short period of time. This was less widespread, not as severe as the deadly second wave, but worse than that first wave, which was not so deadly. And this was mainly through the beginning of 1919. Through April of 1919. Yeah. Ed points out that it depends on where you're talking about. But it was much more sporadic geographically. It wasn't like from January to April, the whole world didn't have the flu. Right. It's just around the world that flu outbreak was still going on. But. Not everywhere. Should we take another break? Let's all right, we're going to take another quickie and then talk about kind of what also made this especially deadly right after this. All right, we're going to talk about what made this so deadly. In addition to the war going on, at the same time, there was some other weird factors and characteristics of this flu. Right. We mentioned young and healthy people already, but it bears saying again, the death rate for people between 25 and 34 was really high, and conversely, children were infected at a high rate. It's not like they weren't getting it, but they had a low mortality rate, and nothing about that makes sense. Yeah. So for the 25 to 34 age group, who you would think would probably be the highest group of survivors, they had a two times higher death rate than the 45 to 64 age group during the Spanish flu, which was ancient. Yeah. Really? I mean, if the average life expectancy normally was something in the forties to the 50s, that is kind of ancient. Actually, I would be on death door in 1918. Yeah. Just like with a typical flu, infants and the very elderly and people with compromised immune systems, they died in the greatest numbers. But when you look at that graph, there's a huge spike among young, healthy adults where they normally shouldn't be. And there's a lot of theories about why that happened. One reason is because it was spread among soldiers, and those soldiers were starting to come home at the time, so they spread it to their wives who were about the same age. They spread it to their children, they spread it to their friends. So it definitely was hanging around a specific age group. But they also think that there was a large amount of deaths and that this also accounts for the pneumonia deaths that killed so many people, something called the cytokines storm, which sounds like terrifying to me. Yeah. That is when you have such an overstimulation of immune cells that it just generates, basically, you drown in your own flim because of an over stimulation of immune cells creating so much fluid. Like, your immune system is so good and so healthy, it kills you. Your immune response is so massive, and they're just starting to understand cytokine storms. Cytokines activate immune cells, and that's what causes the inflammation, the water on the lungs, which then gets infected by bacteria, which gives you pneumonia, which can kill you. They're just starting to understand this, but they have linked it to the appearance of new flus that people haven't been exposed to before. And this is probably the number one reason why people who were young and healthy adults died in such numbers, because their age group hadn't been exposed to any H one n one flu before. So not only was this a new strain of Ho one n one to their bodies, this is a brand new type of virus that they'd never been exposed to. And so people whose immune systems were over amped died from these cytokinestones, they think. Man. Another unusual thing was how fast it killed you. There were cases where you would literally say, I'm not feeling so good, and then 12 hours later you were dead. Can you believe that? Yeah, victims died very, very fast. Which, you know, when people are dying this quickly, it just compounds. And then you've got like hospitals and overflowing with people, and then you can't care for them, and then people being turned away because they're too full, and then they spread it more. And there are reports of people toe tagging people that were still alive. They just knew that they were going to be dead soon. Did you see that American Experience documentary? Yes. It was really tough. Apparently bedside manner just developed in the last couple of decades. But did it? Yeah, that's a good question. But I mean, can you imagine going to the doctor and the doctor saying, like, better get in line for a casket, sun, or twelve year old. Yes. Or telling your twelve year old that you just punch that doctor in the mouth, or putting a toe tag on a live person. That's just nuts. But there's verifiable reports that they did this. Of course, back then, if you were twelve, you've seen a lot of life, kid. You're middle aged, you've had two full careers, right. You retired from coal mining at seven. But get yourself fitted for that casket because you're not going to live to see 30 like your old man. And here's a lollipop. So sad. I know we're making fun of this, but that's the only way I can get through it. Okay. Another thing that it did was, well, we've already kind of hit on this a lot, but how quickly it went so far, and again, largely because of this war, and because it was attacking people so violently and quickly. Like, us. Towns in the United States tried to quarantine themselves, but it was just too late. Like you couldn't stem that tide at that point. You couldn't. There was a guy on that American Experience documentary who lived through it as a boy, and he was saying that it was coming our way, it was coming down the highway toward us, just town after town, we give these flu outbreaks. And his town tried to quarantine themselves, but the mailman brought it in. And if it's not the mailman, it's going to be somebody else. If you have a soldier returning from home from Europe, you're not going to be like, you can't come home yet. We got to wait until this potentially never ending flu epidemic goes away before you can come back home. There's just some way it's going to get through. And it got through. Apparently everywhere except New Caledonia and American Samoa. Yeah. Another characteristic of it was the symptoms that had. So in addition to bleeding out of your ears, you would get mahogany cheeks, these weird brown spots on your cheekbones. You would turn blue because your lungs were not oxygenating the blood nearly enough so your extremities in your face and lips would turn blue. There was a nurse in that documentary that said you needed to basically be on guard at all times because people would shoot blood out of their nose across the room, and you would just have to step out of the way to not get splattered by it. People would scream when they were touched, even lightly. It was just an astoundingly bad flu. There was vomiting, nausea, like delirium, just every horrible symptom you can think of, people basically had. And if you're a doctor at the time, you're not like, oh, this is the flu. You were like, what is this? I've never seen anything like this before. Well, and again, that led to it getting even worse because of the confusion, again, over symptoms, how slow they reacted because of the war. Like, it's really hard to imagine a pandemic outbreak coinciding with a world war the likes of which the world had never seen at that point. Yeah. And they said that people had room to really focus on one thing, and they had to choose between the war and the flu pandemic, and they chose the war instead. Well, because it was also a time not to make too light of it, but back then it was when, you know, like, you're not really sick. Like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get to work. Right. People dying over there. People didn't have the most sympathy for sickness like this. Get yourself fitted for a casket. Stop complaining. So eventually they did, but it was just that slowness to react that made it such a health crisis, especially in the US. Yes. It's not like they didn't know that there was such thing as infectious disease and that if you banned public gatherings and said, no, we got to close these movie theaters or these bars or not hold these parades, that it would have a positive effect on public health. But they chose willfully. The people in charge chose not to out of a sense of patriotism and nationalism and the idea that you didn't want to have any impact on morale, that public health commissioners around the country were just ignoring it. And in cases where they weren't ignoring it, they were outright downplaying it in the press saying, this is not a thing. It's fine. Like any reports you're hearing are overblown. And there was one commissioner in particular, a guy named Wilmer Cruising, who was the health commissioner of Philadelphia. Yes. They hit really hard. They got hit the worst out of any American city. And it was because of this guy and the moves that he made, and one of the big ones, one of the biggest mistakes he made, knowing full well that there was a flu pandemic going on in his city. He allowed a Liberty Parade to take place in Philadelphia in late September, where 200,000 people showed up to the parade, and within a few days, Philadelphia had it worse than anybody in one day. 759 people died in Philadelphia in one day. Within a week or two of this parade taking place, like, the parade was moment zero for the real spread of the pandemic in Philadelphia. And it was this guy's fault. Yeah, that and his declaration. A virus in every cheesesteak. I don't know. It depends on the virus. I might still eat the cheesesteak, to tell you the truth. Oh, man, I love a good cheese steak. Oh, yeah. It's hard to find them in Atlanta. It really is one of the good ones. Woody's, of course, over near the park is kind of the old standard. Do you like it, though? It's all right. It's pretty traditionally silly. I thought they left off the cheese was and put on ketchup. Really? They don't put on ketchup. I think they do. Well, I just had one and had no ketchup on it. Well, maybe they changed the recipe, because I swear to God, I've had one with ketchup on it there. Really? Did you ask for a bloody oh, yeah. That was the problem. I asked for it with ketchup. They do bastardize it with they have one version with bacon that is not as good as you would think. Like, everything isn't better with bacon. That's absolutely true. Because what they do is it's not like strips of bacon wedged in the roll. It's diced up and cooked with the meat. And normally I would say, like, oh, man, sign me up, but something about it just didn't work. Yeah, I think plus the fact that pigs are smarter than dogs also makes things less good with bacon sometimes, too. What? Yeah, they're really smart. I know, but why you got to bring dogs into this? Have you seen, like, that PETA ad? It's like a pig. No, it's a Labrador's body with a pig's head on it. And it said, if pigs looked like this, would you eat them or something? They got a bunch of stuff for it. It's a pretty weird looking ad, too. Yeah, I would say so. All right, so let's talk about let's wrap this puppy up. Okay. And the legacy of the pandemic of 1918. The Spanish Flu, also called the Spanish Lady and the Blue Death. And I think Flanders disease in Germany. Flanders? Not sure why. Maybe it started near a place called Flanders. Yeah. In Belgium, I believe. But that's a pretty long standing tradition. It's blame some neighbor you don't really like for the flu that's killing off your population. Well, this is all blamed on Spain. They had nothing to do with it. You don't want to call it, like, us flu or anything. No. So I want to say one more thing, though. Chuck. So we talked a little bit about the society breaking down. Right. You said that people ran out of caskets. I don't think we really got that across. Like put yourself in a mind where there are so many dead people all of a sudden that you don't have any caskets to put them in anymore. You have to wait for them to hurriedly build more caskets unless the people that build the caskets are dead. Yeah, that's another real possibility, too. Like imagine building a casket falling into it from the flu and well, they just leave you in there because you are dead now. Well, but that's what I mean. Like, we're kind of kidding, but when I said it altered humanity in a small town, what if the doctors died and the teachers died? And then there were towns that may have survived, but they had no infrastructure because there were no cops or doctors or teachers or police. It was killing everybody. So you could just be left with a bunch of twelve year olds, right? Yeah. Children with the court up in there. It kind of was. I'm sure that happened to a lot of towns that are now run by children as out of custom. Maybe. So that's probably where it started. But the other thing that was a casualty of the Spanish flu, especially in small towns, was like civic life. Because if you were healthy, you looked at other people on the street with suspicion. If you went out at all, you didn't stop and talk to people, you didn't say, Hi, neighbor. You didn't do all the things that keep like a community glued together. And so community started to fall apart. And then when public officials finally did start to react, they shut down schools, they shut down bars, they banned gatherings. Some towns ban funerals. Like you couldn't have a funeral for your dear departed mother. You had to leave her in a box on your porch for the undertakers to come get on an open wagon. Like it's the medieval plague collectors. This was I know that sounds like a long time ago, but this wasn't the 16th century. No. So this is going on. And at the same time, it wasn't leaving a genuine, lasting national impression on America or anywhere really in the world that I could see, which is really bizarre. Well, yeah, that's one of the weird things about its legacy is and again, we hate to keep hammering this home, but because of the war, it wasn't like the Spanish flu went away, which was really weird. It went away very much, kind of quickly, and no one really knew why, but it's not like that happened. And then they were like, all right, well, man, we really need to change public health policy and we really need to get all these breakthroughs and sanitation and vaccinations going and really take care of things now. They kind of were just like, oh, well, thank God that's gone. And it would be decades before they made real changes in policy to help prevent something like this. Which is bizarre, because you would think, like, when something like that happened, it would have that effect, but it didn't. It just didn't. There were no teachable oprah moments from it. It was just like you said, everybody was glad it was gone. Yes. I thought the bit that Ed included about Woodrow Wilson I'd heard this before was really interesting. He was US. President at the time. He got the flu in January of 1919. Obviously did not die from it. But there are people and historians that say that it altered him so much that it left him very paranoid, very secretive, and even caused him to impose harsher reparations on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, which basically crippled Germany, which led to the rise of Naziism in the Nazi Party, which led to World War II. So World War II may have never even happened. Who knows? Had it not been for Woodrow Wilson being sick with the Spanish flu. Maybe it's bizarre, it's a bit of a leap, but I have other people I've heard that case made. I've seen it, too. He just kind of changed and apparently took a completely different tack than he originally had intended. As reparations against Germany. Yes. And in US towns, this was a time when people opened up their door to a stranger and they were in need, and that really changed that. Like you said, not only were they not hanging out on the street, but people were turning people away at gunpoint and people were taking their own lives and the lives of their family. It was just like it was brutal. Yes, it was brutal. And it's weird that it's not more recognized than it is, but hopefully we just contributed it to being remembered forever. That's right. But we now know today because we've continued to study the flu of 1918, really, how a pandemic can play out. And it's not like science has forgotten. They are still studying the causes and the repercussions and what we can do better. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating, is what it is. By God, if you want to know more about Spanish flu, there's a lot more to it. We talked about everything we possibly could, but it's just big. So you can go search for it in your handy search bar of your handy search engine on your handy computer. Do that. And since I said that, it's time for Chuck. Oh, yes, you say it. Okay. Administrative details. All right, everybody, this is the time of the show every quarter or so. Is it quarterly? Roughly? Yeah. Definitely after the holidays. Because we're thankful for everybody who thought of us over the holidays. That's right. So we want to begin by saying we got a lot of Christmas cards and letters, and rather than list all of those individually, like we should. We're just going to give a blanket thank you for Christmas cards and letters and well wishes in the form of a written or typed letter. It's always nice to get those. Still, I should say we're pretty thankful after the holiday. What else? Let's see. Danielle and Adam, they sent us a wedding invitation and they got married in Phoenix the weekend after our live show in Atlanta. So mazel tov and congratulations and best wishes to Danielle and Adam. That's right. We got a very special gift. We got a real deal American flag that was flown in battle in combat. Wow. Major Mike Wilkes of the United States Air Force sent us his flag flown by Special Forces ops crew on actual combat missions. And it came with a certificate of its legitimacy signed by four of the crew members. Right. That's about as legitimate as it gets. Yes. John Hank sent us some of his Ready ball lip balm. I feel bad for John. That's a tough act to follow. But you can check out. It's good lip balm. You can check it out at Reddybalm. R-E-A-D-Y ballm balm. Finecom. Readybalmcom by John Hank. We got a lot of pins, everybody. We did our episode on ballpoint pins, and people felt the need to share their favorites, which is pretty cool. So there will be some pins scattered throughout here. But first up, Christina Twig sent us her favorite pilot. Easy. Blue colored pilot. Easy. Touch. Fine point. Not bad. Still no pilot. G two S, but it's not bad. Yeah. I've been trying out these different pins, though. That's interesting. Another dude named I can't try. I've tried them, but then they just cramped my hand. I started bleeding from under my fingernails, something like that. I just can't do it. Another guy who sent us pens is Ryan Pinto, who has a great name. Thanks, Ryan. That's right. Marcus Clater from the UK sent me a hand drawn film still from the movie Rushmore. Nice. He's a movie crush fan as well, and he said he draws film stills by hand and send me one that you want me to do. So I picked the very famous last shot of Rushmore of Max and his teacher standing in front of each other to dance at the big dance while everyone else is dancing around them. And it's really, really pretty. I got to see it. I haven't seen it. It's awesome. Our old buddy Van Nostrin, one of the original fans, I would say. Yeah. And now a pal. Yeah, he and Lee are both pals. He sent us a Satanic skull, as is the huge and a vintage relief map of Puget Sound, his beloved sound. Yeah, because he's a big kayaker now. And I hit him up yesterday and I said, thanks for the map. And he said, now you will know where to find my body one day, or something like that. Yeah. At the very least, we'll find his foot floating and Puget Sound, I'm sure. That's right. Aaron Cooper are speaking of old friends and listeners. Cooper has been around with us for many years and is very famous within our community for doing the excellent photoshops of us. And every Christmas sends us the selects in nice large printed form. And he sent us another bounty of posters this year. He's also an administrator on the SYSK Army Facebook page. Yes. And also designs a lot of the T shirts and just all around. Great guy. Yeah. Good guy, great father. Nice goatee. Who else do we have? Chuck? Rebecca, rob. Yeah. That's Robe, believe it or not. Okay, good. I'm glad you corrected me, because it's Rob. And I was like, I feel bad, but I'm not calling Rebecca Roub. And I'm glad it's Robe. So, Rebecca Robe sent us a box full of goodies from South Dakota, and especially for Chuck, a ween poster from the artist Shane Schroeder, who can be found at Shaineart.com. Shaneart.com. That's right. And if you live in South Dakota, particularly near Astoria, South Dakota, you can do a lot worse than our and our landscape design, which is Rebecca's Jam. She works out in Gardens for people. Nice. That's very lovely work. That's good work, for sure. Mimi Bailey Of Greenville, South Carolina, sent A Lot Of Cool Things. They sent a toy for Momo. Thank you. They sent some necco wafers for me and I think tiny tabasco as well. And then Jerry, didn't you get a little tiny? Because we always laugh about the miso soup with Jerry. Yeah, she loves miso. Yeah. That's for Mimi Bailey of Greenville. Siggy Homegren, who also has a wonderful name, sent us some glass jewelry for our ladies and glass art by Ciggy on Etsy is where you can find that stuff. Thanks, Siggy. Cameron Henley sent me. I've been talking a lot about my love for Australian Rules football, specifically the Melbourne Football Club. So he sent me a Melbourne football club calendar. Follow those hunky, men. I'm going to get it on the wall. Right. Let's see our buddy, Sweetwater Dave, who's now become Badger dave, who's now become New Hampshire Representative dave, did we ever say that Dave won his election? I think we did. But you're saying again, he won his election. Congratulations, Dave. He sent us some olive oil from Spain. That Badger, which is a company he works for, uses in some of their products, and they also sell the olive oil straight up. And he says it's great. And Dave is right. So thanks, Dave. Hope you're doing well. We also got tiny tabasco bottles from Nikki Carl and Jackson Russell. Nice family. Who else? Alison Gallagher, who is also a movie crusher and stuff you should know, listener who recently moved to Atlanta. So welcome, Alison. Oh, yeah. Welcome. She sent a shirt that says, with great beard comes great responsibility to me. And a little iPhone plug in fan because it gets so hot, you literally just plug it into where you charge your iPhone. Sure. And it spins a fan blade and I shall never be hot again. It's ear piercing, everybody. It's so loud. Laura Stewart sent some very nice gifts. She adopted an elephant in your daughter Ruby's name. Chuck from the World Wildlife Foundation. That's right. And she also adopted a honeybee in mine and Yummy's and momo's name. So thank you very much, Laura. That was very kind of you. That was very sweet. This one came with an elephant plushie and my kid loves this thing, named it Navy. We didn't get a plushie. She said that she looked for a plush honey bee for us but couldn't find one, so she just sent us a dead bee. Oh, well, that's nice. With a stinger still intact, right? With a postit note with you written on it. Thanks, Laura. I'm just teaching. Well, and thanks to everybody, that's all we have for now. The slate is clean. If we did forget you, then bother us on email and we'll get you in the next round for sure. And if you want to get in touch with this, you can go to stuffysheatknow.com and check out all of our social links. You can also find me at the joshclarkway.com. And you can send me, Jerry, Chuck and everyone involved an email to stuff. Podcast@howestuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
42f99f2a-53a3-11e8-bdec-8721ae9df162 | Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/who-were-the-buffalo-soldiers | Josh and Chuck dive into history today to tell the story of the Buffalo Soldiers. | Josh and Chuck dive into history today to tell the story of the Buffalo Soldiers. | Thu, 30 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=30, tm_isdst=0) | 48582403 | audio/mpeg | "You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com.com. Awesomer. School's out. The sun is shining, the daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good, it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's. Charles W, action Jackson. Bryant. Right. Sure. And then there's Jerry over there the flash that makes this stuff you should Know. One thing people say to me is how much I like Carl Weathers. Sure. And how speedy Jerry is. Why do I want to say that Carl Weather has one arm in Action Jackson? I don't think that was the case. Has he ever had one arm in any of his oh, I think his arm gets pulled off in Predator. Okay. I'm conflating the two. That sounds about right. I saw Predator, but just once when it came out. I saw it within the last twelve months. I think it's even better now as a grown up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can really feel the tension. Like you're in the jungle there with everybody. It's amazing. Have you been singing the Buffalo Soldier song, like, constantly in your head? By my best efforts. I can't stop. Well, I looked up the lyrics because I know some of them, but I wanted to kind of see where exactly he was probably talking about the soldiers. And there were some kind of on the nose references, so he mentioned San Juan. Mentioned San Juan Wales. Fighting for America. Fighting on arrival. Fighting for survival. Sure. I always got it wrong, though. I thought he said DREDLOCK. Rockstar. No, he says DREDLOCK. Roster. I know. I learned that today. Dreadlock rock star. He's talking about himself. That's hilarious. I was singing it wrong. I mean, he was singing about himself. No, he's singing about the Buffalo Soldiers. They weren't rostas. I guess some of them could have been. Maybe. We'll find out. Anyway, I've been singing for 40 years. Dreadlocked rock star. That's pretty good. Like a dumb dumb. Oh, that's all right. It's pretty close, man. And it still makes sense. The ones that don't make sense are the hilarious ones. That just seems like a very, like, I don't know, 1991, white college kid thing to sing. Dread. Like, rock star. Yeah. Dreadlock rock. Yes. When you first start listening to Bob Marley. Okay. You ready? I'm ready. So we're talking Buffalo Soldiers and then it is not just a Bob Marley song. If anything, the Bob Marley song is kind of like a history lesson, which is kind of interesting a bit. But the Buffalo Soldiers was the name of some all black regiments and then eventually all black soldiers in the United States fighting in the United States military. That's right. From right after the Civil War all the way up until, I think, when the last all black regiment was disbanded and the military was, in practice, desegregated. Yeah. But when did you say that happened? I think okay, but they did not take on that name until post civil civil War. Right. And at first it wasn't a name that they took on themselves, it was a name that was given to them. And there's a lot of dispute over where it came from, who is the first to use it, that kind of stuff. But it's a really interesting history, and it's not just an interesting military history. There's a lot of terrible, tragic irony involved. Sure. There's this kind of overarching theme where you can make a case that the Buffalo Soldiers are the ones who actually paved the way for desegregation throughout the entire United States. You can trace a direct line from their service to desegregation. It's pretty amazing stuff. And yet there's still this kind of cloud that hangs over them historically, because of one of the things that they participated in, which was the genocide of Native Americans at the behest of the white US. Government. Right. Because they were trying to earn a place in white America and gain some status and prestige. And white America was like, we want you to do something for us first. And we'll still probably not grant you that respect. Yes. Which is kind of par for the course, from what I understand, as far as military service and being black in America goes. In the Battle of New Orleans, the Black Phalanx, this black regiment ended up pretty cool name. Yeah, it really is. They ended up basically winning the battle against the British at the Battle of New Orleans, which actually came, ironically, after the end of the War of 1812. But it was still a decisive battle. And they had been mustard, a lot of them, from local plantations by Andrew Jackson. And Jackson had promised them their freedom if they came and fought and won. And they came and fought and won in jackson said, yes, sorry, you have to go back to your plantations. I was lying. Yeah. That's not a surprise. Yeah, but imagine that. And that was not the first time that it happened to them. That was pretty much par for the courses. Sure. While they were enslaved, they would be promised freedom for fighting, and then no, after the fact that it's not going to happen. Yeah. And like we said, the Buffalo soldiers post Civil War, and we'll get to their formal designation and their regiments and stuff like that. Okay. But there had been individuals enlisted, and all the way back to the Revolutionary War, there were black individuals that would go and fight, but they just weren't grouped in their own regiments. The first one was the black regiment in Rhode Island, I think. Yeah. In the Revolutionary War. Didn't we talk about them in a short stuff about the black Revolutionary War fighters and they moved up to Nova Scotia? We definitely did. Did we? So the grabster put a lot of this together for us, which was a big help. And it's important to look at what was going on after the Civil War and this unique set of circumstances that were created that kind of led to these regiments being formed, which was about 12,000, maybe a little bit more black veteran soldiers from the Civil War all of a sudden needed jobs. And they were soldiers at this point, so they were like, I'll keep doing this. This could be my career. Right. Like, give us a job in Reconstruction in the south. They needed federal troops. They needed white federal troops. Well, yes, it was probably not a good idea to send black troops to oversee Reconstruction to occupy the south. Can you imagine? No, it would not have been. Oh, my God. So they sent white troops, of course, but that created a vacuum elsewhere where they could use and utilize these black troops. Right. There were 4 million slaves that were now free. And Ed Hazard a guess that let's say a million. One and a half million of these were adult males that were ready to go and serve and fight if need be. And then we were going west, and we knew that there were Native Americans out there that were not going to go easily. There was Mexico looming on the horizon as potential conflict. And because they were sending white soldiers to the south, they needed people to go out west and kind of keep the peace in a way and take care of business in another way. Or remove Native Americans forcibly from their ancestral lands. That's right. So on July 20, 1866, congress did something really surprising. They said, We've got all these kind of expansionist ideas. We've got the south that we need to occupy. We need a bigger army. We're going to raise a huge peacetime army. And not only that, we're going to form some all black regiments. We're going to let black people enlist for the first time ever as peacetime soldiers. Yeah. And partially because they just needed people, and partially because they fought these black veterans that fought in the Civil War for the Union. They should be rewarded with jobs. Exactly. So for the first time, the federal government didn't renege on the offer of something better after having Served And Fought that's Right. As A Soldier. So there was a big deal in just allowing black soldiers to enlist during peacetime. But the fact that they could enlist meant that they could become officers as well, which meant west point was open to black soldiers for the first time, which was a huge deal. Yeah. In 1866 is when they expanded the army just a few years later. They wanted to shrink the army a little bit, so they consolidated a bunch of regiments down to 25. And the original, I think it was six four infantry and two cavalry were now shrunk down and combined into the 9th Cavalry, the 10th Cavalry. I'm saying both cavalry and cavalry. Sure. Just covering all your bases, even though only one of them is correct and it's cavalry. The 24th inventory and the 25th inventory. Right. And the fact that they survived this downsizing of the army because Congress went, we need a big army that's too big. Let's get rid of some soldiers. The fact that all black regiments survived is really miraculous because in that downsizing decree a few years later, it wasn't included. Like and we still need to keep black regiments intact. Right. And William To Come To Sherman was no Great Friend To The Black Man by Any Stretch Of The Imagination, and He Was In Charge Of Downsizing These Troops, and Yet He Knew Enough that There Were Still Congress, People Congressmen In Congress, who Had Created The Black Regiments In The First Place. So they Would Not Be Very Happy If He Just Dissolved Them. So he kept them in touch and actually just went from six to four. Yeah. And it's interesting because it was peace time during wartime, especially back then, it was really pretty easy to get people to sign up and volunteer and fight for whatever side they were on. But in peacetime, they found that they could get the cream of the crop of black soldiers because they didn't have as much opportunity. So they could really be picky and get these really super capable fighters. Whereas on the other side, during peacetime, it was harder to get white soldiers that were as capable because they had much more opportunities to do other things beyond, like, hey, I got nothing going on. I'll send it for the army. Right, exactly. And in the army too. There's a lot of mythology about how the black regiments retreated related to white regiments as well. And it seems like some historians have shown if you trace the supply lines, the black regiments got the same shoddy and then increasingly better supplies as the white regiments at the same time. And in the army, you had just opportunities that just weren't afforded to you outside, like the opportunity to make money and have savings and a pension, things that you could kind of bank on a future with. That was just not part of the black experience of black men back then. Right. I think that's a very robust set up. And more. Oh, we're still doing setup. No, that's beyond that's why I said and more. OK, but I think what I'm trying to say is it's a great time for a break. Okay. Yeah. All right. We'll be right back and we'll talk a little bit about how this name came to be right after that. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers, all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call in IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. So there's a lot in here about how this name came to be, but I think we can condense it to just a couple of versions, one of which was that the name may have come from the Native Americans as sort of an honor. Like, they're brave and they fight. They're, like, fierce, like the buffalo and, like, Sasha Fierce. I don't know what that is. That's like Beyonce's weird alias. Really? Why do stars, when you get to this enormous, huge point, decide to create an alter ego? That's always not good. Chris Gaines. Yes. Learn the lesson from Chris Gaines. Yeah. Who else has done that? It doesn't matter. Chris Gains. Some of them have worked. Vicky Stardust certainly worked. Captain Fantastic worked fine. Chris Gaines, negates all those no, I agree. Okay. I didn't know that beyonce very short lived. Really? And what was the persona? Was it really? I guess she was fierce. I don't know. I just heard her name a couple of times. Beyonce is fierce, though, right? Right? You don't need an altrigo. Beyonce, you're fierce enough. You don't want to go too much fiercer. You should be her manager. You know all the right moves that is one of the stories was that it was a name of honor from the Native Americans. But this, to me, sounds like it might have been just something kind of cooked up in history books or it just kind of converted into that, maybe the Smithsonian Museum of African American History says. Yeah, that stands as popular lower that's one example. Another is basically there are two competing ones. And that is that the Native Americans did give this name to the black soldiers. But that they were referring to the wooliness of the black soldier's hair compared to white soldiers hair. And that if you look between the horns of a buffalo. That kind of like to pay almost that the buffalo is wearing bears a vague resemblance to it. And that's where it initially came from. Yeah. And there's, like, direct evidence from letters and stuff at the time of this, whether or not it was true or not. It was at least down in print as being the reason. But we don't know for sure and we don't know for sure how they felt about the name other than it seems like as time went on, they kind of embraced the name as a designation. And in one case, there was one troop that did use a bison on a patch on their uniform, but then bison were used on other patches on uniforms of white soldiers, too. I think it was strictly black regiments. Oh, really? Just later ones that weren't the 9th, 10th, 24th, or 25th. Got you. That was my interpretation. Okay. But yeah, by the time I think 1911 is when that first patch appears. So by the time 1911 rolls around, the black regiments had totally taken on buffalo soldier as a name of honor. Yeah. And Ed points out, I think it's fair, it's easy now in 2020 to look back at two ethnic groups that were kept under the thumb of the white man and say that, oh, the Native Americans respected them as fierce fighters, and the black soldiers respected the Native Americans. But that's probably retroactive revisionist history, because there were plenty of cases where the buffalo soldiers referred to them as savages, and one case of one soldier going as a costume party dressed up in, I guess, what you would call red face. Oh, yeah. It seems like that's sort of cooked up these days. They really had much respect for one another during their battles. But I don't know if that's the case. No, but you can understand how people would want to do that. Sure. Because sending African American soldiers out to remove Native Americans from their land with violence at the behest of white people, it's not a good story. No, it's a terrible story. Yeah. It takes a bad story. It makes it worse. And then at the same time, there's a real silver lining to it. There's that good story that, like, black soldiers served as heroes for the black community in America as a whole. At a time when they really needed some black heroes, the Jim Crow South was really starting to solidify. So it's not like an all bad story, but it's definitely not an all good story either. So people want, like, a nice storybook ending, for sure. Which is surely where that came from. Yes, I think so. Should we talk a little bit about what they did? Yeah. With your service record? Yes. When they were first assembled in, I think late to mid 1860s, they were almost immediately moved out to the frontier kansas, then Texas, New Mexico, pushing further and further west as their work was increasingly successful. Yeah. And usually under the command of white officers. It was not looked at as some great assignment if you were a white officer, to go west and command one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments. Yeah. It would have been like being stationed in Alaska or something like that. Alaska is great. Although some white commanding officers did rise to the occasion. Yeah. And had a lot of great things to say about the soldiers, too, for sure. Some of them definitely did not rise to the occasion and actually went the other way. Right. Yeah. And you mentioned West Point. This was a huge deal because, like you said, now these young men could go attend West Point and come out officers. Upon entry into the army, there were quite a few cases. One was a man named Henry Flipper. He was the first black graduate of West Point in 1077. Came out as second lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry and was basically set up with a court marshall. There was a case where he was put in charge of a quartermaster safe to guard it, basically, and take charge of it. Money becomes missing. He kind of freaks out and lies about it. It's kind of all evidence point to the fact that he didn't take the money, but he did lie about how did he what did he lie about? Things I couldn't find. I think that the initial money was missing at all, maybe. I'm not really sure, but it looks like it was a set up. He was acquitted of the main charge even back then and was found guilty of an added charge of conduct unbecoming of an officer. The lying part. Right. And was dismissed from the army, which even back then was an overblown sentence compared to the similar charges of white officers. Right. The army at the time, he could have gotten his discharge changed to honorable discharge, but the army apparently didn't have any procedure to do that. So it was up to the commander in chief, Chester A. Arthur, to decide yes or nay, and he just let it pass by. Right. Was he a lieutenant? Second lieutenant. Second Lieutenant Flipper went to his grave saying that he was innocent. And in the 1998, Bill Clinton finally pardoned him. Billy boy, he did and Clinton at Ghoul ordered him exhumed and reburied with full military honors. Oh, interesting. But they suspect that Clinton just wanted to see what the body looked like. Come on, he said, let's do this. Right. Yeah, he probably did say that. So there are another couple of cases. John Hanks Alexander and Charles Young. They were West Point grads early on. They went on to lead these regiments. And that's not to say that at West Point it was smooth sailing, of course. Right. They had a very hard time there and still persevered. Yeah. Extraordinarily. It points out that in the Tuskegee Airman episode too, I think we talked about how those guys who went through West Point had or the military academies had just an awful time of it too. Yes, that happened. It probably still happens to some degree. Sure. But I read the Lords of Discipline. I did too. And saw the movie. I don't know if I saw the movie or not. And that was what year was that set? That was probably sixties, was it? I don't remember. What was the problem with that guy? He just was soft or something. He had feelings, you know. I don't remember. I haven't seen it in a long time. Yeah, but that was the Citadel, not West Point, which is Navy, I think, right? Air Force? Marines? I don't know what the Citadel is. National Guard? No. Cub Scouts. Yes, it was Cubscoutscow. Citadel. Famous Cubscouth. So these regiments had about 1000 troops and officers, but they were constantly under supplied. Yeah. And like you said earlier, there's no evidence that they were intentionally under supplied. No, but it's a myth that they were. Yeah, but kind of everyone out west was because it takes a long time to get stuff out there. And a lot of those old Civil War weapons and equipment were pretty shoddy anyway. Yeah. Plus, I mean, it's not really easy to come by water in the New Mexico desert where you're fighting the Cheyenne or the Apache. So you have horses that need water too, because you're a cavalry unit. And the horses were breaking down is a really bad time as they were moving further and further west. Because we tend to think of the United States military, like in the terms of today, this just incredibly well oiled logistical juggernaut. Sure. That was not the case after the Civil War. As a matter of fact, until, I believe, the Spanish American War the United States military was looked upon internationally is kind of like not the best around. Certainly not the best to quit the logistics. We didn't have that kind of stuff down. You didn't hear it from me, but right, exactly. And this is the army that these guys were enlisted in. So they were dealing with an army that was finding its feet and then also on the frontiers of the United States at a time when they're protecting the people, building the railroads. There's not even the railroads out there yet. One of their jobs is to protect railroad workers, mail carriers, people who were on cattle drive. Yeah. These were the jobs they were tasked with. Well, they were also fighting, like we said, in what was known as the Indian Wars, including some of the big ones. I think we need to do a big old episode on the Indian Wars. Yeah, let's do it. Wounded Knee. The White River War. Yeah. I've never heard of that one. I looked it up. The war is not a term for most of these. It should be massacre. No, it should be straight up massacres. Yeah. Although here's the other thing, too. This is really easy for guys like us to do, especially in retrospect, is what's called, like, mythologizing the noble savage. Right. Where we kind of make it seem like the Indians were just the people who kind of meekly accepted their fate and were just rolled over by the US. Government through this westward expansion. That's not the case. In almost every case, the further west we got, the fiercer the fighting got. They pushed back for sure. They engaged in massacres that included killing women and children and noncombatants. Both sides did. So it's not like the Native Americans were just innocent of bloodshed. But it's important to remember that they were defending their lands from invaders. They were the insurgents in that. So there's, like, a certain amount of moral higher ground that they afforded just for being in that position. Right, for sure. But that's the thing. That's why I've always been fascinated about history. Is it's never just black and white? Yes. There's so much nuance that gets overlooked, especially if you were raised in public schools in America. Exactly. Not a lot of nuance going on. Right. And the white people swooped in and everything was great. Exactly. So by the 1890s, the Indian Wars ended. The reservations popped up, or they were just flat out massacred, like you said, or imprisoned. And this is when the buffalo soldiers started taking part in some of the land disputes out west with white settlers. The removal of the Sooners in Oklahoma. That's huge. It is huge, because all of a sudden, black regiments show up and they're like, you might be white, but you need to get out of here because you didn't follow the rules. That's right. That's a huge change from a decade or so before, when those people would have been enslaved in the south. Right. It's a big deal. What else? You mentioned San Juan from the Bob Marley song. Yeah. That was when they entered the national stage for the first time. Yeah. Fighting in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Yeah. It's very confusing. They fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba and the Battle for San Juan in Puerto Rico. That's right. Under the 10th Regiment. Under the command of a guy named General John Pershing. Yes. Who you might be familiar with is known as Blackjack Pershing, the famous World War I general. Yeah, I knew I had heard of him. He was named Blackjack because he was in command of the black regiments, the 10th Cavalry. And, I mean, I think in the First World War, he was a little less willing to stand up and advocate for them. But by the time World War II came around, he was okay. So I didn't hear about the World War II part, but that was a pretty big betrayal in World War I because he led the 10th Cavalry up San Juan Hill and Cuba, along with the Rough Riders, along with white infantry. This battle was one of the first ones right before the turn of the 20th century, where if you were standing back, like, looking at this battle, there's black guys, there's white guys, there's black guys on horses, there's Spanish people coming down here. There's all these people. But the black soldiers and the white soldiers were intermingling, fighting together side by side, and they won. And Teddy Roosevelt said it was all me. I won the battle of Cuba. San Juan in Cuba. Sure. But historians say actually, no. These black regiments, specifically the 10th Cavalry, really won this battle in the Spanish American wardown in Cuba. And it was huge. It put the buffalo soldiers on the map for really the first time ever in the American popular consciousness and black families around America. Like, you could go into their dining room and there'd be a print of, like, a painting of the Battle of San Juan with the buffalo soldiers storming the hill. One historian put it that they were there that generation, Jackie Robinson and Joe Lewis. Like I was saying, they were the heroes at a time when Jim Crow laws were really coming into force at a really bleak time for black America. All of a sudden, there's this buffalo soldiers that basically helped win the Spanish American War, fighting alongside white soldiers, too, and being equal in that respect. And that's why you'll see all those statues right next to Teddy Roosevelt. Exactly. And you know what? I may have made up that part about General Pershing advocating more of World War II, now that I think about it. Oh, well, I didn't get to the betrayal thing, Chuck. So when World War I rolled around, he was in charge of, I think, basically everybody in Europe, and he turned his back on his black regiment and all black soldiers and basically said, no, you guys fight in your own regiment, so I don't want you fighting side by side. But the French were like, hey, come fight with us. We'll command you. And that happened. That reminded me, the French were also the first ones to recognize officially the Native American code talkers, even before the United States did. Oh, I remember that. And they also used black aviators in World War I, too. So up with the French, historically speaking. That's right. There's a t shirt. They gave us those fries. Sure. And that bread. You mean freedom fries? Freedom bread. I feel like I'm talking a lot. Oh, yeah. Am I? No more than usual. Okay. Freedom bread. So in World War II, the buffalo soldier units were used a lot. A lot of times, though, they were not on the front lines. They were stuck to administrative and support duties, but they did join in combat here and there on both the theaters and the war, mostly toward the end of World War II. But a lot of the good that you see coming out of what the buffalo soldiers did was foundation work and groundwork for desegregating the military, for showing that these guys are just the same as white soldiers. They're just as capable, they fight just as bravely. And it really kind of laid the groundwork for the desegregation after the war. Yes. Like a direct line for it. It's weird, but basically a way to put it is that white America said, okay, all right, we'll give you a shot. You go out and serve in battle and let's see what you can do, and then maybe we'll see from there. And just by being given that one opportunity to show that they could do things that were presumed they couldn't. Like act bravely and fight and be a good soldier that was good at being a soldier. They proved that all of these myths about how black people couldn't do these things were wrong. And that kind of thing opens up some people's eyes to. Okay. Well. What else do I think about black people that are wrong? And it's weird to think about because on a social level, that's what it takes, that people's minds can be changed like that. But historically speaking, in retrospect, that's how it happens. One prejudice is tested, and then all of a sudden, other prejudices start falling slowly. Yeah. Kind of falling over like domino's. Totally. Very slowly, though. Yeah. Unfortunately, like dominoes, you can only picture falling fast. I know. See that in slowmo. It's almost a terrible analogy. Almost. So it's crazy to think but even though desegregation happened long before this, it takes a while for that to fully happen. Right. And they were buffalo soldier units in the Korean war. All black units in the Korean War. But it was 1948, I think, that Truman signed this act, desegregating the military. Yeah. And I think it took three more years when the final one was disbanded. The 27th. Right, but that's why I was saying you could trace a direct line of desegregation from the military, because that was the first chance that black America had to show that it could be treated equally and that it could act equally. Yeah, and they showed that, and it led to desegregation in the military. And then three years after the actual impact of desegregation of military regiments, there was the Brown versus Board of Education ruling, which not in practice, but in theory, desegregated schools. Right. So it went army schools, and then eventually, socially, it just kept going. Yeah, but it was because of the Buffalo Soldiers in their service, directly, undisputedly. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's crazy to think as late as the Korean War, though, some of those units were still fighting, because when I think of Match, it doesn't feel modern. But it doesn't feel like Buffalo Soldier territory. Right? Yeah. The Buffalo Soldiers. You think of the 19th century American West? Not sure. No? You don't think of Hawkeye and his gin? Still, I guess it was one black character on Mash with a very unfortunate name. But we won't talk about that. I'm not familiar. I don't remember. All right, well, I think we should take a break and come back and talk about what is, to me, one of the cooler aspects of this whole story. The Bob Marley song? No. We'll be right back. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system, so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right, we're back, and we're going to talk about what I think is one of the coolest little parts here of this whole story, which I never knew. If you've ever been to Sequoia National Park or Yosemite National Park or some other national parks out west, and you're hiking a trail or driving down a road, you might have the Buffalo Soldiers to thank for that trail and those roads. Yeah. And it's one of their highlight achievements to me is once we established the national parks, teddy Roosevelt again build statues of him right. You had to enforce this stuff because this was the first time we were like, wait a minute. This is protected land. You can't just come in here and take the timber or hunt the animals. Right. There are rules now. You set aside grazing land, you set aside national parks. Libertarians, they take issue with that kind of thing. And you need to have buffalo soldiers to fight them off. That's right. So from 1891 to 1913, about 25 years or so, some of these black regiments were essentially the first park rangers. They didn't have that name at the time, but they kept the poachers at bay, stopped the illegal grazing, and the timber thieves, they fought wildfires. Yeah. I didn't get a chance to really look into this, but I wonder what 1913 wildfire fighting was like. I'll bet it was real dicey bucket brigade stuff. Probably like 2020 firefighting is dicey wildfire fighting, but 100 years ago, man, I'll bet it was. I can't imagine. Good Lord. But like I said, with the trails and stuff, a lot of the more significant trails and roads, some of the buildings, yeah. Some of the older cabins, they were built and constructed by buffalo soldiers, which is just super cool. Yeah. So if you find a building in Yosemite or Sequoia national parks from 1891 to yes, then it was probably built by buffalo soldiers or hiking a trail. This is all just super cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool. They also rode bicycles around the place, too, which is kind of neat. Yeah. So Chuck, the last buffalo soldier, and I mean like original buffalo soldier Mark Matthews, he died on September 6, 2005. He was entered at Arlington National Cemetery. He was 111 years old, and he actually fought under General Pershing in the tent cavalry on the hunt for ponchovia. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if we mention that. How many Medals of Honor were there? 23. I saw 23. The National Museum of African American History says 18. I'm going to go with them. All right. Somewhere between 18 and 23. Let's say that. Yeah. So I guess the moral of the story is that they did provide this direct line to desegregation not only through the army, but, like you're saying, all through America. But sadly, a lot of them did exit the military. Some of them did have a little higher status and a leg to stand on. Many of them didn't. There was a study of lynchings in the US. That found that black military veterans were targeted and lynched more than non veteran black people with the idea that it was a real threat in the racist white south for a black man to leave the army with some rank and some status, feeling good guns, feeling good about himself. Don't forget the Tulsa Masker episode. It was the World War One vets who were like, no, we're going to go defend this boy from being lynched with guns. They showed up with guns. I remember in the Black Panther episode, too, they traced a direct line of this sense of, like, you need to defend yourself and protect yourself with firearms. They trace that directly to World War One veterans. Yeah. So there is a terrible logic to that, I guess. Yeah, for sure. There was also a terrible senator and governor of Mississippi named James Bartiman who was just straight up white supremacist. Like, no matter how you slice it, you could have just said senator from Mississippi in 1917. Sure. He spoke to the US. Senate, and he really kind of crystallizes how they felt about black veterans in 1917 on the Senate floor. He said, once you impress the Negro with the fact that he is defending the flag and inflate his untored soul with military heirs, his political rights must be respected. And he wasn't saying, like, and that's great. Yeah. So let's respect that. Yes. This was a warning, basically. Right. And he was overlooked. They didn't listen to him, ultimately, because they did continue having black soldiers as soldiers and eventually desegregated, which led to desegregation in America, which is pretty great. That's right. I would love to hear from some current African American military personnel because I want to know what the current sort of temperature is as an active service person. Oh. What the racism is like in the military. Yeah, sure. I'm sure there will be different versions of that story depending on who you're in contact with and what your particular platoon is like. Yeah. I wonder, though, because the military is like, some kind of weird symbol of American society. It is. I wonder if it's more racist or less racist. I think there's a chance we could go either way. My guess is less. Like I said, my brother in law before is a Marine, and pretty high up, you could say. And every time I've been on these Marine bases a lot, and it all seems like they're all sort of, you know, got that thinking, that group think going on. We're just Marines. Like, none of us are a color. We're green. Well, I've seen Full Metal Jacket. Right. And there are a lot of rates of stuff in there. Sure. Okay. Yeah. It could go either way. It could go either way. I would like to hear that as well. I'd also like to hear from any Native American listeners to know what they were taught about buffalo soldiers, too, what was put down within the different tribes. Yeah. Because they contacted all sorts of different tribes from the Lakota Sue up in the north down to the Apaches in New Mexico. And Mexico. Teach us everyone. Yeah. We'll read them on listener mail. If you want to know more about buffalo soldiers, there's a lot of really great stuff to read, and you can't really go wrong with a guy named Frank Schubert, who is a scholar of them of Buffalo soldiers. And he's got a lot of articles on the Web, and I believe some books, too. And since I said Frank Schubert, it's time for listener mail. Oh, no, it's not. Oh, that's right. You know what it's time for? Hit them, Chuck. It is time for administrative details. So we haven't done this in a while. If you're new to the show, Administrative Details is where we take a couple of minutes. We're going to do this on this episode and the next. You got that straight? To read out some thank yous. Tell them, Chuck, for some of the kindnesses that people throw our way. That's right. Whether they be physical totems, like, T shirts and buttons to confectionaries, like, cookies and pastries and cheeses. I like that. What I did not do on this one, and I feel bad because you probably did, is write down all the names of all the postcards and letters. I wrote down the ones that I think I've got basically everybody. And we should say we almost always miss somebody or a few. So if we don't say your name and you have not been thanked in a previous administrative detail, please get in touch with us so we can correct that. That's right. And if you have a letter or a postcard that is on my desk, I'll include those in the next batch because now I feel bad. All right, let's go through these. And there's also some people who I don't have names for, but we do have the items. So you can also write in and be like, that was me. That's right. For example, the very nice person who gave us almond cookies and whiskey cake at our Orlando show. That's right, our live show in Orlando. Don't remember or don't have the name of who gave us that, but thank you for them. Katie from Davis, California, sent us some cool little notebooks. They were little notebooks. Like Schemes was like the title of one of them. You can write down band names. Just sort of fun names on the covers of these notebooks. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Huge thanks, as always, to our good friends Hillary and Michael Ozar. And they're good friends, the people at Flathead Lake Cheese for all the cheese. That's right. Flathead Lake Cheese is far and away my favorite cheese in the world. It's good cheese. They make very good cheese. You guys cannot go wrong. Just go get some flat head like cheese and you'll love it. Yeah. I don't know if they specialize in Gouda, but we seem to be on the Gouda mailing list. They make a hopped gouda. That is my favorite. Have you had it? Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's yum. It has hops in it like it's a beer, but it's cheap. And while we're on the Los Angeles, Hilary and Mike and Coop, I just got this today. They sent us aprons. Word butcher. Yeah, aprons. That is so appropriate. It's a knife going into the lettering of a word butcher. Because I don't know if you guys know this, but we are well known to mispronounce everything. Yeah, to butch your words, I think you're going to do that. So Smaddy from France sent us a T card with some lay. Two Marmouth T attached. Thank you. Smarty. Yeah. Jess Fowl sent us his game that he designed, Philosophy. The game. Or better yet, drunk philosophy. That's a great name. Katie Barnes from the Barnes Made Soap Company for the Wonderful Soap. All of them are really good, but I strongly recommend the Autumn Figure and the Mariner Brine Bar. Good stuff. So you can head over to Barnesmaid Barnesmade.com for summer. Katie soaps. Becky and Frost sent us planetary coasters that she made in her studio is seafoodstudio.com. That is Cephei Dstudio.com. If you want some planetary coasters, they are pretty spacey and awesome. Kevin Reuter gave us Basil Hayden and Bullet Rye. Remember that? At our show at the Bellhouse? And even wrapped them up as Christmas presents. That's right. Which is just lovely. Thanks a lot, Kevin. And funny enough, at the show, somebody asked us what drink we would want to have on a desert island if we could only have one. And both of us were saying gin drinks. And he was like, well, I guess I guessed wrong with the Basil Hayden and bullet. And I was like, no, dude, you nailed it. We're all inclusive. Our buddy, Van Nostril, I feel like he sent us more than this. So if you have something else, let us know. We just hung out with him and his wonderful wife Leah in Seattle. He sent us some records, some awesome records. Smurfs Disco Duck lawrence Welk and the John Denver Muppets Christmas. And you know what? Van Nostrin gave us books before, and one of them was about oh, I can't say yet. Oh, really? Because the live show is not out. But he gave us a book about the live show years ago, and I never got around to reading it. That's right. They reminded me after the show, they're like, you know that we sent you that book, you dummy? So I'll have to read it now. Will and Katie Lynn Lee send us coffee from Coffee by Design. So nice delish. Let's see. Nicole Collins, Doctor Osteopathy sent us a copy of her book Insight, which is on vision, like real vision and the miracle that is vision. So check it out. Insight Authority. It's a doctor of metal. I was delivered by a deal. One of the things they do is they adjust you like you're a baby, and they adjust you like a chiropractor when you're born. I was born breach, so the do adjusted me in reverse order. Apparently, everyone delivery room gave them a golf clap afterwards. And you waved your hand, said, thank you, everyone. Yeah, thank you. I have a taste for this applause thing. Fart curled fart. Indigo Proof from Portland sent me a gift certificate for one free denim repair. Nice. I complained about my Levi's blowing out, so they said, send me those jeans and we'll fix them for you. It's Indigo Proof. And where else do they fix jeans? Portland, Oregon. That is a gene fixing town. Totally. Sure. I got a super old one from not this past October, but the October before last. Chuck wow. Do you remember Kathy with a K? Tosh and I believe our Phoenix show or Salt Lake City show? One of the two are you talking about gave us lasso. Real live lasso, rope and Rope. And she said, go on to YouTube and learn how to lasso now. And I've yet to do that, but I still have my lasso, so thanks a lot, Cathy. I appreciate you. Yeah, it's not only cool, because I will try and learn that one day, but it looks cool hanging on a wall, for sure. And also, I think Cathy is a postal worker, so hopefully she dug our Going postal episode. I haven't heard from her. That's right. Email is Kathy. Let us know how we did a correction to read, but I'll just wait for listener mail for that one. Oh, yeah, that was me. That was my bad. Was it just you? I think so. Somebody else made it seem like it was me too. How many more should we do for this one? Let's do three more. Okay. Anna Parker. She's a painter and muralist who did this lovely painting of my three dogs, two of which are now dearly departed, but it's very, very sweet. And speaking of which, you can find her work@sweettmurals.com? Yes. Very nice. Let's see. Lance Roper, who's my boy from Toledo, who is from Actual Coffee in Toledo, sent me some really good coffee. So check out actual coffee in Toledo. Actual Coffee. Betty Upperley sent us voodoo dolls of us. Oh, I want to know who made that. Those are so cool. They're, like, really cute. And they're laden with little Easter eggs. Like, I'm holding all kinds of crazy things that all relate to shows. I'm holding a magic mushroom. Really? Yeah. Well, that's from the show. But they had no pins, we should point out. So they weren't voodoo dolls that were out to harm us? No, her son Josh introduced her to the show and her husband. Thanks, Betty. Yeah, momo is riding my foot online too. Oh, really? Yeah. That's very cute. Let's see the wooden egg and special egg coasters. S-Y-S-K egg Coasters from the very kind people at Good Egg World. Yeah. All right, I got one more for this dish. Okay. Adam Peterson. This was a really cool gift. He sent us two bottles of Coca Cola from the very last run of returnable bottles that Coca Cola ever did. Oh, wow. They were small family run bottler in Winona, Minnesota. And he said his inlaws had run it since 1932. So these were the last run of returnables that came off the line. And they're even stamped with their little family bottler name and everything. Oh, that's really cool. Very cool. All right, last one. This one came from the Toronto show. A guy named Phil Bowen gave us each a prosthetic eye. Oh, man, that's one of the best ever. One of the best gifts either one of us has ever gotten. So cool. So thanks a lot for our prosthetic eyes, Phil. We still have them. I think there's a picture of us wearing them, too. Yeah. Okay. If you want to get in touch with us, just to say hi or to send us something, it doesn't matter. You can go on to Stuffiestoe.com and follow our social links there, I think. And as always, you can send us an email, wrap it up, bank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today you know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
4145738e-53a3-11e8-bdec-cf62c1d5c9e0 | Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/yeti-the-asian-bigfoot | We've covered Nessie and Bigfoot, so why not tackle the Yeti? Listen in today and Josh and Chuck cover what used to be known as the Abominable Snowman. | We've covered Nessie and Bigfoot, so why not tackle the Yeti? Listen in today and Josh and Chuck cover what used to be known as the Abominable Snowman. | Tue, 19 Feb 2019 17:36:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=17, tm_min=36, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) | 43511715 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. Somewhere over there. And this is stuff you should know. The continuing Cryptozoology edition. Oh, this finishes it, right? Oh, I don't know about that. We've done bigfoot Loch Ness monster yeti? We haven't done like mothman. The chupacabra chupacabra. That's a big one too. Yeah. There's slenderman is more Internet folklore than anything. Did we do that one, or did we think about it and not do it? The latter of those two. If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something. Yeah, if I remember correctly, it hurt my feelings. Oh, man. I think we could do Slender Man now. It was just so early on that it was very thin. Now I think it would be more robust. It was slender. Yeah, that's right. Well, today we're talking about the yeti, which is not slender. Depending on which yeti you're talking about, Chuck, it's either enormous and, like, 8ft tall covered in gray or white or maybe sometimes reddish hair. Sure. Weighing 400, \u00a3500 easily. Yeah. Or actually, it is kind of slender. It could be basically what amounts to a wild hippie. Basically somebody who likes to grab roots out of the ground and lets out a squeal or cry every once in a while just to, I guess, know that they're alive. And there's really two competing versions of what those of us in the Western world would think was the yeti. But the one we're really talking about is the first one, what we also think of as the Abominable Snowman. How tall was Hippie Rob? He was average, like five something, I guess. Like high fives, probably. He's a little shorter than me. Okay. Yeah. All right. He was not the Yeti of legend, as far as I know. He could be now, though. Well, I don't know. It just sounded awful lot like him. Kind of does yelping in the mountains scrubbing for roots. Yeah. Covered in dirt and with wild, crazy hair. So I think we should just tell, like, if you don't know what we're talking about this is the legendary beast that lives in Asia. Yes. Around the Himalayas, typically. Yeah. So it's known as Asia's bigfoot. Or maybe bigfoot is known as North America's yeti. I don't know. I guess Yeti came first, right? Yeah. I think Yeti has been around with the Sherpa of Tibet for a very long time. Yeah. And that's sort of the deal of the origin story of this thing is the yeti has been told for many years in traditional stories in that area. There was someone named Sheba Dakal that collected a bunch of these stories in a book called Folktales of Sherpa and Yeti. And all of them kind of figured the same way, which was whether it's a story called The Annihilation of the Yeti in which this is pretty good. It's about sherpa seeking revenge on a tormenting group of yetis. This sounds like something that should be on the Sci-fi Channel. I would be very surprised if it wasn't. But all of these stories basically have the same moral message at the end, which is it's sort of like a grims fairy tale. Like, Be careful out on the woods. Yeah, exactly. I think it serves the exact same purpose, too, like in the Grimm Fairy Tales. And I thought the same thing. There's witches that live in candy houses, so don't go wandering off in the woods, kids, because you'll end up getting eaten. For little kids in Tibet, it was, don't wander off into the Tibetan plateau or the yeti will get you and all sorts of terrible things will happen to you. Which is funny, because there are all sorts of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau. Well, I think what they were saying was, you can't just be like, look out for the bears. Will be like, I don't know. I can see a Brash kid being like, no, bear. Everybody knows what a bear is. I'll wrestle a bear any day of the week. Yeah, maybe. And then along the way, it gets into a drinking contest with Marion from Indiana Jones. Yeah, right. Exactly. That was one of the best scenes in the history of film. Yeah, I think so. And Tibetan kids tend to agree with me too. But before we move on, I want to say one thing that annihilation of the yeti. Keep that in the back of your mind. The story was that there are a bunch of yeti that were hanging around, and the sherpa were sick of them hanging around. So the sherpa basically threw a yeti party and got drunk and fought with each other to kind of provide an example to the yeti, hey, you should get drunk and fight with each other too, in the hopes of the yeti would destroy each other. It didn't work, and the yeti all managed to escape, except for one, who was supposedly killed by a lama, one of the Buddhist monks in the area. So that's part of the story. That's the end. That's the annihilation of the yeti story. I didn't know a llama figure then. And really, annihilation is kind of a strong word if you think about it. Because if you just kill one out of, I think, 240 yeti, it's hardly annihilation. That's a good point. I think so, too. So throughout history, these legends have been pervasive in the region. So much so that supposedly the Great Alexander, or Alexander the Great I'm not sure why I did that. When he came through town and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, I'd like to see one of your famous yetis. I don't know if that's what Alexander the Great sounded like. No, no. What did ancient Roman sound like, if not Romania? Was he Roman? I think he was Greek. Was he? Jeez, how about, I really screwed that up? I knew that. Do a German accent. I'm just going to leave. No, hang tight, Chuck. You can rebound. Yeah. Why did I think he was Roman in that Greek? Because the Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves. I'm not firing on all cylinders, but regardless of my bad accent, or maybe I should just edit back in and say, that was my Greek accent. There you go. He said, I want to see a yeti. And the locals, they were like, you know, we totally would do that. However, you can't get them down this low and you'd have to hike really high up in those mountains and I know you're not down with that, so sorry. Yeah, exactly. So I guess Alexander the Great was like, I'm bored. I can't believe we're still talking about this. Give me some wine. And gotten a drinking contest. And that was that. So the Yeti continued on in Sherpa tradition in Tibetan, Nepal and Bhutan, but in the west, it kind of disappeared from view until the 20th century. And so, remember, these are tall tales that the Sherpa teach their kids, although there is supposedly some, I guess, general belief as well, but I can't quite penetrate it. But just imagine that it was just strictly tall tales the Sherpa people told their kids. Then Westerners came in and said, what is this you're talking about? Tell us about this. And just bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker. Yes. And things really took for him. In 1021, there's a journalist named Henry Newman, he did an interview with some British explorers, and this is a time of great exploration, especially from the British, these sort of, I guess, Indiana Jones like mountaineers who would go all over the world in search of these jungles and mountains, in search of crazy beasts and treasures and things like that. Right, sure. So he interviewed some of these guys and they said, you know what, we found these huge footprints up in the mountains. And the locals there, I guess sherpa said, because with hidden sherpa, the plural sherpa, did we determine that? I'm pretty sure, yeah. That was a good episode, by the way, everyone. It was. Go back and listen to that one. What was the title? Warm Friendly Living. Yeah, because that's, I think, what Tim Zing Norgate said. So great. Yeah. So they said that their guides, our Sherpa guides, called them Mito Kongi, which the translation, the real translation, is a little awkward. Man bear snowman. But Newman confused all that. He got the snowman part right, but he translated that first part to mean meto, metoh to mean filthy or dirty. And then he changed that on his own to the word abominable. Right. And that's where we get the Abominable snowman. Yeah. He was like, I don't like filthy snowman. I'm going to change the name that I've already gotten wrong and turn it into Abominable snowman. Yeah, he really great journalist, but it's fascinating that you can trace it back to this one dummy that's the whole Abominable snowman, that's where it came from, was this one guy. And that obviously just completely captured the attention of the rest of the world when he wrote this, because this was not just like, oh, yeah, they heard about an Abominable snowman. These explorers found tracks, and the Shirp of guides told them, the tracks belong to this Abominable snowman. Therefore, there are Abominable snowmen living in the Himalayas. And the explorer who led that particular expedition was Charles Howard Berry. Howard Berry Bury. And apparently he and Newman were really big into promoting the idea of an Abominable snowman or men living in the Himalayas. And that it just being, like, this giant, huge creature with shaggy hair and very much akin to bigfoot. But if you look at the descriptions, the traditional descriptions of the yeti, they're much smaller and not nearly as huge as the Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be. Yeah. There was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions from 1942, there was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and I believe that she got this information from two hikers that reported seeing the yeti. Right. And this is what they said. The height was not much less than 8ft, so tall, for sure, but it's not like it was 10ft tall. The heads, because there were two of them, were described as squaring. And the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulder sloped slowly down to a powerful chest covered by reddish brown hair, which formed a close body fur mixed with long, straight hairs hanging downward, about the size and build of a small man. The head covered with long hair, but the face and chest, not very hairy at all. This all sounds like they always describe him or it is bipedal, right? Means walking upright. Right. But if you go back and look at that 1042 description and how detailed it was, those hikers who gave the description said that they saw all this from observing two black specs moving across the snow about a quarter mile below them, and yet they could see that it had a thick undercoat and, like, a very long, hairy overcoat, and it was reddish. That's just basically perfect Abominable snowman sighting. Yeah, agreed. But it's one of many. After that, Howard Barry expedition came back and Newman broadcasts to the world, people started going to the Himalayas and droves. And they weren't just necessarily looking for the Abominable snowman. Everest was there, and everybody knew Everest was there, and a lot of people wanted to be the first one to summit Everest or the first Westerner, I should say, to summit Everest. So while a lot of them were in the area, they're like, well, we'll look for the Abominable snowman while we're here, too. Yeah. And some pretty legendary mountaineers. And granted, these are not like, zoologist or anything, but they're respected men in their field. People like Ryan Holmesner and one Sir Edmund Hillary both searched for evidence of the yeti while they were hiking. And messenger even wrote a book called My Quest for the Yeti confronting the Himalaya's Deepest Mystery. Right. But we'll save the big reveal till the end or the third act of this show. Okay. Is there a third act? Yeah, there's got to be. Okay. We're in big trouble if there's not. Well, why don't we take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about a couple of more of these reported sightings. Let's do it. All right. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck stuff? You should. All right. Okay, Chuck. So we've started to get some sightings from expeditions that are going to Everest and just hanging around the Himalayas. And then I think in 1951, something really big happened. One of those explorers, Eric Shifton, took a photograph of a track that to this day looks pretty remarkable, actually. Yeah. Again, it's not, like, hard evidence, but this is a very famous photo. I remember seeing this when I was a kid, and I guess it was probably the Guinness or Ripley's Believe It or not or something. It was time. Life books for me. Was it? Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. It's a very famous picture of, like, a pickaxe yeah. Used for scale. Yes. Right next to it. And I remember that very distinctly when I saw this picture, I was like, oh, yeah. And then when you look at it, you're like, Wait, that doesn't look quite right. That's a really weird track. It looks like an elongated human foot, but rather than a left toe, it's kind of bulbous and weird. It doesn't look like the other toes, and it certainly doesn't look like what a human toe should look like. And it's also huge. I think it was measured about 13 inches, which is a pretty typical size for a yeti track, from what I understand, over the ages. But the thing about it is, it is a nice, crisp, fresh track. And the other thing about it and this is what really captured the attention of the world eric Shifton was not known to be a particularly fraudulent person. Right. He was a very respected explorer and mountaineer. He knew the area well, and as a guy who has Trekked yeti his whole life, I believe his name is Daniel Taylor. Yeah, daniel Taylor put it, if shifting is coming back with a picture of a track, you know, it's a real track. It's not fake. It's not a hoax. So the question was, what was it? And this is that picture. That track hit the world like the surgeon's photo of the Loch Ness monster hit the world back in 1933. It just became, like, proof to people who believe in the yeti around the world that the yeti definitely exists. Yeah, like you said, it was really what made it different than other photos, that it was so sharp, it was a really good picture, and that little toe thing basically looked like a thumb, and it looked odd. But this Daniel Taylor guy actually, when I started reading that article, I thought, oh, boy, this crackpot. But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy because he spent a lot of his life looking for the yeti. Went over there, even met with the kingdom Nepal, and the king of Nepal said, well, if you want to go to the wildest place and the most remote place in our land, go to barun B-A-R-U-N this baroun valley, right. And he went there, and he looked around, and he did not find a yeti. But what he did do was ended up helping to work towards conservation of that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining to his story, was he got there and he was like, this is one of the most beautiful places on earth, right, and one of the greatest wildernesses I've ever been to. He realized it wasn't protected and that Chinese loggers were infringing on one side and farmers were infringing on the other. So he kind of spun it into, like, good work, doing conservation work in that area, which was kind of cool. Yeah, he got it turned into a national park in Nepal. It's a protected area now, which is significant. Have you seen pictures of the valley? Yeah, it's astounding. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life. And it was just being used because the people living there like, well, we need this land. Yeah, it's beautiful, but we can't afford to preserve it because a lot of people around here live on $15 a year. Right. So they were just making use of it however they could. And he came in with the government, said, no more of that. Get out of here. This is protected now, but it is gorgeous. And he had actually been raised there. Daniel Taylor's grandparents were missionaries in the Himalayas, and his parents kind of took over his grandparents work. So he was raised in the Himalayas, so he'd been looking for the yeti his whole life. But when he went to the baroun, he feels like he found the answer to that track, that it was a kind of tree bear. Right. But there's a big problem with that. The barun valley is a subtropical rainforest, so a tree bear living in there wouldn't survive very well in the snow of the Tibetan plateau, 10,000 or more feet higher up the mountain. So it doesn't really solve the mystery much. No, but his notion that it could have been a tree bear makes a little more sense with these tracks because a tree bear does have I don't know if you call it a thumb, but some sort of opposable digit to make climbing easier. And that would at least explain this weird thumb like thing in these prints. It would. So it's got, like, half of the thing explained. The other half is, what the heck was that tree bear, the subtropical rainforest tree bear doing up in the mountains of the Himalayas? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, like in the snow above the snow line, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. But the other thing about that shipton photo that became world famous for the yeti was that the track itself was very crisp. And there's a guy named Benjamin Radford who is a skeptic, who has written a lot about the yeti, and in particular, how difficult obtaining yeti tracks could be, or actually, more to the point, how easy it would be to confuse the normal animals tracks or something weird, because of the fact that the snow is a terrible medium for tracks. Because, like, say a bear walks through an area and leaves some tracks in the snow, the next morning, as the sun comes up and it hits the tracks and it shoots all that heat under that track, it starts to melt the sides, maybe elongate it, maybe make the toes look splayed, and it just doesn't resemble a bear track anymore at all. It looks like something weird and not previously known, like an entirely new species. That's the thing about this shift in photograph that captured everyone's attention. It doesn't look like that at all. It looks sharp, new. It doesn't look melted at all. The edges are clean and crisp. That's what I think really kind of struck everybody. It wasn't like a melted mangled track. It was like a new track by something that was not immediately identifiable. Yeah, for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years as supposed evidence. In 1986, a hiker named Anthony Wooldridge said, there's a yeti over there. He's about 500ft away, and he saw a bunch of tracks in the snow that looked like it was going that way. And he took some photographs that were proven genuine. But I think by genuine, that just means they weren't faked. Yeah, that's how I understand it, because wasn't this the photo that they said, actually, those are just rocks standing up? Yeah, like a rock outcropping or whatever. Yeah. This guy was also a respected mountaineer and explorer and knew the area really well. And so when he came back with this photo and they said this photo wasn't faked, it's not been doctored. Right. People listen to him, too, but it just turns out he was wrong. This photo of rocks has not been doctored. Exactly. That's ultimately what they were saying, because another expedition went back to the same spot the next year and we're like, oh, yeah, it's those rocks over there. And even in his account, that guy what was his name? Woodridge. Yeah. Woodridge says they just stood there motionless like rocks. Yeah, they were still his boulders, upright boulders. But the other thing is, he swore that there were tracks leading up to it, so he seemed to think that they really were there. But from what I understand, he was earnest in his report. It wasn't like a fraud or a hoax or anything like that. And I think he was a little red faced afterward, probably. Yeah. They even made a movie about it called Ernest Goes Hiking. Ernest saves Christmas with the Abominable snowman. I'll bet Ernest did save Christmas in one movie. I guarantee there's a movie called Ernest Saves Christmas. I think there was. Right now the only one I'm 100% sure of is Ernest Goes to Camp. I never saw any of those. My family saw that movie in the theater. Top Dollar. Top Dollar, which was $3. Yeah, I guess I hope so at the time, which is surprising because my mom used to sneak in bulk candy from the store across the way from the movie theater in Southwest Mall. Yeah, we know that move in our family works really well. So over the years, there have been not only things like, oh, look, footprints, or hey, look at that rock across the valley. There have been I don't want to call it evidence, but alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientists and people like Sir Edmund Hillary. He brought back a scalp and said he didn't say, I scalped the yeti, but he said, hey, I think this is a yeti scalp. Yeah. He's trying to fool anyone, though, was he? No, he was supposedly kind of a casual believer in it. He'd been sent on a Yeti expedition by New World Encyclopedia years before, and he came back with a Yeti skull cap that he got from a monastery in Nepal. They had a Yeti skull cap and a hand, a Yeti hand. A mummified Yeti hand. And what's crazy is that Yeti skull cap was supposedly the scalp of the one Yeti that had been killed during the annihilation of the Yeti story. I didn't know. So he brings it back, I think it wasn't that he was gullible, and I also am sure it wasn't that he was a hoaxster. He was the kind of scientific person who kept his mind open until the evidence was in. Man, can you imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send Sir Edmund Hillary out on assignment? How great is that? I know. That was the mid 20th century. It was a great time to be alive in the way of wonder and curiosity. So, yeah, he comes back with a scalp, and it turns out they did a little research and it was an animal called a saro. It's kind of like a goat. Yeah, some poor Sarah got scalp. Yeah, but that happened a lot. There was this finger, and this is a pretty good story that actor Jimmy Stewart, believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out supposed yeti finger. Yeah. From, again, from a monastery. I believe it might have been the same monastery. Yeah. And wasn't he just on vacation there and just got sort of mixed up in this plan? Yeah, we got to mention Tom Slick, the oil man. Yeah. Because he figures into this story. He was a rich guy who was one of these dudes, this sort of adventuring rich guys that was like, I'm a yeti hunter for this year. Yeah. And when you say hunter, he was a hunter. His entire point to finding the yeti was to shoot and kill it and to take it back and have it stuffed. And the government, Nepal, had a real problem with that and basically said, your expedition is banned. Nobody can come in here and kill the yeti. And apparently the US. State Department got in touch with Nepal and said, hey, by the way, we have the same feeling. We have a policy of not killing yeti either. So apparently with that, Tom Slick's expedition was allowed back in on the basis that they would never try to kill the yeti. Acceptance, self defense. Okay. And I guess later on, when he became interested in Bigfoot, he had a change of heart, and he stopped hunting to kill and started hunting just to find and maybe capture on photograph. And that was it. And his change of heart changed the way that Bigfoot is searched for to this day. And the yeti. Oh, really? Yeah. It's much more peaceful search. He was like the last of the big game hunters involved in trying to find unidentified animals again to kill them so they could be stuffed and kept at the National Geographic Society or something like that. Yeah. And that was a big thing that Daniel's guy talks about. Just these legends in history and how. Quote unquote science back then was in the Victorian age where because all these tales of Tarzan and these fantastic beasts. These rich people would go into the jungle and search for animals that no one had ever seen before. So they could shoot and kill them and bring them back and say. Look at this weird thing. Right. A lot of people don't really like you point to the guys who are out there doing the hunting and killing and the exploitation and all of that, but they were very frequently working at the behest of museums sure. Who for a very long time got a pass, even though they were the source of those expeditions and the funders of those expeditions. And the reason people were out there in the first place was to go get specimens for the museum's collections and ostensibly to study or whatever, but it was to study them dead. And I think probably because there wasn't really any reliable way to ship a live specimen back in a lot of ways, but also there was so I think Tom Slick kind of represented the end of that and at the beginning of this new era of much more peaceful exploration and expeditions. Yeah, and I don't want to leave everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart. He was on vacation, I think, in Calcutta, got mixed up in this Yeti finger, helped smuggle it back. And they finally did DNA testing about seven or eight years ago, and they said, oh, this is a human finger. Right. But I mean, for a while there, they weren't 100% sure. And I guess tom slick was friends. Had a common friend with jimmy Stewart. And jimmy stewart happened to be in India. And so Tom Slick's agents in Nepal managed to get this finger to Jimmy Stewart, who agreed to smuggle it out on the basis that Jimmy Stewart's luggage is not going to get searched. Jimmy Stewart smuggled a Yeti finger out of India and to the UK for it to be studied. Go ahead and put the finger in my bag. A jimmy Stewart yeti impression. In my head, I was like, jimmy Stewart? Can I pull that off? You did then you nailed it. All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and how that is figured in the search in more recent years right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's tough. You should know. All right, so Chuck, you remember in the Loch Ness episode, the Loch Ness Monster episode, we talked about how there's like a new search going on where they're sampling the lock itself and examining it for DNA. Apparently applying modern genetics and genetic analysis to cryptozoology is like the next chapter. And rather than saying like, oh, well, that's it for us, our big fraud is over with. Cryptozoologists are like, awesome good. We finally have the tools now to find out, to get to the bottom of this stuff and to actually discover new specimens or new species. So they seem to be quite happy about it and quite excited, although a lot of their beliefs hang in the balance and could just have the legs cut out from under them by science. That's true. So science wins. In 2013, there's a geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, yeti holders of Yeti pieces, send them to me. If you have any yeti hair, yeti teeth, yeti tissue, send it to Oxford University. And he got it. He got 57 samples. They picked 36 of those to do some DNA analysis on, and most of these turned out to be animals that we all know, like bears and cows and horses. At the time, though, he found a couple of samples from Bhutan and India that he said. Were 100% match for jawbones of a polar bear from the Pleistocene era. Yes. And this kind of excited people because this may have been, I mean, not the yeti, but this may have been sort of a combination a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear because this is when they were diverging genetically. And that in itself would be a pretty cool find. Yeah, it would be a new type of bear that was descended from bears that went extinct about 40,000 years ago, and it'd be a type of polar bear. There aren't polar bears in the Himalayas. There's black bears, there's brown bears, there's Himalayan bears, there's tree bears, but there's not polar bears. And the fact that he accidentally found this by putting out this call for samples of yeti or Bigfoot or whoever just made it all the sweeter that he had just accidentally discovered a new type of polar bear living in the Himalayas. Yeah. But sadly, that was not even the case. Some more scientists came along later. They did re analysis, and I think what they landed on was, you know, unfortunately, I think you're getting a bad reading because of a damage sample. What these really are are just brown bears. They're brown bears, yes. Some other people followed up because it's not like it was any kind of hoax or anything like that. It's WIC, right? His last name is Wike Sykes. Sykes is, like, a leading expert on analyzing mitochondrial DNA. Wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind of introduced the world to genetic analysis through mtDNA. But he just made a mistake or leaped to a conclusion, I think is the thing that everyone's being too polite to maybe say. But he shared all of his data on GenBank, which is this huge database, and other people came and analyzed and said, no, it's just regular bears. And then other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally just regular brown bears that we already know about. Yeah, but science, at least was getting involved. And scientists kind of round, they were like, you know what? This is great because we're using real science finally, and regardless of what result we get, we're doing it the right way. And that's really kind of the thing that counts. Don't be disappointed that we're not finding the yeti. And if it's not clear to everyone listening, it seems like the yeti are almost always just bears. Yes. That not just the, like, tissue samples or the fecal samples or the hair samples, but also the tracks, the sightings, all of it are probably just Himalayan bears, brown bears, and black bears. And that's actually the opinion of Rhinehold Messner, who actually is such a mountaineer around the area. He has a museum in the mountains. And one of his yeti samples were one of the ones that Psychs analyzed. His turned out to be the tooth of a dog, but he says that doesn't surprise me because I think they're all bears. I think all of his bears, including his own sighting, he became infatuated with searching for the yeti because he spotted something in the Himalayas that he couldn't explain. And then through his own methodical research, he wrote a book about it. He talked to other people about it. He did his own studies, and he kept his mind open, and his mind became converted to it's. All bears? Yeah, pretty much. The Russians got involved, you would think. Oh, and what like the they got involved about eight years ago and went searching for the yeti in Siberia, and what they came back with were things like, oh, look at this. These twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping pods by the yeti, and they twisted these branches, and look at this. It's evidence, but it turns out that they were clearly manmade, there were tool made cuts, and they were located not in a remote area at all. Just, like, right off a trail, I think. Right, yeah. And what people think is, oh, they just cook this stuff up to try and bring tourism to a not very tourist friendly area. Right. Siberia. And apparently there's a longstanding tradition among Russians and former Soviets of basically drumming up tourism by playing on people's beliefs in the yeti and the abominable snowman. And I think there was a period of time one of the people interviewed in this great BBC article about the yeti, this Russian scientist, says there's a period of time where it was very fashionable for the intelligentia of Russia and the Soviet Union to basically go on trips in the summer looking for the Abominable snowman. And they would show up in these towns, and every town had a designated yeti witness, and the yeti witnesses job was to basically regale them with tall tales that were supposedly true, take them on these tours into the forest, and then make a bunch of money off of them and say, thanks a lot, Chump. Sorry, we didn't see anything this time. But apparently in 2011, the Russian government orchestrated another one of those through this conference. And from the conference, they announced to the world they had found indisputable proof that yeti exists from this bed and these broken branches and supposedly a few hairs attached to a clump of moss. But some other people who were attending, anthropologists and biologists, were like, no, it's totally made up. This is all just a big tourist PR stunt. Yes. Which is hilarious. Way to go, Russia. And Putin supposedly tried to do it again. In 2016, he announced that he saw three yeti from a helicopter tour of Siberia. That's funny. Yeah, I think so, too. I don't have much else yet. You're bears, right? Yeah. We couldn't talk about cryptozoology, though, without mentioning that sealakanth argument. And the thing about the yeti is that there was actually a species of ape called Gigantopithecus that was like, a nine foot tall ape, the biggest ape that ever lived, that lived in that very area and went extinct about 100,000 years ago. So the people who really believe in this are like, we thought the Seal of Cancer went extinct, like, 60 million years before. We just think this guy went extinct 100,000 years before. Who's to say? So that seems to be the thing that's carrying on this belief. That and the fact that if somebody put in one of these articles, all it would take is one yeti to prove that yeti exists. But no matter how much there's no such thing as evidence, they can prove it doesn't exist. So people are always going to believe it. Just like Nessie. Exactly. And bigfoot. Exactly. So there you go. If you want to know more about the yeti, go to the Himalayas and look for it yourself. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Or we should mention, if you're in Disney World, there's a roller coaster ride called Expedition Everest Colon. Because, you know, every good roller coaster has a colon in the name. Right. Legend of the Forbidden Mountain. There is a track on display there that the reason it's not in a scientific museum and it's at Disney World is because it's a yeti track. But you can go get one from a TV show. Yeah. This guy named Gates, who is not a zoologist at all, but he's an actor. I don't even think he's an animal tracker. Is he? No, he's an actor and a TV presenter and a producer. Yeah. So they presented one on his TV show and now it's in Disney World. Yeah. And if you're in Disneyland, there's a yeti on the Matterhorn ride. Oh, really? Like a real yeti? Yeah, they have one chained by the neck inside the Matterhorn. Really? Scrawling. You clearly aren't taking very good care of it. Amazing. Well, I already said it's time for listener mail. Charles. Yes, I got distracted. Sorry. So I'm going to call this follow up on the chilly finger that Jimmy Stewart planted at Windy's. Nice and quick, shout out. There's a local listener from Georgia Tech. But I just wanted to say hello to a couple of people I met last weekend at the High Museum when I went to the Infinity Mirrors exhibit. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, you always kusama. Yeah, I thought it was. Here's what I think. I think it was really cool, and it would have been a lot cooler if it's just like yeah, you just walk through all these things and you don't wait 30 minutes to spend 20 seconds in the room. That took away from it a bit. You mean I went at the end of the day and people send out and we could just keep going in and staying as long as we wanted in them. So I totally get what you're saying. It was cool, though. And I also think, like, I went with my brother and his family, and Scott was kind of like, I could build one of these in my backyard by next weekend. I want to see Scott's infinity mirror. I thought the same thing. It'd be awesome to build one of those and just hang out in it, for sure. I don't want to take anything away from her, though. She's a great artist, and it was really neat. I think the one that was sort of like the Christmas lights was my favorite one. What about the one that's, like, kind of like an octagonal box that you look in? That was awesome. Yeah, it's just like you see your future in the 80s or something like that. Yeah, I got a couple of cool photos, but I largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried to be in it, man. Yeah, man. I'm with you. So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that just happened to be there, and they both came up and like, Are you Chuck? And so my brother got a kick out of that as well. Oh, that's awesome. But this was not one of those people. Okay. It just reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys. Relatively new listeners have probably listened to about 100 episodes so far. Tend to hop around. As you can tell, I'm a Georgia Tech student and really hope to run into you guys at some point in Atlanta. Did I mention I go to Georgia Tech? Anyway, I finally sort of had something to write in about. I was listening to the Wendy's Chili podcast, suddenly heard the name of a place that sounded very familiar cole's Custard. Remember we mentioned that at the end as a place where there was a finger? Oh, yeah. He said it was one of the places where a finger had been found. And it shocked me, as it is just a tiny little custard shop that is not a chain on quite expensive beach property in North Carolina. As a Georgia Tech student, I was shocked. I've been to the place probably five or ten times as a frequent berserk of Wrightsville Beach and then never heard of anyone mention this incident. Just think it's very impressive that a small little store managed to stay afloat after such an incident occurred. Right. Hearing about the finger incident will not deter me from going again, though, and that is from Ethan Lyons. And, Ethan, maybe that is exactly why it endured it's because people just want that custard so bad. It must be pretty good custard, though, if you think about it. Yeah. And it didn't make, like, big national news, probably because it's not a chain. I see. Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it. Plus, they also did a better job spinning the PR than Wendy's did, I'm betting. Well, thanks a lot, Ethan, for letting us know. Just kind of bringing that home. Hadn't really envisioned the place where that finger was found in the custard until now. So thanks for that. If you want to get in touch with us and kind of paint a more illustrative picture than we did about something we talked about, we love that. You can join us on Stuffysheanow.com, check out all of our links there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetopworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs all in the same week. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-08-10-sysk-bioarcheaology-final.mp3 | How Bioarchaeology Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-bioarchaeology-works | Thanks to advancements in fields like genetics, and molecular chemistry, archaeology is undergoing a renaissance and opening up new understanding of the past. | Thanks to advancements in fields like genetics, and molecular chemistry, archaeology is undergoing a renaissance and opening up new understanding of the past. | Thu, 10 Aug 2017 13:00:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=222, tm_isdst=0) | 52759899 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. So it's stuff you should know. Doing one of my favorite things. Chuck what's that? Archaeology. Yeah, we've done a few of these over the years. Yes. Specifically one called Archaeology in a Nutshell, which was mostly about archaeology. Yeah. And boy, it's hard to find an archeology article on the Internet that doesn't mention Indiana Jones. I'll say that? Including this one from stuff you should know or from how stuff works. It was the one, two, third and fourth word in this article. Yes. Forget the Indiana Jones fedora. Yes. But you know what? No pun intended. Hats off to that character. That character has done so much for the field of archeology just by existing. Yeah, for sure. It definitely opened my eyes. Archaeology was one of the first complicated words I could spell as a youngster. Yeah. Thanks to Indiana Jones. I bet 95% of archaeologists between the ages of 30 and 55 are there because of Indiana Jones. Right. And you can usually pick them out because they tend to dress like him as well. You really don't need a whip. No, I don't need it. Right. I want it. You never know. Yeah. But yeah. He represents, though, this kind of well, he represents a type of archaeologist that never actually existed. Pulp fiction kind of archaeologists from the 1930s adventures. Right, yeah. So Indiana Jones and his ilk didn't ever really exist, but he also kind of represents this type of archaeology that has become old school, for sure. And it's starting to be replaced. I was going to say slowly being replaced, but I get the impression that it's fairly quickly being replaced by this kind of new method. These new techniques that put together all fall under the name of bioarcheology. Right. Which is a subgenre not genre, but subfield. There's a word I'm looking for. I can't find it. I think sub specialty works or specialty. Yeah, it is a specialty, but I can't a sub umbrella of the umbrella term, a subbrella man, it's going to bug me. I'll think of it later. So, anyway, we're talking about the combining of a lot of different disciplines in archaeology, and they all have great long names like Paleo, demography, just studying ancient populations, the demographics of those. Right. Paleo genetics, which is a big deal, as you will see, with DNA, scraping some old teeth, finding out what's going on there. Yeah. Mortuary studies, which is the best way to get a date in college, if you say you're minoring in mortuary studies. Right. What else? Well, basically anything where you can apply new scientific techniques to the study of bones, in particular bones that kind of lends itself to being called bio archaeology. But the field, this little thing that started out, I think it's kind of a fairly specialized subdiscipline of archaeology it's the word subdiscipline. I think I suggested that, didn't I? No, I don't think so. It's starting to replace archeology as a whole. From what I can see from the outside looking in, it's becoming archaeology. Exactly. It's replacing some of these old techniques with these new techniques is kind of a technocratic approach to archaeology. And the practices, the best practices they're coming up with are so good that they're kind of undoing old archeology. And so this specialized field is kind of taking over the field as a whole. And it seems to be the way that archaeology is going. And one of the reasons initially it was just like dig up the bones and try to read them in even better ways than the old style of archaeology did. Right. But as it's growing as a field or as a sub discipline, it's starting to try to answer bigger and bigger questions about the people that are being dug up and the populations that they belong to. Yeah, kind of putting it in a historic context and not just, let me look at this one set of bones and what this says about this person, but like you said, they're trying to almost reconstruct societies as a whole and social strata and what they ate and what kind of things killed them and whether or not they accepted outsiders. It's really kind of neat. It really is. I like it. And plus, this is stuff that archeology, I guess you could call it old school archaeology, concerned itself with as well. But I get the impression that the old school archaeology was not rooted enough in science, so they were at risk of making grand pronouncements that were not necessarily correct. So you just have limited evidence, like this one skeleton or maybe one burial area, and just from a few things that were basically based on observation, just like visual observation. You would make these extrapolating, you would extrapolate onto the population as a whole. And you could get that wrong really easily. So what bioarchaeology does is the same thing. You still bury up dead bodies, you surmise things from the way that they were situated, the stuff they were buried with and all that. But then you also apply scientific investigation like genetics and using mass spectrometers to isolate isotopes and bones. And then you take that evidence and you apply it to the visual observations you've made and you get a clearer picture and you're at less risk of getting it wrong. I think that's why it's becoming archaeology. Yeah, and we'll probably talk about this a little more later on, but one of the things I thought was really neat about this is they make the point in our article here that history is written by historians. So you often just get stories or the history of the more important people. Right. And they even quoted a bio archeologist in here that says that their goal is to kind of work from the bottom up and to find out what was going on with some of these marginalized people in society, or at the very least, society as a whole. And not just, let's dig up King Tutt's tomb, which is great, but who worked on King Tut's tomb. That's interesting. Exactly. Yeah. And so that's basically what's called diplomatic or great man, histography Love It, which is the study of well, that's just digging up King Tutt and focusing on him and leaders and rulers. And that's based on the idea that they're the ones who really push society forward or in whatever direction it would love it. It was on the rulers. And that's the way that it's been. That's like kind of the Western white patriarchical approach to studying history. Sure. What you love and what Bioarcheology has tasked itself with is called History From Below, which is, like you said, it's sussing out the common people's lives and figuring out society from there. And one of the neat things about that. Chuck. Is imagine if you're just part of a marginalized group today. And you find out from some archaeologists down the road or some historians down the road that actually the group that you're a part of did some really amazing things in this one civilization at this one period in time that's inspiring. That can inspire people alive today to do great things with their own lives based on finding out some neat stuff about their ancestry that would have otherwise been overlooked if their ancestry had never been part of the leadership of a society. Yeah, there's a lot of value to it. Yeah. And the term itself, you're more likely, at least at this point, and I think you're right, it is changing to hear it in America, even though it was first used by a British archaeologist named Sir John Graham Douglas Clark, great British name in the 1970s, but an American anthropologist named Jane Ellen Buxtra. It's as good as I could have done. Buxtra. B-U-I-K-S-T-R-A. She's the one who kind of popularized it, and Americans kind of picked up on the term a little more, at least at this point. You're not as likely to hear it in Europe right now. Right. Well, we're just going to call her Jane Ellen. Okay. So Jane Ellen, she was an anthropologist, and she basically took that term bio archaeology and basically said it was the integration of archaeology and human osteology, which is the study of human bones and what they can tell us put together to investigate biocultural change. That was her definition of bio archeology, and she came up with it in 1977, and that really kind of is the definition for the field today. Yeah, she was awesome, actually. I looked into her a little bit. Does she wear a pith helmet, too? She's probably been a pit at some point. Sure. I had a dude right in actually, that was a fellow pither. Nice. I saw a couple of people on Twitter saying, like, I had to go look this up. But this is what you're wearing in the pool. Well, I mean, to be fair, there are, like, the British soldier type tall pith helmets with the red feather. Yeah. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the low safari type that provides the coverage. That's precisely what I assumed you were talking about. Yeah. It'd be just weird to wear the tall ones in a swimming pool. That's right. But yeah. This guy was a mail carrier. Oh, yeah. It seems like that might be standard issue for the post office, now that you mention it. I've seen it before. I have to for the Walkers, at least. Yeah, the walkers, the undead ones. All right, well, I think we should already take a break since we provided such a nice, broad overview. Gosh. That's all right. Sure. And we'll come back and talk more and more about bones and poop. All right. All right. So we promised talk of bones and poop. We'll deal with bones first and bones most times. Unless, like, recently when they found did you hear, like, just a couple of days ago, they found this couple from World War II frozen in the Swiss Alps? Yes. Okay. So this couple it's so tragic, right? It is. They had tons of kids that were at home. The dad used to go hiking in the mountains all the time. The mom finally went with them for the first time, and they get lost and they fall into a crevasse and are lost for 70 years. Yeah. Never heard from them again. Yeah. And the reason why she never went with them before with her husband before is because she's pregnant all the time. Yeah. So she reared a bunch of kids, fell into a crevasse, died, was lost for 70 years, and then was found again by a ski lift company. Could you imagine coming across something like that? It'd be grizzly in World War II outfits. I mean, uniform, obviously, but period era clothing. Yeah. So, anyway, barring something like that, generally what you're going to be left with when people die. The flesh goes away very quickly as far as in a relative sense, and you're going to be left with bones. These skeletons, they're very durable, they're very hard, and they last a very long time. So the best evidence that bioarcheologists work with, for the most part, like bones and teeth. Right. Because, like you said, they last a very long time. And there's actually quite a bit you can tell from those things. Sure. In fact, I saw an explanation of bio archaeology because it's such an evolving field still, Chuck, that the definition. Even though Jane Ellen's definition holds pretty well. It's just not set in stone. No one says, this is the definition. Right. Right. So one explanation for bioarchy LG I saw that as a discipline. It views the skeleton as a form of material culture crafted through lived experience. So the skeleton itself has the markers of all these different things that this person did in their lifetime, had done to them in their lifetime. Like, say, an infliction of violence suffered from in their lifetime, like a disease ate in their lifetime, how hard they worked. Yeah, all of this stuff is left behind in your bones. And we've just recently really figured out how to read this beyond looking at it and visually inspecting it. We've learned how to apply scientific tools like DNA analysis to glean more information from them. Yeah, it's really neat. It really puts a more broad human aspect to it all, I think. Yeah, for sure. Did these people suffer as a society? Did they thrive? Were they healthy? Were they sick? What did they overcome? What was their environment like? Was it social upheaval that brought them down? Or was it a large wave? Or was it a disease from eating the wrong thing? Right. It's really interesting. I think it was in 2014, I believe we talked about this on some show, but it might have even been an Internet roundup. But they discovered the oldest human poop, 50,000 year old Neanderthal poop, and they found out that it was a bit of a surprise that they ate a lot of vegetables. Yeah, I saw this documentary recently called what the Health, I think is what it was called. Netflix or whatever. So clever. Right? But there's an ongoing discussion in it about whether humans are actually herbivores or omnivores. Yeah, it was a bit of surprise because they thought that Neanderthals I think it's talls. Right, they ate talls, but I think it is supposed to be talls. I don't know. Well, they ate largely only meat, and then they found that no, it's called COPPERLIGHT, this fossil feces. Right. They did eat a lot of meat, obviously, but they were eating and they couldn't tell from the chemistry analysis of the poop itself, but they did pollen analysis of the area and found that they were eating, like, berries and nuts and tubers. And overall just gets kind of a more complete picture of something like you were talking about earlier. They previously were like, no, all they did was eat meat. Well, yeah. Plus, also, I mean, think about it. So there's this whole idea that all of the megafauna in North America collapsed, like, around 12,000 years ago, and humans get blamed for it. Like, we overhunted the megafauna. Right. Well, if we find evidence down the road through bio archaeology that, no, actually, most of the ancestors who made it to North America and were living here 12,000 years ago were vegetarians for the most part. They probably didn't overhunt and drive to extinction the megafauna. That was probably something else that did it. And so laying it at the feet of these early humans has been kind of a cautionary tale like, look what happens. You can lead to environmental collapse if you don't manage the wildlife correctly. But if that's not actually true and we find out what did lead to the collapse of the Megafauna, then maybe we can protect against that instead. Right. You know what I mean? And just forget the rest of wildlife. Yeah. You can overhun all you want. Well, it's definitely calling into question a lot of things that we took for granted because of just sort of limited science, I guess, is the best way to say it. Yeah. And there was this Atlas obscure article we both read about human feces, about copper light, the study of it. I think it was something like, to know ancient civilization, you have to study its feces or something along those lines. Yes. To truly know an ancient society, one must analyze its feces. Right. And it gives an example of this one archaeologist who was working back in the is working today, and back in the 60s, when they would find copper light, they would be like, oh, this is interesting. And then they'd use it for, like, flying disc contest at lunch. Right. Can you believe it? This is not that long ago archeologists were doing this, and today it's like, you find copper light, you bag it separately from the other copper light found it's going back for genetic analysis. You take half of the sample and preserve it so that you can use it for later analysis when our tools become even more advanced. It's just such a great example of old school archeology and the new archeology that's coming up today. Yeah, they're looking at it as it is, which is a legitimate important find that can tell you a lot about a society instead of playing Frisbee baseball with it. Right. I guess it's Frisbee football, right. Playing Froth with the poop. Did you ever play that? Frisbee golf? No. They have courses for that stuff. I know. Yeah, I know. They definitely do. I'm sure they did in Athens, if they don't still. Well, in true Chuck form, I went so far as to buy a couple of different Frisbee golf Frisbees and never went. Oh, you never did, huh? No, that's kind of my thing. Nothing beats sitting around when you're in college. Yeah, pretty much. Copper light, it took from the until just recently, like, even through the said that it was a pretty small field of people that took it seriously. And other people were still, even in the 90s, like, what are you studying poop for? To be fair, at the time, especially, like, back in the 60s, as recently as, like, the 80s or ninety s, I guess. Like you were saying, we didn't have anything that we could do with the human poop besides besides false. Yeah, there wasn't anything you could do. I mean, you could break it open and be like, oh, look, a corn seed. They were eating corn. That's about the best you could hope for. Right. So there wasn't much you could do. But even still, if you look at what we're doing with it today, which is preserving half of the sample for future analysis with better tools that haven't been invented yet, that definitely underscores a mentality that wasn't present before either, which is this is not the apex yet. We haven't reached the apex of science. Yeah. I mean, nowadays they can rehydrate it. They can say, hey, there were parasites in this poop and in fact, in all the poop of all these people that lived here. So perhaps that's what killed them. And they don't even have to have the stool sample. They can find an ancient latrine and learn a lot from that. And it sounds kind of funny, but you can learn a lot from this stuff. Well, I remember when I was writing the cannibalism article years back, right around that time, they had found evidence of cannibalism from copper light, and they had done it really round about. They'd found some protein that is only found in human muscle, and they found it in the poop of some southwestern indigenous groups. Poop. And they think that it was the result of climate change because the climate had changed and people were starving, and they engaged in cannibalism as a result. But that's a pretty sterling example of bio archeology in action. Yeah. This one guy, Pierce Mitchell from University of Cambridge, go, I don't know, go fighting chaplains. Fighting chaplains. He learned through studying fecal matter that King Richard III had roundworm. Yeah, that's great, man. His geography, though. Sure. Who cares? All right, so, man, I didn't expect to go right into poop, but there we did it. Well, let's talk teeth. Let's go from poop to teeth. The standard. Yes. Teeth are a big marker. Like, if they dug me up one day, they would say, well, this gentleman had at least two bad teeth, because the only thing left. And I had a brief conversation with the very famous Mike Row, just kind of weirdly had a conversation with him one day about my implants, and he said, oh, you have those implants. And he went, well, just know in a thousand years that will be the only thing left of you. Right. So that's kind of good to know. Sure, yeah. They'll be like, obviously, this person was of higher social status. He had implants. Yeah. Or at least dental insurance. He was probably venerated and bury me with my flippers is all I'm going to say. Too. Right. So what they could find out from teeth or can find out maybe if the children suffered from malnutrition. Well, there's a whole thing where when you are malnourished as a child, your teeth form these little lines in them. The development is kind of stunted, and they stay there for life, even if you manage to become nourished and survive. Right. So they can tell what your diet was like as a child from just looking at your teeth. Well, and can also tell, I guess, when I was talking about how society may have overcome something, maybe they were close to death and overcame disease to end up thriving, but they still had those lines and the teeth. Right? Exactly. They can also tell from teeth if you crush teeth up and powder them and run them through a mass spectrometer. There's some pretty neat stuff you can do with that. Actually. When you're a little kid and you start eating and drinking the local water. There's something called strontium. And it's a stable isotope that's found in the bedrock of your area. And it's specific to your area. Your region. It's pretty localized, right? Yeah. The type of strontium isotope that's going to be where you live and when rainwater filters through the bedrock into groundwater and then comes back out and it's taken up by plants and enters the water supply, and then your mom eats that plant and then breast feeds you, those stranium isotopes get transferred to you and they get locked into your teeth for life. Right. So where you're born can be isolated by using a mass spectrometer to find what Stronium isotopes are in your teeth. That can be done whether you live 50,000 years ago or were born yesterday. Either way, isn't that amazing? Yeah. I feel like we talked about that before. There's no way we have it. Right? Yeah. Like something about the water that you drank as a child. Yeah, that would be it. Yeah, totally. Right. So you're taking in strontium isotopes and you've got those embedded in your teeth. You also get different kinds of isotopes as well asnium lead, oxygen. They all have stable isotopes that get embedded into your skeleton, whether it's your teeth or your bones. But the stuff in your teeth from when you're young stays in there. It's permanently locked in. But the stuff in your bones, remember we did like does the body replace itself every seven or eight years? Since your skeleton replaces itself on a pretty regular basis, the strontium and the isotopes that are found in your bones later in life are going to be a marker of where you lived close to your death. Right? Yes. So if the strength of isotopes in your teeth are different from the strawnium isotopes in your bone, well, a bio archeologist is going to say, this person migrated. Where did they come from? Why did they migrate? Why were they buried with all these great grave goods? Do they come from a different culture and basically end up becoming venerated in this new culture? Were they like a high priest or what's the deal? Where did this person come from? That's amazing. Yeah. And that's just kind of laying the groundwork now. And we might not have the technology to say, oh, well, this is where he came from. We don't have the interpretation yet to say this is where they came from and this is what happened when they arrived. But we can create raw data from that for successive generations of archeologists to look at and use to include it into a better understanding of the population they're examining. Yeah. With the mass spectrometer, which we've talked about in other shows too, they do something called stable isotope analysis in terms of also finding out what people ate. If there's a difference in molecular weight, like the ratio of heavy to light particles, they can determine whether someone consumed more carbon or more nitrogen in their lifetime. If they have a lot of nitrogen, maybe they ate a lot of meat, or most likely ate a lot of meat, or they just ate handfuls of nitrogen. Yeah, maybe. So. Nice nitrogen fields that you come across. If they have a high ratio of the carbon, maybe they ate a lot of, like, corn or I guess maize. Sorghum that's such a great word. Sure. Low carbon. It's an old timey word, like, anytime I hear sorghum I immediately think overall yeah, me too. Low ratio of carbon isotopes might mean they ate more potatoes and wheat and stuff like that. So it's just amazing that science has gotten to this point. You can dig up a phone, find out where someone was from, where they died, and what they ate, like, largely in their life. Yeah. And again, you're putting it in context with where you're finding this. Yeah. That's already, like, the story that's already there. Exactly. Because if you bury somebody with something that says a lot just as much as what your bones say about how you lived. I saw somebody say, like, the way that you're treated in death by the people who you are survived by, that says quite a bit as well. The type of burial, the way that your grave was marked, says a lot about not just you and how you were treated, but also what the society was found important. That's true. Because you can ask for whatever you want in your burial. Right. But someone's got to feel good enough about you to carry that out. Carry those out. They might be like, sure, I want to keep this wooden phallus. I don't want you to be buried with it. Sure. Did you see that thing, those mummies that were discovered in China? I don't think so. These are the ones hobby Lobby token. No, I think that was like Middle Eastern artifact that Hobby Lobby had, which I don't know anything about that. Do you? I read briefly after I saw the word Hobby Lobby. What were they doing with that stuff? I don't know. It's very bizarre. Maybe they were collectors. Maybe they were going to turn it into a line of, like, tasteful home decor. Probably so. Well, there was a group of mummies found that belonged to an unnamed population that lived about 4000 years ago in an autonomous part of China that's now a desert. It's called the tackle, macken desert. I'm sure I got that 100% right. But the area of the district that they were found near is called the Showhood District. And the mummies are just incredibly well preserved, so much so that their hair is totally intact. They were buried with these felt hats and fur line boots that are totally intact. I think one of them had, like, a feather in their cap that was intact. The preservation is just unheard of. And one of them is so well preserved that she's called the Beauty of Show Hoodie. Right, where she's just kind of good looking as far as mummies go. Look her up. Don't think I'm a weirdo. You'll feel odd about this after you see her yourself, right? What was the name again? The beauty of show Jew. Okay, so it's not at all pronounced like that, but just type in Beauty Mummy China or something like that, and it will definitely bring it up. But this unknown group, they would bury their dead with phalluses or vulvas. They were buried with, like, 13 foot phallus sticking out of, like, their graves. They were really into sex for one reason or another, right? And the hats that they were buried in were found in burials in the area 2000 years later. And so this unknown group that no one has any idea what they were like or what they were into, aside from they were super sexy, right? They think that they know what language they spoke because the group that had similar hats 2000 years later was known to speak this one lost language, and it was more related to Latin than, say, like, Central Asian, which doesn't really make sense until you find out that some of these mummies actually had red hair and European features. And they think that they were a pastoral group that basically herded their cows all the way from Western Europe over to the deserts of central China. Wow. Isn't that astounding? Yeah. Holy cow. Yeah. But again, bio archeology. All right, well, let's take another break here. We'll talk a little bit about DNA and a little bit about how Hobby Lobby kind of figures into this in a way. Okay. All right, so we talked about mass spectrometers, talked about good old fashioned tooth scraping, good looking mummies, talked about the sexiest mummies in history. Right? I'm sure there's a top ten list on the Internet somewhere. I'm telling you, you'll be like, oh, there's number one. I got to see this. So I guess DNA is sort of the next place to go. They've been using DNA in archaeology for a while. Obviously since the advent of DNA, they've been trying to apply it, but they use it as much as they can. Now, ancient DNA, because obviously with DNA you can find out all kinds of things from relatedness to other individuals within a population, marriage. Patterns, maybe. And obviously just something is they can tell largely from the bones what kind of sex of an individual. But DNA is the shoe in. Yeah. Supposedly, even if you are sexing an individual by the bone structure, it's still an educated guess. Not definitive. Sure. It's DNA. That's the only definitive way to say this is a man or this is a woman. Yeah. It could have been a man with a very dainty frame. So the mummy is called the beauty of X-I-A-O-H-E which, believe it or not, is shoe. How's my Chinese? That was pretty good, actually. Thanks, man. I'm going the extra step these days and looking up pronunciations and then practicing, which is the second step. What word was it that shamed you into doing that? Oh, there's been so many. Yeah. I can't bring any of mine. I think I blocked them out to keep any level of self respect, but there have been plenty, as you're well aware. Can you think of one? No. Okay. Nothing recently. I'm sure everyone will let us know on the Internet. I just found the mummy. Yeah. Am I right or what? That's a good looking mummy. Well, I don't know. It's a little weird to say it is, but I think when you approach it from like, wow, that's a mummy. I can't believe how well preserved it is. Yeah. Place instead of like a mummy. Yeah. Although, hey, man to eat his own. Does that extend to that? Yeah, sure. All right. What else about DNA lineages? Obviously, it's a very big deal. Well, yeah. You can find a group of group burial or basically a cemetery. And now bioarcheologists just like to show off by showing who's related to whom. Yeah. Just by saying, well, let's look at their genes, their DNA. Sure. Which is pretty neat. Yeah. And as a whole, if you look at a cemetery, finding an individual is great, but when archeologists can uncover a burial ground, that's when they really kind of lick their chops, because they can learn a lot about the hierarchy of the society. What different ones of them ate, like you said, if they migrated, maybe they were from somewhere else. Where were they born? Right. Which says a lot about a population. If they took in people from other societies yes. Killing them right away. That's a great point, actually. Yeah. That actually gives a pretty good example of the social hierarchy thing. That gives a good example of bio archaeology. Whereas before you would find a grave, and this one had, like, a marker, and the person was buried with a lot of cool stuff, and then it's next to a grave, or there's a grave nearby that isn't really buried with as much stuff. So you would say, well, this person was obviously venerated and this is a socially unequal society. Right. And it's a pretty good guess. You're probably right. But what bioarcheology does now is they take that surmising, and then they say, okay, well, this person had a diet that was rich and meat, and this person ate nothing but vegetables. So the rich and meat person who had the nicer grave was probably richer. And let's look at their bones. Oh, their bones are less dense, which would indicate they had not engaged in hard labor during their lifetime, whereas this other person's bones are very dense, which meant that they probably did engage in hard labor. And so you start putting all this stuff together, and you're backing up the surmise that you made about the social strata or strategy. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Sure. I'm glad at least one person does, and you're basically backing it up rather than just jumping to conclusions and leaving it at that. Yeah. It's a much more firm science, for sure. Yeah. So I kind of teased before the break that Hobby Lobby kind of plays a part, but I was referencing in general, when anytime we talk about archeology, there's a certain amount of controversy involved, because what you're inherently doing is disturbing ancient greys in almost all cases, unless there are no humans there. But there's going to be some controversy within that. Some people think you shouldn't do it at all, and then other people have come along the way to at least kind of give a framework of how best to do this. Best practices. UNESCO. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in 1970, adopted a convention called the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful, but basically what it says is, try not to let happen, which is what Hobby Lobby did, which is obviously pay for a cultural object that didn't belong to your people. Right. Individually. Right. That's the key. Even if it's somebody who is a member of, say, like, the tribe, that that artifact comes from, that skeleton comes from there's something called cultural patrimony, which is that that is an object that belongs to the tribe as a whole, and no individual, including an individual from that tribe, can claim ownership over it or over the tribe. Right. Yeah. If the tribe says, no, that's ours, the tribe wins, that individual doesn't. Yeah. And there's been a really big and I know we talked about this on other episodes, but there's been a really big push in the past ten years, but really in the past, like, 2025 years for repatriation of these cultural items here in the US. And I think in 1990, they yeah. George H. W. Bush. Yes. They passed the legislation called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Nagra. Sure, why not? Not as catchy as UNESCO. That's a good one. No, but, you know, like I said, the idea is that you just can't come in here and steal such a harsh word, but it's kind of gray rob. Yeah, it's really tough. I think gray robbing, we did one on that, right, as a whole. Yeah. Remember that one audience member in London called me out and was like, are you saying my parents are gray robbers because they're both archeologists? And I was like, of course, that was our life topic. I said, some people would say that for sure. I do remember that, yeah. There's a little bit of, like, pushback, though, in some cases because sometimes they end up having to rely on oral history. And I think that the cynics are saying, well, how do we know? They're just saying this stuff. Yeah, that was passed down orally. Like, show it to me in writing. Have an alphabet, dude. Or you might have to negotiate with a religious leader and then another jerk might come along and say, oh, wait a minute, these are their religious beliefs and this is federal law. Like, we have to keep those things separate. Yeah. So, I mean, those are all very cynical viewpoints. I think generally by archeologists try as much as possible to work with the local people or the indigenous people and say, hey, this is your stuff, let us uncover some of your secrets here. Right. Unless they're like, no, don't, we don't want the secrets out. Right. But they tried to have a good working relationship with the indigenous people, so that's the best way to go forward. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you never know, obviously, what's important to like, one Native American tribe might be different for another, but I would think a lot of times they might want some of the stuff highlighted and even put on display, as long as it's a temporary thing and they can get it back. Yeah. I think it also depends on the context of the last century was really rife with I mean, you really can't call it anything much more than academically sanctioned gray robbing where universities of prestigiousness would send off basically guys who amounted to adventurers to go locate grades and loot them and bring them back for the universities to widen their prestige with these collections. Right. Or for the crown. Sure. And then if for decades you said, hey, give that back, that was taken by anyone's definition illegally. The university is like, oh, sorry, no, you're going to be upset about that. Whereas if the person says, well, yes, of course, let's give this back to you. Can we do this analysis on it first? Right, and then get it back to you? Or if you discover something, you say, hey, we need to hold a meeting with this local indigenous population saying, we found a grave site, we'd really like to excavate it, but it's up to them whether we do or not. Right. You're probably going to get a lot better reception than you would if you just rolled right over their wishes and didn't take them into consideration at all. Well, there's a saying here in the South, Josh, that you've probably heard you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Right. So true. It's always been my approach. Yeah, that's why there's always plenty of honey at all of these local meetings of indigenous people when the bio archaeologists show up. I just learned this today. They're exhuming Salvador Dali. Yeah. Did you see that? A paternity test? Yeah. Jerry Springer is behind it. Official. No, he's not. Is he? No, it wouldn't surprise me. No, it wouldn't be either. Officials in Spain are going to break into his tomb, get a DNA sample, and see if this lady, this woman Pilar Abel, is in fact his daughter. It's a good name, pillar. She's a fortune teller. Oh, yeah. She's a little wacky. Well, apparently her claims legit. Not that they're taking the guy up. Yeah, holly from stuff you missed in history class. And I were talking about this and I hadn't heard about it yet, and she was telling me about it. She was like, oh, this lady, she's a piece of work, man. She's wacky. I was like, well, she probably just waltzed into court and knowing anything about Salvador Dali. The judge was like, yeah, maybe we should look into this. Right? Yeah. Like two of the great odd figures, or at least one. I like how you just expose Holly to a lawsuit from this lady by saying she was wacky. Wacky. I quote holly Fry said wacky. And of course, his family, the Salvador Dali Foundation, is fighting it. Buried. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting when it seems a little sentimental for Salvador. Dolly, it doesn't seem to fit his character. I'm sure he'd be like, whoa. All right, let's get it going. Yeah. Dig me up. Dig me up and bury me with the world's bestlooking mummy. She said it's not about the dough, it's about the money. Yeah, we'll see about that. It's like tens of millions of dollars at stake here, easy. Oh, so she has a claim on his estate is what it is. Well, that also explains why the foundation doesn't want it. Yeah, that's a good thing. If he fathered a child, she is his rightful heir because he didn't have any kids. I got you. I have mixed feelings about that stuff. How does it well, I mean, on one hand, it seems like Jesus person coming along and trying to get some of this money, but then on the other hand well, yeah, if that's his daughter that he never cared for. Yeah, I mean, I definitely end up siding with the fact that it is family in the end, but it feels icky sometimes, too. Well, yeah. I mean, you're digging up a body. You're digging up a body so you can make a claim on money. Whether it is about that or not, it's all involved. But I also feel like there's a certain amount of reverence for the dead body where it's kind of like no. If you fathered an illegitimate child in life, just because he died doesn't really get him off the hook from that, from whatever consequence that might be even in death. I don't know, I hadn't really considered it until now, but I guess it is just kind of an icky thing overall. But it's also it's just a dead body, you know what I mean? Sure, it's a dead body. Doesn't care. Yeah, I'm not too precious about my remains. That's good to know because I'm going to dig you up based on that. Good. Make me into a bunch of soccer balls. Alright. Just kick me around the world. That would be great, man. What a great idea. So Chuck, let's wrap it up. Talking about why this kind of stuff is important. I think we've hit on it like here or there. Like explaining the history of a society from the common people rather than just the leadership gives a better idea of the society. That's definitely one thing. Oh, for sure. But also I think that bio archeology is kind of tasked itself with using the past, getting a clear picture of the past to explain the present or predict the near future. One thing that a lot of people are trying to figure out is our humans inherently violent. And one way you could kind of provide evidence for that case is were we violent in the past? I think we even did an entire episode on that one that was pretty great about whether humans have always been violent. And I think that's one thing that bio archeologists are trying to solve is finding evidence of violence or an evidence of a lack of violence in a society that happened before. Another big one is climate change and how humans have responded to that in the past. Right. And what we might can do about it in the future. Exactly. Based on that learning. Yeah. And then there's just something to be said about getting bones out of a grave. There's nothing more satisfying than that. Putting them in a bag, throwing the bag over your shoulder and walking back to the lab whistling as you do. That's right. The job well done. You got anything else? I got nothing else, sir. Okay, well, I'm sure bio archeology will have plenty more for us to talk about in the future, so maybe we'll revisit it. In the meantime, you can type that word bioarcheology into the search bar@housetofworks.com. Since I said that it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this what was in the subject line, which is, am I an ahole? Except she really said the word yes, I know, it's from Michaela. And I always like these. That kind of pose a question to us. So this one does that. Here's what went down, guys. It was a recent conversation with my boyfriend. I stopped at a stop sign at the same time as a car coming from the opposite direction who had a turn signal on? I was going straight. The guy and I both waved for the other to go ahead first. Got a little awkward, but that's not the important part. My boyfriend said he notices that it's usually men who do the wave to usher people at stop signs, and he thinks it's just them trying to be controlling and that they are probably jerks. I wave people through all the time just trying to be nice and help them get where they're going a little bit faster without worrying about who should technically go first. So I've always assumed that when people do the wave at me, it's because they're trying to be nice. My questions to you all are, how do you perceive the wave? Am I controlling ahole? Is this how my boyfriend perceives the wave? Is he a controlling ahole? If he sees it that way? And should I stop doing the wave? And that's for Michaela. She said, thanks, I'll be seeing you in Lawrence, Kansas, in a couple of months. I've been spreading the good word. Awesome. Thank you. So, Josh, what are your thoughts on the wave? When I am I very infrequently wave, you just go, no, I guess that's not true. I don't actually wave. I do the you know, where you present with your hand, you palm up, and then you kind of move it to one side like, oh, please, after you. Sure, yeah, that's what I do, which I just realized as a form of the wave. And I do that sometimes, but I guess the only time I would do it is when it's not obviously clear who's supposed to go. So I tend to just ask the other person to go ahead and please after you. Right. I don't think of that as being controlling, but that's exactly what I'm doing, is taking control of the situation, but not doing it. Yeah. To me, just not even giving a second thought and basically pushing through ahead of somebody who may or may not justifiably should have gone first. That's the jerky move. To me, I think it goes both ways. It just depends on your perception of the world. Do you hate people? If so, then you probably find the way to be controlling and jerky. What about you? All right, so my four way stop sign deal is very deep. It's a very big thing in my life waiting on me. Well, I've got a lot of thoughts on this. First of all, the worst people in society are people who mistreat children, animals, and elderly. And then right behind them are people that just run right through a stop sign because they just know, like, I don't want to be bothered. Yeah, well, they could mistreat children, animals, and the elderly with the front end of their car like that, too. So those are awful people. As far as the wave, I tend to try and let someone else go first. But I'm also kind of impatient, so you've just got a moment. Like, if you just sit there and dawdle after I wave, I'll either get aggressive with my wave and then kind of look like a jerk, or I'll just go and be like, you had your chance. Yeah, I do the I just go where I'm like, all right, see you in hell. And then the other thing that really bugs me about stop signs lately, I've noticed, is there's a growing segment of society that seems to think like it doesn't matter who arrived first. It's just like, I feel like I've been waiting long enough. Yeah, you can't do that. Like a heavily a heavily trafficked four way stop. You may be the fourth, and I'm sorry that you feel like you've been sitting there too long, but if you were the fourth one to come to a complete stop, then you got to let the other three go. Not just like I think they treat it like, hey, I stopped, and now I'm going. Now there's a sub discipline to that, Chuck, right? Yes. Where if somebody is going straight and you're going straight in the other way, you can go straight right then and just use up a turn simultaneously. It actually keeps things going faster. Not at all rude. Somebody might be like, hey, wait a minute. But if they stop and think for even half of a second, they'll see that you actually did them a favor. That is okay as long as you're not trying it while somebody's turning left in front of you. Yeah. And there's also the thing that bugs me is when two people stop facing each other and you both go to go at the same time because you think we're both going straight, and they go to turn into you and honk at you, and I'm like, Dude, let me know which way you're going. Yeah, I probably would let you go anyway. Right, but I thought you were going straight. Got to use that blinker. You'll get a finger if you don't use the blinker. Whoa. Not by me. I'm just saying some people. So, anyway, I think out of all the traffic things, even including, like, highway merging, the four way stop sign intersection is my most troublesome and frustrating part of driving. For me, that's number one. Well, now everybody knows, so look out for Chuck, all right? Yeah. This is Mikayla that brought all this up. Yeah. Mikaela, I hope we explained that I don't think that means you're a controlling jerk, and I don't think that means your boyfriend is, because he thinks that is what it means, either. Yeah. Maybe you guys should just find some other topics to discuss. Yes. But, Michaela, I do think you're with the wrong guy. Overall, though, you clearly better than him. Poor guy. Okay. Wow. I can't believe we're ending it like that. But if you want to get in touch with us, like Mikayla did, then you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can hang out with me on Twitter at Josh Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook@facebookcom. Charleswchuckbryant Orstuffyshno you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
Green Renovation and Construction | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/green-renovation-and-construction | Demolition and construction creates a lot of waste, so renovating your house is generally a "greener" option. In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore some green renovation and construction options. | Demolition and construction creates a lot of waste, so renovating your house is generally a "greener" option. In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore some green renovation and construction options. | Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:27:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=17, tm_min=27, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=341, tm_isdst=0) | 29686053 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Dressed like me today, aren't you? You've even got, like, a little food stock staying right there, just like me. Yeah. I'm wearing, like, a plaid collared shirt with a sweater over it. And Josh came up and was like, what's up with that? You stealing my look. And you are. But you wear it well, Chuck. Well, if you came in with a T shirt with a hole in it and a half beard and a baseball cap, you would yell at me, too. Flip flops. I would say the same thing. You get out the car radio antenna again, wouldn't you? Yes. The caning. Yeah. All right. What's your set up here? Okay. You're ready for my set up? This is all business, isn't it? Let's do it. All right. Chuck, you ever heard of JB. McKinnon? No. You ever heard of the 100 Miles Food Movement? Yes. Okay, so JB. McKinnon and I think his girlfriend were the people who originated this and wrote that book plenty. That's the idea that you try to not eat any food that's more than 100 miles from your home. Right? Right. And that kind of lends itself to seasonal eating, local vore. Yeah, sure. He said apparently good luck finding a beer that was produced within 100 miles. Like, grown produced all within 100 miles. Right. Basis of the Loca bore movement, or at least the mouthpiece of it. Right? Sure. So he's become kind of this boy wonder in environmentalism as a whole since that book was released. People look to him for advice, and he puts on his glasses and clears his throat and gives it to him sometimes. But McKinnon had this pretty awesome article that was republished in September, October Reader, and it was about basically not getting paralyzed by having so many problems presented to us like we do. Right. And he fights the sociologist paralyzed into not taking action. Yeah. Like, there's nothing I can do or into taking too much action, which is equally problematic. Right? Yeah. There's a famous sociologist named Stanley Cohen. And Cohen jamie McKinnon. Sites. This is a me, right? I'm just a fan. Sure. McKinnon sites. Cohen's book States of Denial, and basically, in it, Cohen's, like, he talks about how we dilute ourselves into inaction largely because it's just too much or we're trying to do too much. And he says there's only so much we can do. Right. And we can't waste our energy on every single problem that we face. True. So what McKinnon suggests is called vertical agitation, where you pick one topic and you give it everything you've got. If you want to save the dolphins, you save those dolphins. If you want to make sure every single person in America follows through on this compact fluorescent bulb thing. Right. That's your thing. To make that your movement. If you are interested in reducing the waste stream, that's your thing. And this is your podcast. Thanks, straight. This is your podcast. I think I like the Outtake better. No. Okay, well, let's plug ahead. Chuckers, chuck, specifically, we're going to start out with a problem that well, let's talk about this. One of the biggest sectors of municipal waste, that waste stream. Huge. One of the big areas of thought today is figuring out how to reduce the waste stream. And there's all sorts of ideas. There's a carpet company, and I can't remember what it's called, but it's headed by this great idealist visionary. Right. And they lease carpeting. You never own the carpeting in your house. You lease it, which is you're paying all the same price or whatever, but when you have it taken out, you can't take it to the dump because it's not yours. That company takes it back and they recycle it. Interesting. It is. So it's being diverted from the waste stream. Right. So one of the biggest sectors of municipal waste that accounts for, I think, are accounted for 40% of all the waste generated and taken to the dumps in the United States is called construction and demolition waste. Yes. One big way of converting or diverting I'm sorry, waste from this waste stream, away from the municipal dump and back into reuse is demolition. Over. Remodeling. I'm sorry, over. Full demolition. Right. Renovating your old home. Yes. Tearing it down, starting over. The problem is with being green. I'm making air quotes. I'm going to do that every time I say that word. Okay, okay. It's been so co opted. I know, but being green is a matter of details and context. Right, right. So, like recycling. Recycling is good. Right. Just putting your bottles and cans out by the curb, that's just a good idea, isn't it? Sure. Not in every case, buddy. Like what? Well, wouldn't you be better off simply reusing a bottle? Yeah. Rather than throwing it out and having it picked up by what is actually a garbage truck? It's just taking it to a different place. Well, yeah, and we mentioned this before, I can't remember which one it was in. But we need to point out again, that's why the reduce reuse, recycle it's in an order for a reason. Right. Reduce is the best thing you can do. Don't even use that bottle. Use your little aluminum bottle to get your water. Fill it up with your little filtered water at home and just use that. Right. Reuse. If you happen to have a bottle and we do a lot of this, just keep filling that thing up. Sure. And then at the very last resort, you can recycle. And if you're not doing any of those three things, then you're just a jerk. Pretty much. That's what I say. So, yeah, recycle you're right there. I mean, you got to have those big trucks to smash everything together and deliver it to places and plants. And there's a lot of greenhouse gasses emitted when you do that. There's a lot of waste, there's a lot of fuel spent yes. In the recycling process. But recycling generally is good. Yes. The same thing can be said for renovating. Renovating is generally better than demolition, but it is on a case by case basis and it has to do with how you do it. There's actually, like, a greener way to renovate, but if you're looking at a house, an old house, and you say, I'm either going to tear this down or I'm going to totally remodel it, but I want to go green, which one should I do? The rule of thumb generally is to renovate simply because it produces less waste. Yes. Right. And plus, all the materials it takes to build something from the ground up is obviously going to be more even if you took the house down to the foundation and the studs, you're still going to be saving on the foundation, the studs, as far as buying new and manufacturing new materials. Right. You've got a stat here, Josh. About 136,000,000 tons of waste every year, which is about 40% of what's filling up our city dumps is construction, demolition, waste. Now, I have something surprising for you. I've got a little surprise, Chuck. Oh, good. That was 2007. Oh, man. What's? It now, in 2010, if 142,000,000 tons were generated, which they were, this is all construction and demolition, which includes highway construction and repair, which accounts for a lot of it. Right. Guess how much is estimated to be recycled this year? To be recycled? I don't know. 50% out of 142,000,000 tons. 120. Really? Recycled. That's fantastic. So a lot of this is being diverted away from it. Right. So there's success. Right. People are learning how to do this, and that's a big part of it is not just not demolishing your house, but even if you do demolish, it recycling the parts that are demolished, reusing parts. Like you mentioned, the Seattle based store Restore, they get one this year in Atlanta, too. Do they? Yeah, it's great, man. Is it a Restore store? Like, officially Restore? I think it's called a Restore. That's cool. And Emily and I are renovating our house very slowly. Yeah, I was going to say, are you still doing that? When I first met you, you were like, yeah, I renovate every weekend. Yeah. That's not every weekend now. Is that why it's very slow? Yeah. What's the last thing you did? We did some yard stuff, like fences and stairs and things like that. You're still squatting? It's slow. Yeah, we're squatting. So far, so good. But Restore is awesome because instead of going to your big box retailer to buy your new door, go to one of these Restore places, and they'll have, like, 60 doors that have been taken from houses in great shape and maybe even cooler and more period looking than the ones you can get at the big box place. And they have not only that, it's not just doors. They have like, windows and window frames. They have wood. They have all kinds of things that have been removed from houses for resale. Right. So that's a very good way to go if you're restoring your home. It is. In Restore, in any outfit like this, they tend to be nonprofits, right. They get their supplies by people bringing them in and selling them to them, and then they mark it up. Or else they donate it and sell it. Right? Yes. It's donated to Restore, or at least in Seattle. Restore will actually undertake demolition projects. So they'll charge you to demolish your house, but they do it by hand. They keep the nails, like down to the nails. Everything is recycled. Everything that could possibly be recycled is recycled. One of the cool things is, since they're a nonprofit and since they're taking the stuff that can be salvaged to resell in their store, you get a tax deduction. So it may be slightly more than like what the guy with the bulldozer is going to charge you. Right. But ultimately, with the tax deduction, it may come out to be less and you get that good conscience thing. Got good karma coming your way. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the projects they do by hand. The EPA rated four of these from Restore, and they rated between 70 and 97% reuse ratings. Right. That's amazing. 97% reuse. And one of the other big benefits of demolishing your house by hand, I mean, it's slow. It's way slower, sure, but the trees in your yard have roots, and a bulldozer with tracks even a bobcat can conceivably do it. Depending on how shallow the root system is, running over it can kill your tree. It's not good. It's a lot worse than running over your foot. And I've heard of nightmares from friends of mine where accidents happen when you get those big machines in there, like, oops, I accidentally dug into your sewer line, or Oops, I accidentally cracked your gas line. I mean, these things are supposed to be well marked, but he got 100 year old house. You never know what's going on in the ground. Oh, I know. And then once that happens, it's not only more money, but it's not good for what's going on in your environment, local environment. If you are demolishing your house and you are not paying for research to do it, let's say you're doing it yourself, you got some time. You just feel like beating the tar out of some drywall with a sledgehammer. That's kind of fun. You can put your stuff on Craigslist. In addition to not having to pay to dump it, people will actually, at the very least, come take it away for free for their own use, right? So you can say, hey, I've got a really great door. Here's a picture of it. Who wants it? You can get away with getting rid of anything on Craigslist. And it's a free section, like troll it any day. And you will see I've got a pile of bricks. I got a pile of this. And people come and get it. Yes, they will, because they need that pile of bricks because bricks aren't cheap. That's right. And you might even be able to charge them if you're a savvy demolisher for taking away your stuff. Yes, there's also I wish I knew the name of the company, but I saw one of the home reno shows a few years ago. Wait, a what home reno show is that? Really? Are you on an abbreviated name basis? Home renovation television program. This company will come out and take all of your demo. Let's say you are demolishing it. They will take your demolition waste on site, put it into this machine that pulverizes it into little bits of nothingness, and separates the nails at the same time. Like, you see it shaking, the nails are coming out the side. And then what they do then is they've got like half of your house in little pebble sized chunks, and then they'll lay it under your driveway and then pave on top of that. Sweet. So right there. It's all on site reuse. And it's probably not the cheapest thing in the world, but you get to have a clear conscience that you didn't go to the city dump and put your house on it, essentially because this is what you're doing. We should probably also say that if you are going to save a few bucks, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of ten grand and demolish your house yourself, you should watch some videos on it, talk to some people who've done it before. It can actually be kind of dangerous. You're deconstructing your house and it could fall on top of you. Yes, demolition is very dangerous. You need to know what you're doing. You need to have the right gear. Don't be a dummy. Don't be a dummy. You want to talk a little bit more about green building? Yeah. So let's say you've gutted your house and you're in the market to maybe make some greener improvements, right? Right. So let's talk green building, dude. Well, there's green materials, and you may not know this, but pretty much any material that you need to build your house, you can find a recycled version of that if you look hard enough. Yeah. So that's where you should start. Well, you're looking at well, there's two different ways that something can come to you. Recycled, post industrial. So, like, fly ash in your concrete could be recycled. It could be captured from industrial waste. And that's actually good. I think fly ash is particularly bad to just bury. Oh, really? It's good to use it up, from what I understand. Or it could be post consumer. Meaning, like, somebody took their toilet paper roll, put it in the recycling stream, and now it's part of your wood floor. Right. Because that does happen sometimes. The laminate floors you can get is recycled things pressed together with a wood veneer on top. Right. Easy to install. Cheap. Cheap, yes. And if you have a playground have you been to the Piedmont Park playground? No, but does it have one of those rubber floors? It is so much fun to walk on. Josh another thing, too, is they have this wood now, quote unquote wood that you can use for decking. That's not wood. It's actually recycled bottles. Yeah, but it looks like wood pet bottles, not glass bottles. Yeah. And then speaking of, quote unquote wood, bamboo flooring is huge. Oh, yeah. It's actually a grass. A big draw of bamboo is that it grows back in five to six years. Right. Oak takes 120 years, I think, to mature fully again. You know what that's called, then? A sustainable product. Really? That's what sustainable means. I have not heard that phrase before. You can recycle steel. You can melt it down, reform it, reshape it. The World Trade Center was largely recycled. I don't know if you knew that. I did. And in fact, it was a big brouhaha afterward because a lot of the families of victims from the Twin Towers falling said, that's evidence, you should study it. And then Bloomberg, who was an engineer, and other engineers said it should be recycled. There's not a lot you can learn about the structural integrity of the building from actually looking at the collapsed deal. You need to look at, like, computer programs that show how it was built. So we appreciate you saying that, but we're going to recycle it. Bloomberg was an engineer. I don't know I said that, so I hope so. I thought I read that he was an engineer at one point. He's a sharp attack. Maybe not. Cork floor is another option if you want to go green. Besides the bamboo. It's sustainable as well. Yeah, because bamboo apparently is susceptible to spotchiness from exposure to UV. Well, both cork is, too. Cork is, too. But you need to know this going in. If you'd live in a house where you have a room that's not like the sun beating down on at all times, maybe that's a good option. Like bathroom. Yeah, exactly. A bathroom. That's windowless. You know that doctor's office we went to the other day? It was bamboo for did you see that? I didn't. Unmistakable. You could tell people you have grass floor. You could tell people you have a grass floor. Oh, yeah. If bamboo is grass, yeah. Okay. Is that one of the draws of it? I don't know. Tankless water heaters, obviously. I think we might have talked about this before. Do you have one or you're just a fan? No, I'm just a fan. Okay. It's called on demand heating. And the idea here is, if you don't know about these, is that your water heater in your basement, if it's a tank, water heater is just a big tank full of water and it's always being kept hot. So if you need a shower, it's going to be hot. If you're out of town for a week, they say turn it down. But if you don't, it's still going to be heating that water for nothing. On demand heating means they heat the water at the source. Then it flows into your faucet and is hot upon demand. Instead of keeping it all hot, you can have one for the whole house. Or if you just want to have one just for your dishwasher, you can do that. Have like a smaller one and they're a little bit more expensive. But you get that money back. You'll save it eventually. So they will pay for themselves. Yes. Well, most of the stuff, like solar heating and all that kind of thing, and wind energy, there's a pay off eventually. So you just got to look at how long you're going to be living there, how much the investment is, what kind of tax breaks you're going to get, and figure out if it makes sense for you or if you've just got the dough and you want to do a really green thing, then just do it anyway. That's what I say. Insulation. Yeah, I like this one. Go ahead then. So you've got, I think heating and cooling is about 30, 45% of the average bill, right. The average utility. I don't know. Well, insulation can save 15% to 20%. Right. But your heating and cooling is about 30% to 45% of all the money you put out a month on your utilities. Sure. So proper installation saves 15% to 20% of that. Yeah, not too shabby. The problem is this is fiberglass, and fiberglass can be, well, not so good for the lungs. As a kid from Libya. Owens corning Ford Town. They've gotten better with it. But when you see the dudes come in, they've got on like a Hazmat suit and you think, what am I lining my home with if these guys can't touch it or breathe it? Right? How about this? Line your home instead with old jeans. Old blue jeans and newspaper. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And they spray this stuff in. Have you ever seen it? I have, and it's fascinating to watch. And not only that, it's a double duty. So not only are you getting they say it rates better as insulation. You're not using the harmful, potentially toxic fiberglass, and you're taking all this newspaper and blue jeans and saving it from the landfill. So it's like a triple Whammy right there. So what else do we have, Chuck? You got countertops recycled paper and glass and aluminum. Concrete is really popular these days. Don't forget to use that post industrial fly ash concrete. That's right. But that's all the rage. Very trendy. And of course, the compact fluorescent light bulb. Controversial. Yeah. Well, it's become a poster boy for cynics of the ability of one person to make any kind of change. All they can do you want a stat? Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't use them because they complain that it's not a warm bulb. No. And it's very cold. Yeah, they've gotten a little bit better, they've gotten warmer. But let's say you're not a fan of it. Don't necessarily think that you have to go all or nothing. If everyone in the country, if every household swapped out one bulb in their home, that would save enough energy to power 3 million homes for a year, prevent \u00a39 billion of greenhouse gasses, which is the equivalent of 800,000 cars running for a full year. If everyone did one, one bulb. Alright, not bad. And they last a lot longer, they cost a little bit more. But you save about $40 per bulb over its lifetime because they last 10,000 hours compared to about 800 to 1000 hours. And like I said, if you don't like the white hue of the compact fluorescent, just put one in a place in your house that you don't spend a ton of time in and pat yourself on the back that you did a little bit of good. Can you imagine being the poor South West, to stand there in time, the fluorescent bulb, to see how long it lasts for quality assurance? We're in a lab coat just staring at your watch for 10,000 straight hours. I wonder how long 10,000 hours? What does that break down to? How many days is that? Several days. So that's all I got. It's greener to renovate, it seems, as a rule. But within that, there are things you can do to be even greener. Yeah. Or if you're going to build from the ground up, there are ways to go about that. To make it greener as well. Yeah. Because again, technically, if you demolish your house and recycle all of it, or if you renovate and don't recycle anything, demolishing was a better choice. There was greener. Yeah. Chuck, what else you got? I got nothing. I got nothing either. Diverting waste of landfill. Yeah, we don't do the green thing a lot. It's been a while. We like to touch these every now and then. We just touched it. It's been touched and it touched us right back. If you want to learn more about all things green, How Stuff Works has an entire channel dedicated to green. It's a sub channel under science. Right. Darn skippy. You can just type green into the handy search bar and that will bring up about 150 returns, right? Yes, as I said, search bar. It's time now for listener mail. All right, listener mail. Josh, I got a couple of things here. One quick listener mail. Yeah. And then another list of movies that you called for little known or underappreciated movies. Yeah. Some were quite as little known as yes. I got a problem with a few of these. But first, from Rachel. Hi, Chuck. Josh and Jerry. Huge fan. You mentioned the snuggie inventor, and I wanted to share a little gossip. This is good, actually. Are you going to read this? Really? I asked her, and she said, go ahead. Yes, but are you going to ask the snuggie inventor? I'm going to say allegedly through the whole thing. All right. Allegedly. Last weekend, my friend Catered, the snuggie inventor's daughter's, bought in Mitzvah. Allegedly. It was at some Trump country club, and Ivana was there. Allegedly. Allegedly. It wasn't an Ivana. Lookalike who was paid to be there. That's right. The event was Broadway themed, and the daughter's face was photoshopped onto a bunch of Broadway banners like Cats and Billy Elliot. I've been to a New York Broadway themed. Bought Mitzvah before too. Really? Yeah. People with some dough. Sure. My friend worked the martini bar and allegedly did not get a single tip. And that's the scoop from Rachel. Allegedly. And now, little known movies or underappreciated movies? What was the exact call for overlooked attack? The gas station is a Korean film. I have not seen that yet. I have not seen that. We had, like, three or four people sending the movie Being There, which I seen it, but I've heard it. It sounds familiar. Oh, it's great. Peter Sellers Halas. Yes. But it was not overlooked because it made $30 million in 79, which is pretty good. Yeah. And it was nominated for two Academy Awards, one of which won best supporting actor. Maybe they mean, like, by the average person. I was specifically asking for movie suggestions for me. Okay. Well being there I saw capturing the Friedman last time. You seen that? Yeah. Oh, my God. That movie, man. The whole time I was like, they did it. They didn't do it. They did it. They didn't do it. I just kicked back and watched, and it was like, wow, this is crazy. What do you think in the end, did you think they did it or didn't do it? I don't think the son did it. I don't think either of them did it. I think the dad had we should probably not spoil it for people. Yeah, I think the dad had definite issues, and he admitted as such, but I don't think he did it. I think he got caught for stuff he didn't get caught for. Yeah. What a great movie. Yeah, it was. Wow. Documentary. One nice lady sitting in the movie. Office space not too terribly overlooked. It depends on the crowd you run with, I would imagine, if you hang out with people who play shuffle board regularly. Yes. Office Space may have been overlooked. It was overlooked in the theaters. It became a big hit on video. Right. You know what was overlooked in the theater? Though that shouldn't have been looked at was extract his third movie. Yeah, that wasn't very good. Terrible. But Idiocracy was awesome. I thought it was okay. It started to get a little old to me. Did it? Yes. The premise sort of was like, all right, it's a one joke premise, and it got old. No, I thought he did well with the one joke premise. One thumbs up. One thumbs up. Medium. Yeah. The Last Waltz. Someone sent that in the excellent Martin Score CZ film about the band's last performance, which how dare you? I've seen it, like 100 times. Alien apocalypse during the Great Bruce Campbell. I've never heard of this one. Quack. Sir Fortune has a cousin in the Bronx. I looked this up and it sounds pretty good. Gene Wilder. Gene Wilder. You can't go wrong. Never can go wrong. Gene Wilder. Have you seen the original producers? Oh, yeah. I've only seen, like, the first 20 minutes, and it's hilarious. Yes, it's great. Gene Wilder was the man. The Proposition, which was an awesome gritty western written by Nick Cave. Did you see that? Yeah, I did. Possibly. That's the one and only. Right? With the guy Pierce. Yeah. I don't know if Austin is the right word. It's pretty good. I liked it, too, but, I mean, I was expecting more from it, I must say. Well, since we're on the Western thing, I'm going to recommend the Jesse James movie that Brad Pitt was in. The assassination. Just James? Yes. I have not seen that man. It is awesome. My Western pick. Yes. Ravens. Ravens. Great. Yeah. It was another guy peers movie. Jerry's like, you guys are going on and on. People like to hear this, though. Someone recommended the movie synecte. New York Connecticy. It's synextekey. Jerry said truth. Oh, well, it's a Greek word, and it means I can't remember what it means, but it has to do with the play on the words connected. So the Greek word means a play on words? No, I was going to say I can't remember exactly what it means, but it's a really weird movie by Charlie Kaufman. I thought it was connected. Okay. I love Charlie Kaufman. And Philip Seymour Hoffman. The great Phil Hoffman. Yeah. I saw him beside me in a car one time in La. I think you've told that story well, let's hear that one. I just saw him at the car next to me. Chrysler le Baron. You have told that story. No. I told the story about seeing John C. Reilly. Oh, and I'm confusing John Voight because of the Chrysler. Someone recommended Danny Boyle sci-fi movie Sunshine. That was awesome until it fell apart. My God, I've never seen a movie unravel more decidedly than that. And I've never been more disappointed into a movie and then disappointed by how it ended. It was really great up to a point. Yeah. And then a movie called 44 Inch Chest with the great. Ray Winstone and the greater Ian McShane, who was swearing in Deadwood, is he the owner of the hotel? McShane was like, just the big dog in town was. But Ray Winston and McShane were also in Sexy Beast, which was oh, ray Winstone is a class act. Yeah. And someone also said, and I didn't write this down, but I'm glad I thought of it in Bruges with Colin Farrell, Colin Ferrell and Ray Winstone, which is an awesome movie. Okay. And then finally, this was at the last minute, like, right before you recorded a German film called Downfall, and I don't know anything about it, so I cannot recommend nor dissuade you from seeing that. You know what I want to see? Soon as the Human Centipede I've not seen it. I saw a trailer for it. I really want to see it. It's awful. And I guess if you have never seen Cats Live, go. All right, Chuck, that's it. Yeah. I mean, that was a good ten minutes to move. If you want to say hi to me and Chuck or tell us to shut up, send us an email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house. Fforks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder. From exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon, on music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
d5c71c8d-7717-4845-91f1-aec901790bc1 | Short Stuff: Alligator Gar | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-alligator-gar | The alligator gar is one scary looking fish. Learn all about these monsters in today's episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The alligator gar is one scary looking fish. Learn all about these monsters in today's episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 06 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=187, tm_isdst=0) | 10616720 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is short stuff, as usual. Let's go. So can I tell you, my inspiration for this was I was at the lake the other day. We go to a lake here in Georgia. I'm not going to name it because I don't want to be stalked. Okay. Lake no Name. Lake no Name. And I was at the lake the other day doing a project and I was very hot because it's very hot in Georgia right now. And I went to jump in to cool down and right as I was going to take a leap off the dock, I saw a very large, like a two and a half foot garfish kind of tree cold toward the surface. And I've seen them before out there occasionally, but it just scared the life out of me because it is a terrifying looking fish. Yes. If you don't know what a garfish looks like, just do a little image search. And they have these long, very sharp toothed snouts and they are terrifying. It looks like something that you would find in a river in South America and not one that you would jump into a lake in Georgia. Right. And also you travel back in time 50 million years too, because they definitely look prehistoric. For sure. Oh, absolutely. And this is specifically about the alligator gar. And this comes from our old friends at Houseliftworks and Michelle Constantinovsky. Great name. Very nice. But the alligator gar is super old, right? Yeah. I think they found fossils as old as 100 million years old, not just 50. And the reason that it's called an alligator gar is because it has a long snout, too. But rather than being pointed like most other gar, it's flattened, giving it kind of like a shovel like appearance or actually like an alligator snout. And the Latin name for it is attractivedais spatula. And that's right, spatula it's the spatula fish is another way to put it. It really does look like an alligator snap when you see a picture of these things. Yeah, they are huge. They're seven living species of gar, and the alligator gar is the largest by far. The other way you can tell a diff is they have two rows of teeth, the alligator gar, on the upper jaw instead of just the one row of teeth of the regular gar. And I think their head is a bit wider. Yeah. And I think normally they're something like about \u00a3160 to maybe 6ft long, which is enormous for a fish. But they have been, I guess, found up to \u00a3350 and 10ft long, which is even more enormous. I think the record, at least in Texas, is 302 lbs. That was back in 1053. And the reason we bring up Texas because a YouTuber named Peyton Moore, who's a conservationist, posted a video on his channel Wildlife last May because he caught one of these things and it was 8ft long and probably about \u00a3300. Did you watch that video? I did not. It is a very large fish, and he likened it to kind of hanging on to the end of a car that's trying to roll down a driveway. I saw that. I don't see how you bring in a fish like this. That's that heavy. But he knew what he was doing and it's just enormous. Man I think at the end he had that. He obviously released it, but he was kind of measuring it and showing it off for the camera. And this thing just like whipped around to sort of wriggle, and it's so strong, it just knocks this guy over and then swims away. And he's like, well, I guess I was going to let it go, but apparently that just happened now. Good for him for letting it go, or at least planning to, you know. Well, you do let them go because apparently they're not good for eating for a couple of reasons. They don't taste great, and they are covered with these it's almost like an armored scale. They're called gnoid scales. And it's like that sort of like an armor you would see on a dinosaur, basically. Right? Yeah, they're very dinosaur. Even if you can dress them or I should say clean them to eat, the meat that you get off of, it's not going to be very good. And if you find any row or fish eggs in a gar, you want to leave those alone because they're toxic, no matter what gar species you're dealing with. So, yes, not really a delicacy in any way, shape, or form. Should we take a break? I say we take a break and then we'll come back and talk more about alligator car. So Chuck, I found out some pretty interesting stuff about them. An alligator gar is an opportunistic eater, and they'll eat basically anything. I saw that they'll eat deer and raccoons if they get a chance. They'll eat waterfowl, turtles, crabs, other fish. But one of the ways that they catch some of these things, especially some of the harder to catch ones, they play dead. They ambush their prey by playing dead. They'll float and make another fish or a raccoon or something that's going to swim past, think that it's dead. Then all of a sudden it grabs it out of the water and that thing is dead. And they do eat all those things, and they have those huge alligator like mouths and teeth. So they're super scary, but apparently they're not going to come after you. I was just being a little baby boy the other day when I got scared and wouldn't jump in. If I would have jumped in, this thing would have scattered and gone far away. It wouldn't have said, human arm must eat. They're just not going to come after you. So you don't need to fear. I think there's never been on record a case of Al Ghetter gar attacking somebody. Right, right. Yeah, that's what I've seen as well. But I guess if you had seen a car that was floating, you would have wanted to steer clear of that one because maybe it was the ambush. Your arm. You said that you saw them in your lake. I'm taking it that your noname lake is freshwater, right? No, it's a saltwater lake in the middle of Georgia. You never know there's some saltiness in Georgia for sure. Yeah, it's freshwater. And they're only in North America, which is pretty surprising. Yeah, but they used to be remember we said that their fossils have been dating back to 100 million years? They used to be found all over the place. But yeah, now they're only in North America. They're freshwater species, and they tend to like bodies of water with poor oxygen. So, like, say, like maybe a cove where you'd launch a boat or a backwater of a river that's kind of outside of the turbulence, or even swamps or bayou's. And one reason they can survive in these kind of lower oxygen environments is they have an air bladder that not only helps them float, it also distributes oxygen to their blood slowly but surely, so they don't have to take in that much oxygen because they can hold a bunch at once. Yeah, and I think they're in Central America, too. I just wanted to put that on the record. So let's say the Americas, but not South America. These alligators are really tough to pin down. I think north and Central America, because I did see something about Costa Rica, which is okay, so the Americas. Okay, so people, just because you don't eat them, people still do fish for them, like this guy. I think there are a lot of regulations in place because they are really slow to reach the age where they can make little gar. They spawn in very specialized areas, so they are very ripe for overfishing and for shrinking of species. But for that reason, they're highly regulated. And you're basically, at least in Florida and I think a lot of other places, you're only going to be given a permit to fish for these things if it's scientific research or you're working in managing the species or something like that. I tittered earlier, by the way, I want to say at an inappropriate time, but it was because you said they were ripe for overfishing, and I just thought of a ripegar, and that sounds so gross. They're scary looking. Early on, though, that earlier, humans would fish for them and do all sorts of things. Those armor like scales, those cannon scales. They made jewelry out of them and tools and things like that, because they're really tough. And I think they would use their skin for products and the skin oil for different things. Yeah, who knows? What do you have anything else? I don't have anything else. I think we've talked alligator gar to death. Well, I guess the last thing we should mention is that even though they do are opportunistic eaters, I think there used to be an idea that they would devastate other fish populations, and that's apparently not the case, right? Yeah, that's right. So they were overfished because they were considered a nuisance fish, so they were trying to protect fish that they wanted by fishing the alligator gar out, but turns out they were wrong. I do have one more thing. Okay. The name gar for these fish comes from the Anglo Saxon word for spear. That is good. And I've got one more thing, okay. I cannot help but think of a garfish without thinking of the great, great documentary, Vernon, Florida, my favorite documentary of all time by the great Arrow Morris. And one of the characters, the guy that talks like this, he talks about swimming in the river, and, oh, you come up on one of those garfish, you better look out, brother. Really? And I saw that movie in college where I didn't know what a gar fish was, and it was many years later that I saw a gar, and I was like, oh, I get it now. I got to see that movie once for all. There's nothing like it. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, that means everybody's. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
Prohibition: Turns Out That America Loves to Drink | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/prohibition-turns-out-that-america-loves-to-drink | Prohibition was a 13-year period in American history when selling or producing alcohol was illegal. What led to this astonishing development? Why did it end? Josh and Chuck take a look at Prohibition's fascinating history in this episode. | Prohibition was a 13-year period in American history when selling or producing alcohol was illegal. What led to this astonishing development? Why did it end? Josh and Chuck take a look at Prohibition's fascinating history in this episode. | Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:51:17 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=17, tm_min=51, tm_sec=17, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=313, tm_isdst=0) | 38072839 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles L. W. Chuck Bryant. That makes this stuff you should know. The podcast, the sequel, or it makes it a greasy Wednesday night on top of a rooftop brewery. Yeah. You want to do a little recap for everybody? Yeah. Let's do a very brief recap of our trivia night. Take it away, Chuck. I don't remember it. It was awesome. It was a lot of fun. It was jampacked overflowing with people, just like New York was. We had John and Joe and Dave, and everyone had a blast. We lost again. We were in the lead until the last question, and I ruined it for everybody, if I remember correctly. Yeah, but you know what? You did not ruin it, because no one had the right answer on our team, thankfully, because that would have been crushing. You want to do this? The question the last question was, what is the second leading album of all time, sales wise? The best selling album of all time? And I believe you said Dark Side of the Moon, which I thought was a really great guess. Someone else. Joe Randazzo said the Eagle's greatest hits. Another great guess. Sure. And both of us were wrong, or both of you were wrong. But we went with Dark Side of the Moon, didn't we? Wouldn't let her team answer. I think so. It was ACDC's, back and black. Yes. And you know what? Somewhere in my brain, I knew that that was really high up the list. It didn't come to me, but, yeah, we were in second place. We ended up losing on the last question. I thought we were first going in the last question. Were we? Yeah, but no one wants to see us win. It's no fun if we're like, yeah, that's what I told Hodgman. He went, no, I want to win, and I want to rub it like we'll get a better team than Hodgeman. What are you doing hanging out with us? It was a lot of fun, though, and thanks to everyone who came out, and hopefully we'll be coming to a city near you, we're still trying to get that together. Okay, so while we're doing this, I think we need to let more people know about our Facebook page. I suspect that there is a small but substantial, and by that I mean really large segment of stuff you should know listeners who don't necessarily go all the way to listen or mail don't listen to the whole podcast. That's where the gold is. We call them sys listeners. Yes, that's right. So we always talk about our Facebook page there. So it's possible if people out there who don't know that this thing exists, right, Chuck? That's right. And it's good for us if you go there and click like. And it's not only good for us, but it's a good Facebook page. It is. It's, like, fun. And people contribute and chat back and forth, and we talked back and forth with would come down from our ivory tire every once and walk around gland hand people, and then have some people beat up for amusement and then go back up to our ivory tower. Yeah, no, we put great music videos on there. And by music videos, I mean music on YouTube. Cool. Interesting links to great articles and studies and stuff like that, as do most of the people who are on this page. So go check it out. Facebook. Comstuffyou should know. Yeah. And if you click like, you can hide us still if you don't want it in your newsfeed. Well, our buddy in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Rhodes, sent us an email. You saw this, right? He was saying, you can like us, so we still get the like, which, again, makes us look good. But you can also select to not receive updates from whenever we update if you want, so you won't be bothered by us. And you can come and check at your leisure, but you could still like it, too. And then twitter real quick. Chuck, we are on Twitter, and we're at SYSK podcast. Okay. Yes. All right. So, Chuck, this wonderful time that we had on Wednesday night yes. At a brewery, there was one of the darkest periods of American history. There was a time not too long ago where that could have never happened. Or if it had, we would have been outlaws. Yeah. We couldn't have publicized it on a podcast. It would have been on the down low at a private place. We would have to just whisper it on the street. Or we could have drawn in chalk, like, Speak easy this way. Sure. The SYSK speak easy trivia night this way. This dark period in American history is also referred to as Prohibition, also referred to as the Noble experiment. By some, it was a noble experiment. And the reason why is because the whole reason Prohibition was ever enacted, or largely one of the reasons why, was because we realized remember the addiction podcast? Does that come out yet? I don't think so. Okay, so we'll look for the addiction podcast. But consider this. It wasn't until about the 19th century that people started talking about being addicted to alcohol. Right? An awareness of that there was such a thing as alcoholism came about when there was there were some really nice people in the world who said, you know what? Since you can't give it up, all of us are going to give it up together, so you won't be tempted any longer. Because consider nowadays being an alcoholic and trying to give up alcohol and seeing it everywhere, it's got to make it that much harder. So the goal of Prohibition, of the temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition was to not tempt alcoholics any longer. Yeah, you know what's funny, too? When I was reading this, a lot of the reasons which will get into they mentioned are the alcohol can lead to domestic violence and child abuse. And Henry Ford said it leads to a lack of productivity at work. And I was reading all this thinking, yeah, they had a lot of great points, but that still didn't mean that you should try and prohibit people from drinking. It was just a bad idea. Even though a lot of the points they had were solid. Of course it leads and they remain solid. If you look at the old House Works employee handbook, one of the things it says specifically is don't drink at work. I know I almost didn't take the job for that reason, but I did. But no, there were a lot of very solid points that everybody's kind of realized about alcohol, that it's directly connected to physical violence in the home and outside arrests. Mooning, that all goes up when alcohol is around. Right. But as you were saying, it was a failed Noble experiment. It was a bad idea, but it was one that we had to learn the hard way, and we've learned much from it. Right? Sure. Even people that thought it was a great idea at the end of the Noble experiment said that wasn't such a good idea. No, I still hate alcohol, but you just can't do this. So let's talk about this. From 1920 to 1933, the United States had on the books an amendment, an amendment to the Constitution. That's huge. And plus, it makes this Congress look ridiculous that they did this. The 18th Amendment went on the books. It was enacted in 1920, and it forbade the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol and importation. Okay. Which transport? Well, now you can still transport within. Like you couldn't carry it from Kentucky to Georgia. Right. Nor import it from Canada to the US. Right. You see what I'm saying? But you could keep it in your home and you could drink your face off. Well, the cool thing is, too, is I believe it was passed and then a year later is when it went into effect. So they basically were like, you got a year, right. You can fill your basement full of booze. Yeah. We don't be breaking the law. I didn't actually realize this, that you were allowed to drink it yourself. I didn't know that. You didn't get the pictures, did you? No. There is a haunting photograph on page zero of this article. Really? The first page, it was taken in 1931 and a speakeasy, and the people are all wearing it looks like the photo is shining. And there's this one gentleman who's not even necessarily the focus of the photo, and he is just staring out from 1931 into your soul. That's a very creepy picture. That alone is reason enough to go check out this photo because he's on the stun gravy. The jazz juice. The giggle juice. Yeah, the giggle water. So, Josh, it started in 1920, but we have to go back in time just a little bit when it really started. The century? Pretty much, yeah. In the 1830s, the idea of getting rid of alcohol is when it first started to pick up some steam and the temperance movement got going. Society started springing up, and by the time they actually had the federal amendment to the Constitution, I believe there were how many states had already 1616 states had already banned alcohol in some way. Yeah. So it was already going on state level. Check this 19 states, 65% of the towns in America had some sort of ban already been going on for a little while. It was a very popular movement and there are a lot of reasons, but one reason is that these people have been doing this for centuries before it finally took place. Right. As early as 1838, Massachusetts created, I think, the country's first law against alcohol, where basically they said, you can buy all the alcohol you want, but it has to be in no less than this quantity. And that quantity just so happens to be more than any of you drunks can afford. So we're de facto banning alcohol because we're putting it out of your price range. I'm surprised Massachusetts was one of the early states. It's really come around lately. Yeah. Because most of the temperance movement had a lot of support, obviously, in the Bible Belt in places like New York and Boston, in these larger cities. They were kind of like, I'm not so behind this. Right. Well, don't forget Massachusetts not too far before this with burning witches at the state. That's a good point. Right. So that was 1830 818, 46. Maine became the first state to pass a statewide prohibition law. That makes more sense. Sure. Being Maine. TTL maine. Sure. Yeah. So this temperance movement is going on. Remember, the women were at the forefront of this movement in large part. They certainly weren't the only ones, but they were at the forefront not just because they were nagging people. Actually, this was before they had the right to vote. And prior to having the right to vote, women figured out, you're not going to give us the right to vote. Well, we're going to be one of the first groups to learn to organize effectively. Yeah. And it wasn't just with the temperance movement. The women basically created this movement alongside the labor movement in the early 20th century, 19th century anti slavery, that was the consumer movement. And they were extremely effective in promoting consumer rights. And they were also really big into rabble rousing. Like the committee against the high cost of living in Detroit. That was the name of the committee. It was a woman's organization. And they would do everything from consumer education on the street like you deserve government protection of milk standards. Right. To boycotts of local grocers, to actually storming meat packing plants and pouring kerosene on thousands of pounds of meat so nobody could buy it. And they have these really effective campaigns and the temperance movement came about at the same time where women had to organize to have their voice heard because they didn't have the right to vote yet they didn't have suffrage. That's right, Josh. And specifically, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was formed in 1873 in Ohio. A few years before that, 1869, the official Prohibition Party was formed because people were like, democrats and Republicans are kind of dragging their feet on this, so let's actually form a party. Right. And Holland. The Women's Christian Temperance movement. Right. Union. Yes. That woman who led that carry nation is an excellent example of the kind of boisterous nature of this kind of organization in protest. She was known for hanging out around saloons, praying on the front steps to save these people's souls. And the people who tried to come in, she would ward him off with a hatchet and she was arrested. She was arrested 30 times between 19 1910 busting up bars. Yeah. She basically said, I can't vote, so I'm going to become a huge thorn in your side and you can't stop me. And she had direct experience from it. They credit her ferociousness I think I just made up a word. Her ferociousness against alcohol due to a short lived marriage to an alcoholic that left an imprint on her being a motivated individual. Sure, yeah. What's that bumper sticker about? Guns don't kill people, I do. No, something about well behaved women rarely make history. Something like that, yeah, I like that. It's good. Civil War comes along. Josh Jerry laughed at that for some reason because she has that bumper sticker. Okay. The Civil War came along and that kind of slowed things down a little bit. But it was just temporarily because the war ended and people like the liquor industry started booming again, which you would think would slow it more. But what really happened was it started booming such that the temperance movement got even more active to try and take care of business, basically. Right. And one of the things that really, as usual, I'm loathe to say, but one of the things that really drew popular support together was finding the proper scapegoats. Germans and Irish. Yes. Immigrants. This country has a long standing tradition of forgetting that we're all immigrants and targeting the most recent immigrants to the country as the source of all of our worries. And then our political parties go, yeah, it's their fault. And it just kind of goes downhill from there because the Irish like to drink and the Germans love to brew beer. Exactly. And that they became the sources we should go ahead and correct that. There was a popular perception that the Irish liked to drink. Exactly. And the Germans really did run most of the breweries. Yeah. They not distilleries, necessarily, but there was a lot of German owned breweries in the US. So the popular perception was, the Germans are brewing, the Irish are drinking. We need to target these two groups. Sure. So everybody hates them. And then that's how Prohibition ended up being passed in large part. Right. Yeah. There were a lot of groups against it, as well as as many as there were for it. I don't know about as many. But there are also groups like the Association Against Prohibition Amendment and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Exactly. So it wasn't everybody, but it gathered enough support where eventually Congress, that awful Congress of 1919, basically said, we kind of have to do this, and you've got a year to get all your booze. And what we're going to do to enforce this is pass the Volset Act as well. Well, what really put it over the top, because this is 1019 in World War I had just ended. Right. But what really whipped Prohibition sentiment up was World War I anti German, where we're fighting the Kaiser and these Germans are sitting here using all the grain that we can feed our soldiers with the brew beer. And you're not an American if you're drinking beer. Right. And Mr. Anheuser and Mr. Bush were like, no, they were like, beer. It's very nice. Gulp. Yeah. So that led to, like you said, Chuck, the 18th Amendment. And the 18th Amendment in and of itself didn't do anything. It had no teeth. It was a paper tiger. Well, yeah. That's why the Volstead Act. Right. And what did that do? Well, I mean, you can't enforce anything unless you have a way to do it, and that's what the Volstic did. It defined, like, the penalties if you were caught doing this. Exceptions, which they had exceptions for medicinal use and religious ceremony use. Yes. And apparently a lot of doctors prescribed alcohol during the Prohibition. How many? They estimate that more than 1 million gallons of liquor were consumed a year from prescription whiskey. Wait till Prop. 19 passes. Yeah. They got nothing on Manafidil. Manafidil? You're thinking of minoxidil. And I bet there were a lot of religious ceremonies going on, too, if you know what I mean. Well, yeah, you got to think about it. The Catholics, I'm sure we're like, whoa, hey. Blood of Christ and everything over here. Right? Yeah. We need to do this, like, twice a week now. Yeah. And then they went and chanted. No, they did their communion. And they also defined what qualified as an intoxicating limit, which was anything more than 0.5% alcohol. And you know what? That's actually still the case. Back when I was for near beer. Yes. Back when I was a strapping, fat ten year old boy, I used to cross the railroad tracks and go to open pantry and I would enjoy six packs of Kingsbury non alcoholic beer. Whoa, whoa. You drank non alcohol beer at what age? Like ten or eleven. I started secretly. No, I had to keep it secret. Right. From your parents? No. Sometimes I go back and I look at some of the stuff that I did, and I'm like, I had a lot of freedom as a child. See, alcohol was like a big no no in my house. Well, hold on. The reason why is because I knew I was in the right reason. Zero 5% is nonalcoholic. Right. I can buy any non alcoholic beverage. Why? This root beer is non alcoholic and I can buy that. And I actually had an argument once with a clerk at Open Pantry, and I think just the fact that this ten year old was, like, stating his case finally. The guy was like, all right, I don't care, just get out of here. No, I don't think my family liked it, but they just didn't want to get into it with me. See, I would have gotten in big trouble for even that because alcohol was stun gravy to my household. It was the devil's juice, and it was not allowed in the house. It was a really big deal. It's amazing that I ever touched the stuff. I didn't drink at all in high school. I was a straight edge. What's more amazing to me is that you weren't more likely to touch the stuff because it was prohibited. Well, that can happen too. Well, that was one of the major effects of Prohibition, was that alcohol use, when it did increase overall, alcohol decreased as an effective Prohibition. But when it did increase, brother, it increased big time. Right? Yeah. Let's talk about some of the effects, because it had effects on what you could call the good side and the bad side, both medically and economically. Actually, most of the economic effects were pretty bad. They were bad unless you were alcohol. But alcohol trafficking obviously increased things like speakeasies and this will. Alcohol rings, bootlegger rings are pretty much comparable to today's drug dealers. Rum runners. Yes. There were European rum fleets is what they call them. Right? Yeah, because no prohibition in Europe. Most of Europe. So they just sail out into international waters, meeting up there at midnight, and then they would offload their cargo to bootleggers. And that was that the one reason they knew that things were really getting pretty bad on the bootlegging scene that I didn't realize. This is pretty funny to me. Demand for $10,000 bills reached a high in the United States in 1926, and basically that was a pretty clear sign that people wanted very large bills, so they didn't have to have trunks full of money to make their switches. Right. In international waters, political corruption was huge. In fact, there's a very famous quote from Mayor La Guardia, who was running New York at the time, who said, yes, this is a great one. He said something along the lines of, it is impossible to tell whether Prohibition is a good thing or a bad thing. It has never been enforced in this country. Badaboom, bada bing. And they're going to name an airport after the guy. Another awesome fact. Josh, as far as when you said it started booming in a big way prior to Prohibition, there were less than 15,000 bars, legal bars in the US. After Prohibition. In the midst of it, there were more than 30,000, more than double the amount of illegal speakeasies serving, and there were an estimated 100,000 people brewing alcohol of all sorts in their homes illegally. I can tell you there were probably, like, ten prior to Prohibition, people who went to the trouble of making their own. Right. But, I mean, it's the same thing. Don't you think that if California legalizes pot, don't you think that all those people who have a couple of plants growing illegally in their house are going to stop doing that and just go buy it at the store like everybody else? I don't know. The artisans would probably still grow their own, but maybe so. But in much the same way that people home brew beer now, exactly like this is a lot of trouble to go to, that not everybody wants to do. Well, you mentioned the non enforcement, and there's another stat here that is pretty startling. At one point they said, New York City. New York City? Yes, New York City. 7000 arrests were made for alcohol violations, and 17 of those ended up in convictions. Yes. So even when they tried to enforce it, it wouldn't make it all the way through the legal system. That was LaGuardia town, by the way. Well, exactly. And they said in 1925, six states had laws that basically said, quit investigating Prohibition cases or work bust you down to private, or whatever the police entry level is. We're going to bust you down to Keystone Cop level. That's right. Chuck josh, you were speaking economically. That was illegally. All that crime came up, and corruption developed directly as a result of Prohibition. Right. Al Capone, it was big for him. As you said, he turned a I don't want to say two bit, but a fledgling empire from Johnny Torio into $100 million a year enterprise, which that's a lot of cheese by today's standards. Well, yeah, and he was doing a pretty good job of it there in Chicago until the mayor, who was in his hip pocket said, I want to get out of your hip pocket and you're done here. I can't believe you lived. But that led to components downfall, right? Yeah. On a much larger scale. Economically, prohibition was a very terrible idea, especially in the midst of the Great Depression. Some companies, some brewers, specifically, like anheuser Bush, as you mentioned, said, we Germans also like to supply you with things like root beer and ice cream and corn syrup. So don't round us up. Okay. Well, that allowed them to keep their doors open, basically. They did. Not everybody could do that. Not everybody could make that switch and hires. The Bush was already, I think, pretty big at the time. So in St. Louis alone, before Prohibition, there were 22 breweries operating. After Prohibition was repealed, I just gave away the spoiler. Nine reopened, so it had a huge hit just on the brewing industry. It also took away all the tax revenue that America was making before Prohibition, taxing legal sales of liquor. Sure, all of this was on tax. Bootleggers weren't paying any taxes. They were getting rich. And then when the Depression came along, that really kind of turned the tide as far as America was concerned, like, okay, we're sick of this. A lot of crime has come about, a lot of corruption. The US. Is in the Depression, and we're losing out on viable taxable income. And this is just stupid. Everybody is drunk anyway, and the ones who were just kind of moderate drinkers before are big time drinkers. Right. So, for example, apparently by the end of the 20s, there are more alcoholics than there were before Prohibition. Right. Like clinical alcoholics. Wow. Adulterated or contaminated liquor brought on more than 500 deaths, not to mention cases of blindness and paralysis. Remember, it was either the Hangover podcast or the Moon Chime podcast. We talked about coningers the impurities and alcohol that can kill you. Yeah, those did kill a lot of people. Prohibition, on the flip side of Cirrhosis declined from 10.7 men per 100,000 to 29. I'm sorry. It dropped to 10.7 from 29.5 per 100,000 over from 1911 to 29. Silver lining. Well, no, that's my point, though, is they'll point to some stats that will say, well, Cirrhosis dropped, but then 50,000 people died because of making liquor in your tub. Right. And again, overall alcohol consumption across the board dropped from between 30 and 50%, which is substantial. But the ones who it didn't drop in, it kicked their drinking into hyperdrive. Yes. I think some people just like to be bad like this. Forbidden, right? So I'm going to do it all the time. You know, actually, the parallel there with the marijuana movement in this country now is pretty striking, pretty similar, because the recent economic downturns that we've had, I don't know if you noticed, but a lot of states started saying, like, California, you know what? We could make revenue wise if we legalize pot. It's a very interesting I think it's Cato Institute. They're a libertarian think tank, and they issued basically like, you want to know exactly how much you can make and save by decriminalizing marijuana. Here it is. Right. And it was all the money spent in the legal system plus all the revenue that can be raised tax. Exactly. Comes up to like 14 billion a year or something. Like that 14 or 44 or something. There was a four in there. Same thing with the stun. Grady. We should give credit to that. That's John Hodgman's words from his book, the area of my expertise, but you can get on Amazon. I don't want people to think Chuck is so funny. He thought of stunning gravy because they did not. Chuck josh 1932 comes around, everybody's sick and tired of Prohibition, and a new Congress says, you know what? We're going to repeal this. A much hipper drunker congress. They created the 21st Amendment because it takes an amendment to repeal another amendment, right. Yes. And in the history of the United States, this is the first time an amendment was passed to restore the rights taken away by a previous amendment on that one. Yeah. You know what's funny is just about two weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my friend Kirk about prohibition, and I said, why don't they just remove the 18th and 21st Amendment now? Why even have that in there anymore? And he got kind of upset, and he's like, this is the US Constitution you're talking about. And I said, Well, I know, but it seems silly now to still have that on the books, unless I guess it's just the constant reminder of this is what our country went through, and see, we repealed it. But to me, I'm just like, Just take them out. It's kind of like, don't be stupid. Leave me in there. It's a clear message to the people of today. But I wasn't trying to desecrate the Constitution by doing that. I just thought it made it a more efficient document. You just removed the two useful amendment. Trim the fat. So, Chuck, that Congress passed the 21st Amendment, they had to wait for two thirds of the states to ratify it, which happened on December 5, 1933. John D. Rockefeller comes out with the famous quote, drinking is generally increased. The speakeasy has replaced the saloon. A vast army of law breakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale. A clerk stamped the document, and everybody went back to drinking legally again. That night probably resembled our Trivia night recently, I'll bet would be my best guess. So after that, Joshua went to the states to decide how to govern this, and a lot of states said 21 is probably a pretty good day to start drinking. A lot of states, or some said, like, I think Louisiana, and held out for a long time. Georgia even was 18 for a long time. I remember Georgia. I remember when Ohio did theirs. I was, like, in the mid 80s, because my sister was in between there. She was, like, 19 at the time. She was like, no. And I remember Louisiana also finally caved because the feds were holding out on their highway funds. They may have been the last one. They were they yeah. And they finally were just like, We can't take these potholes any longer, so they can't so, Josh, since Prohibition so long ago was repealed and done away with, you would think that now in the United States, you can go anywhere you want, any day you want, buy your boost. You would be wrong. And I know that you know that's wrong because you live in Georgia, pal. Georgia has a blue law. No Sunday sales. No, you can buy it in a restaurant after 1230. Yeah. So if you like to go to brunch early, you're out of luck. I found that out the hard way. Very funny how the brunch club really turns up around 1215. Before then, you can get a seat anywhere on a Sunday, but because of the fear of enticing people away from church with booze or partying too hard on a Saturday night, leading to a desire to keep drinking Sunday morning and then miss church, there's that blue law. Yeah. And I didn't know this. They said that this is not just in Georgia, but period in the United States that came about during the Colonial times. They said, you know what? Let's keep the Sabbath dry. Yeah. And what you've just made reference to is the last sentence of this article. It is, in my opinion, the strangest sentence ever used to end the House of Ford's article. Would you do me a favor of reading that sentence verbatim, please? This law was developed in Colonial times to honor the Christian Sabbath day in Colonial times. The end. It's a little redundant, isn't it? Don't you think? Yeah. Let's talk about some of these other states, though. About half of Mississippi's counties are dry, and you can't even drive through a dry county with booze, even if you're just taking it home, unless you feel like paying a bribe to the sheriff. Yeah. Or if you sneak it. But you can't go to a wet county and say, oh, I'm going to get my Sunday or my beer for the week. You can't drive. You have to take a circuitous route. You had it. Right. If you want to even take your beer to your house. Right. It's pretty serious. Kentucky dry law. Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Virginia, a lot of these states. Alaska. Alaska, actually. You found, like, this pretty cool supplemental article about Alaska having 129 of the dry towns that's mentioned in this article. You found an article that explains why. Because apparently there's a strong tradition of binge drinking brought over by Russians and Finns. Right? Yeah. Finland. And Finland actually had its own bout with prohibition as well, right? Yeah, they did. And I should also point out that this is introduced me to my favorite new expression that I've never heard before. Frontier drinking style. Yeah, they had frontier drinking style. It usually ends with bear wrestling. Yeah, bear wrestling. And it's interesting, though, that they've done a lot of studies and they've shown that the volume and pattern of how you drink correlate with your culture. Yeah. So there's the European, the Southern European wheat culture, which is frequent but moderate drinking, like, basically like French kids of age seven drinking wine at dinner. Exactly. Right. And then you've got the Northern European culture, the dry culture, which is like, you don't drink very often, but when you do, you drink, like, nonstop for three days, frontier style, and then wrestle a bear. Exactly. And commit some sort of crime or something over and over again in the midst of this well. And in the end, places like Canada followed America and had Prohibition for a little while. Canada very long. America in every city. Canada's Prohibition lasted from 1918 to 1919. Exactly. It's just like the beer bearing episode of The Simpsons. Exactly. Yeah. And in Finland, Josh, they repeated 99 years ago in Finland. It really backfired. They enacted Prohibition in 1919. It was all going on at the same time. It's pretty interesting. All over the world. Yeah. And basically, people publicly and privately fommed their nose at it, and they said that they estimate that alcohol consumption tripled, perhaps in Finland. In Finland, after Prohibition, and not only that, people were originally drinking 40% vodka, and during Prohibition, people started drinking basically moonshine, like 96% spirits. Yeah. They said, you know what? You're going to do prohibition. We're going to get drunk or more often than we ever have before, and we're going to get in our saunas and we're going to get wasted, and you can't do anything about it. That seems like a bad idea. I've been saunting like crazy lately. Really? And I found out that heat cuts off the circulation in my calves. And josh finland clearly had a failed experiment, and they repealed it in 1932. So it did last a while. It did. Alaska, they say to this day, native peoples of Alaska and Native Americans is still a lot of alcohol problems disproportionately, so and the sad thing is, it was brought by Europeans. The binge drinking, the frontier style binge drinking was introduced to the Inuit and the natives of Alaska by finns Russians, and I guess old timey claim jumpers who came up from the western United States. Gabby Johnson russia actually experimented for a little while, too, in 1914 through 1925. I figured Russia would have been the one that was, like, six months later. And though they must have vodka, you know, the average lifespan of a Russian male these days is down to 59 because of vodka. Really? Because of drinking. They just drink like fishes, apparently. I remember. Yeltsin. Yeah. The nose. Yeah. I mean, it would look like that wasn't a gin blossom, that was a blooming onion. That's the end of that podcast. If you want to know more about Prohibition, type that word into the search barhouseofworks.com again. It's going to bring up that really super cool picture on page zero. I'm glad you show me that. That's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen, and click all the way through to the last page, too, to find the strangest sentence ever used to end how stuff works article. And since I said search bar at some point in the not too distant past, that means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this email from a guy whose life has eerily resembled our podcast sleep. I discovered your podcast with my two friends, and I went on a road trip from our school in Providence, Rhode Island, to Minnesota. Go, golden, gophers. Is that Minnesota? Yeah, according to Fargo. I was looking for something to listen to in a car on the way and randomly downloaded a bunch of your podcasts. So by your luck, Josh, how often does that happen, you think? And people continue to listen? Yeah, never this one time. Then we began our epic quest across the country. Whatever we listened to came true. Guys, we were in Toledo when Josh said he was from Toledo, we were with a Katie from Wisconsin. When you read a listener mail from a Katie from Wisconsin. Weird. Not the same person. And we won a trivia contest because of your habeas corpus podcast. The winning answer was the body. Our breaks failed in Pennsylvania, and we hung out with some Amish while we waited for them to be fixed. Wow. And we even felt the membranes connecting our brain and skull being stretched in Chicago. What is a hangover no? It was a stretch. Yeah, that's what I thought. We also met some friends along the way and combined our knowledge from the redheads and Flirting podcasts. On the way back from our week long odyssey, we reminisced about our favorite parts of the trip, and all three of us mention your podcast on our list. All right, so thanks for helping us have such a great time. Then he goes on to suggest we do a podcast on the School of America, which we have one right here in Atlanta. No, the School of the Americas is supposedly a now defunct assassin school that we have at Fort Benning that was used to train Latin Americans and basically an insurgency. Is he completely wrong about this, then? Yeah, school of the Americas is just one place, but it's pretty interesting and scary. Well, then, Paul, I've had some words for you, my friend. You just misled us intentionally, and I would like to recant every bit of the enthusiasm I showed for your previous email. Are you sure he wasn't just misinformed? I don't care. Okay, there's something called fact checking, even for emails. If you want to try to mislead Chuck or I, we'd like to hear that. No, mechan. We want to hear it in an email. And if you don't feel like doing something that mean, you could also actually don't even try to mislead us. It takes us off. Lubega, if you have a favorite strange sentence that you've ever come across in your life that can beat this. Law was developed in Colonial times to honor the Christian Sabbath day in Colonial times. We want to hear it. Wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom. Send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows. Morbid. My favorite murder and small town murder. You'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
7ffd4b0e-61a7-11ec-8dfc-cf270afcccda | Short Stuff: Arctic Fox | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-arctic-fox | The Arctic Fox is one of the cutest critters on the planet. It also has an amazing ability to survive the coldest temps on Earth. Dive into the snow and listen today! | The Arctic Fox is one of the cutest critters on the planet. It also has an amazing ability to survive the coldest temps on Earth. Dive into the snow and listen today! | Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=26, tm_isdst=0) | 13467101 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and this is Chuck. We're just a couple of foxes. Silver foxes with our pal Jerry. Silverest fox of all my hair's got a little gray to it now. Yeah, your beard is super gray. It's been gray for a while, but now that the gray is creeping into the old upstairs, I've been plucking mine. No, sure. But you don't care, do you? Mine sometimes comes in a little wiry and I'm like, I don't really like that look on my super straight hair. So I do pull them out when they come in like that. Sure. Head pubes kind of a little bit more look like a roadie for Tesla. Oh, you mean Jimmy Headbube Barrington. Yeah, the guitar tech. That's right. He was a great one, but his hair was messed up. I'll hit him with some smoke. That's right. Man, that guy old inside joke from our Detroit show. Some of you know it, some of you don't. But we're here to talk about the Arctic fox, one of the cuter little critters on planet Earth. Right. So the Arctic fox is adorable, and it's in the same family as dogs, which makes it automatically lovable. But the fact that they can survive in some of the most inhospitable environments on the planet makes them admirable. So they're adorable. Yeah, I got it. Nice portmanteau. Thank you. Yeah. So the Arctic fox just go ahead if you're in a place where you're not driving and look up a little picture of these little fellas, or you're not crossing the street right now on foot. That's right. But I keep saying little because they are small. Like foxes are small. The Arctic fox is even smaller. They can be as small as a little Chihuahua. And by the way, big thanks to our old pals at how stuff works with this one. Yeah. Or they can get huge, like the size of a Jack Russell, you're looking at up to \u00a38. That's right. So when I said that they can survive in some really inhospitable environments like the areas where they live, the circumpolar areas, alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, northern Europe, Russia. Basically, in the Arctic, they have to put up with temperatures that drop it to, like, negative 50 degrees Celsius. Yeah. Which is old. Negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Which reminded me, Chuck, of I can't remember what episode it was, but remember Simo Hiya? The White Death? Yeah. And we talked about how he was basically sniping Russian soldiers when it was, like, negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and 50 people wrote in and said, negative 40 is the same in Fahrenheit and Celsius. I will never forget that. And I just wanted to say it again, that I still remember after all these years. I love that I remember that. So what's astounding about the Arctic fox is that it can survive in those kinds of temperatures and it can do so for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of really pretty spectacular evolutionary adaptations that allow this to happen. And one of those is just that little size, the fact that they're small, they're compact, they have little legs, little short muzzles, and they have little small ears, so they don't have a lot of surface area to begin with exposed to that cold. Right, right. So that's one big thing. They also have the warmest coat of any Arctic animal. It has multiple layers and probably any animal, wouldn't you think? I would guess so, yeah. Now that you mention it. They can trap a layer of air which is heated by their body heat, which in turn keeps them warm, so it protects them from the outside colder air. It's pretty amazing. And then the coutigra, the death blow about their pelt is the fluffy tail on the end that they actually used to cover their head and face with when they curl up to sleep. Adorable. That is awfully adorable. It's true. They also have hair. They're the only canid that has hair over their foot pads. So not only does that just add even more insulation, but it helps them walk on the snow. And then they have counter current blood circulation. And this is what's going to happen. They're going to reduce the blood flow to their feet to make sure those little paws don't get frostbitten. And then when it gets really cold, their actual metabolism shifts by about 25% slower than it is during the summer to basically warm them up to keep them from having to eat as much when there's not as much food. So their body undergoes a metabolic change to survive those winters. Yeah, kind of like a walking Quasi hibernation so that they use up those fat stores that they build up in the fall. Totally. Pretty cool. And one thing I didn't realize about the Arctic fox, in addition to just about everything we've just said that they come in two colors. There's a blue variety of an Arctic fox, which is awesome. Did you see those? I think it's like that white. That's so white. It looks blue. Well, it's sort of a gray, too. It certainly doesn't look blue blue. So if you get excited to go see a blue animal or a blue mammal, don't get your hopes up too much. Right, but I have a problem. I'm not color blind or anything, but Emily always sees colors more deeply, I guess, than I do. So she might see one and call it blue. But I didn't think I mean, I see one in the Google image results, and it's pretty blue. I see the gray you're talking about as well. But people do all sorts of cookie things with postproduction, with photographs now, so who knows what they did with that. Send me that blue box, will you? Sure. In a box? Sure. I'm going to go get them. You could go get them. Some people do keep them as pets from time to time, but those are people who live up in arctic areas. You wouldn't want to get one and bring them down to Georgia because they would be extremely uncomfortable and that would be cruel. But also, Chuck, they apparently make really terrible pets as well, right? Yeah. I think they're known as super stinky. I think they have a urine that it's sort of like skunk like, so they're smelly. They're very hard to train, although they say you can train them. Right. But it's probably not a great idea for a pet. If you're living up in the arctic, you don't have a lot of choices. Go ahead and get an arctic fox and see what you can do. But don't live in Miami Beach and think you're going to be cool and have some exotic pet because it's illegal a and just unethical b. Right. There you go. It covers both boxes. Should we take a break? I think we should. We'll come back with more about the arctic fox. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No longterm commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So what do these little boogers eat? Apparently, since they're canids, they should be carnivores, even hyper carnivores I've seen. But they're technically omnivores because food supplies can get so scarce that arctic foxes have been known to eat basically whatever will sustain them, including seaweed and berries. But typically they prefer meat. Sure, they will load up, increasing their weight by up to 50% as that hard winter sets in. Store up that body fat. And if you see a polar bear in the arctic hunting, you will probably find at least one or more arctic foxes trailing not too far behind, because they will follow those polar bears around and get whatever little scraps that polar bear can't get to. That's right. One of the great things about arctic foxes is they can hunt year round because of their little ears. Their ears are super wide. They're short, but they're wide and they can actually hear stuff like some of their prey moving under the snow. And so if you've ever seen a video of an Arctic fox pounce, it's adorable. But they will go, it's so great, and then straight down to kind of break through the snow and land on top of their prey and catch their prey. And I will one up you. The Arctic fox pouncing is adorable. Momo does that to lizards. Oh, really? It makes an Arctic fox look like garbage. It's so cute, man. You see the videos in the snow, this Arctic fox will literally leap up in the air and then half of it will disappear beneath the snow and all you will see sticking up is a butt and rear legs and that big old fluffy tail. And then there might be a mouse 2ft down into that snow that they smelled from many feet away. So I highly recommend I doubt if Josh is going to post pictures or videos of Momo of doing this on YouTube, but you can find plenty of Arctic foxes doing it. I'll try to get a video of it, actually. Buy them slowmo if you can. Yeah. It's not adorable for the mice, but it is to everybody else. Yeah, but it's part of the food chain. It is true. So if you are a male Arctic fox, they call you a dog. Sure. Sometimes with the AW instead of an o, depending on how good a friend you are with the person calling you that. If you're a female, what do you call Chuck? You're a vixen. It's awesome. Which I love. And just like other foxes, I think other foxes are kits little babies, if I'm not mistaken, and they made about once a year. They're born dark, usually at first about 20 little dark kits. And they are adorable. They give birth in the blazing summer months of sort of spring to summer, April to June, and usually we in about 45 days. And sometimes their siblings will help raise them, which is also pretty cute. Yeah. And then by the time they hit nine to ten months of age, actually, within six months, they're off on their own, and then in nine to ten months, they're sexually mature and they have a really compressed initial adolescence and initial maturation period because they don't live that long. Actually, I think if you have an Arctic fox as a pet, they've been known to live ten to twelve years, kind of similar to a dog, although small dogs often live longer than that by several years. But I guess the longest anyone has ever documented an Arctic fox living is 16 years. Yeah. And the grand scheme of things, I think in the wild you're probably looking at more like eight years. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot harder life in the wild, I would guess, than hanging out and some dudes lean to in northern Canada. Since we're talking about the Arctic, every time I think about The Arctic now, I think about the show The Terror. Have you seen that? Show the terror. I think so. There was an AMC show, it's available on Hulu. There were two seasons. It's an anthology series, so each season is its own entirely different story. Second season, I recommend like the first half of the first season from start to finish, the first second to the last second. It is worth every bit of your interest. Wait a minute. This is the one you recommended to The Grabster on email, right? Yes. It's so good, man. Just check it out. It's one of the best made television shows I've ever seen. I can't imagine how much it costs to make it. And you can tell and all the actors are like every one of them is like the best actor working today. But you've seen them, you recognize them here, there, but you don't really know their names, like that kind of stuff. It's just a really great show. Well, The Atlantic says The Terror is more than a chilling monster show. Yeah, well, the reason they call it The Terror is one of the ships, the terror of the faded, lost polar expedition. That's what it's about, is that and it's all speculative fiction, basically. And since we're on TV corner here for the last minute, we just finished the first season of Leftovers last night. Oh, yeah. Season one wrapped up and so we're speeding right into season two, loving the show. It started to drag a little bit, but then the last two episodes of season one got really interesting. And I wanted to also further explain, I think I might have turned some people off with Station Eleven saying it was a post flu pandemic world. It is one of the best shows I've ever seen. And it's not terrifying. It's like there are no infected or no zombies or anything out there waiting to kill you. Like all the infected died. So it's really just about repopulating and the story of these people who survived. And it's very uplifting. Good, good stuff. I see. So it's softcore. Yeah, it's softcore. It's a cinematic shit, that's. How did we get here? God west, the Arctic Fox is what we're saying. Thanks, Arctic Foxes. We love you guys. And of course, everybody, that means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
2140a08a-78eb-42bd-97f9-aedd0109b776 | Where Did Human Intelligence Come From? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/where-did-human-intelligence-come-from | <p>We humans are smart, to be sure, but if we’re so smart then how come we can’t figure how we got so smart in the first place? Think about that! We sure did and we go over some theories in this super interesting episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | <p>We humans are smart, to be sure, but if we’re so smart then how come we can’t figure how we got so smart in the first place? Think about that! We sure did and we go over some theories in this super interesting episode.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> | Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=207, tm_isdst=0) | 44334275 | audio/mpeg | "Picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your City Advantage Platinum select card. So you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you advantage miles. Actually, you earned advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the city Advantage Platinum Select card. Learn more at citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. Objects carry a lot of power. They tell stories about people, places or a time in history. On mysteries at the museum. The podcast from Travel Channel don Wildman searches for objects that tell shocking stories of American history. Like the ordinary blue mailbox that changed the course of a massive spy case in the cold War. Uncover the histories behind extraordinary objects. Listen to mysteries at the museum on Apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. The brainiac condition. That's right. I was trying to think of something and I was truly blank that's how appropriate. Totally, Chuck. Because we are talking today about human intelligence and the origin of human intelligence, and it just seems super stuff You Should Know for us to not be able to come up with a decent joke. Well, Ed did that for us, actually, because I did want to shout out we usually don't mention, like, section titles and stuff like that. That's actually in our notes. But Ed drops because it's for our eyes. But Ed dropped to Simpsons reference oh, yeah. In his section title, one of the great Simpsons references chimpanzee to chimpanzee. So great. That was from the Planet of the Apes musical, right? That's right. I like to think of that as a little gift from Ed to us. Yeah, it definitely was. And it was well received, too, so thanks, Ed. The reason Ed created a section called Chimpanzees Chimpanzees, because we're going to talk about the lineage of humanity, like where humans came from. And despite that hilarious and clever section title, we did not actually evolve from chimpanzees, but we do share a common ancestor from chimpanzees. So chimps and humans split off from a shared ancestor about six to 8 million years ago. And that really kicked off a very long process of evolution where intelligence started to develop fairly early on. It just was really slow to start and then over time, it kind of picked up speed. Yeah. You found this kind of cool statistic. There's a researcher writer named Richard Leakey, and Richard and I think most people agree, they posit that there was what's called a big bang of human culture around the Upper Paleolithic time period, where things were, like you said, slow going for so long. And things were measured in eras before that very slowly, over like hundreds of millennia. And then all of a sudden, like 60 to 300 years ago or so, things started to really ramp up in terms of innovation and intelligence and just really moving the ball forward, to use a football metaphor. Sure. And we're talking about clothing and social structure and art and creativity and stuff like that. So it's kind of cool to think and we're going to talk about why that might have happened, but the fact that that did happen got us on the moon in short order over the last few thousand years. Yeah, it's kind of like if you look at the development of intelligence as a train that's starting from a stop, it starts out with kind of a Nd, then that Upper Paleolithic revolution, the big bang of culture. That's the part that really punctuates the whole thing. I was thinking more along the lines of, like, a Japanese bullet train, but sure, I don't think we're there quite yet. Okay. We still do some really stupid stuff, but we can also create a bullet train. We can, but we just can't be the bullet train intellectually. Oh, man. Mind blown. So, Chuck, the fact that 30 to 60,000 years ago there was that Upper Paleolithic revolution where humanity just suddenly blossomed into what we recognize today as humanity, it's really tempting to think that human intelligence just was suddenly born all of a sudden, geologically speaking, overnight at that time. But that's just not the case. It seems like something definitely happened there, like some wire connected with another wire that really made a big difference. But instead, again, it was this part of this very long line of seemingly random and unconnected developments in the history of humanity and I guess our genus Homo that led to that point and actually led to that point today, because we're still evolving and developing. Yeah, I guess if you look at it on a timeline, it looks like a mechanic came along and said, well, here's your problem. You forgot to plug it in. That's right. You got to plug these two wires together and then you're all set. Yeah, totally. But we like to talk about Homo sapiens in terms of human intelligence for good reason. Homo sapiens, that is to say, us, aka modern humans, evolved about 3000 years ago, but we are just one of a collection of in this big, lovely family called the hominems. Yeah. Hominins. Yeah. I think it said Ms. Yeah. So the Hominins are everybody that started off branching from that common ancestor with chimps. That's the hominin line. And humans in our genus Homo, that Homo sapiens are a part of, is just part of that hominin. There are other entirely different genus or genii that make up the hominin line, right? That's right. And we should point out that sapiens actually is taken from the latin word for knowledge. So it kind of all makes sense. It does. So the whole thing starts out, it seems like as far back as we can tell, something again, like somewhere around six or so million years ago, there was a group of hominins called artipithecus who basically walked upright, but that was essentially the big difference between them and chimpanzees. But as we'll see, that was a really big difference. Right. Yeah. We'll get into this in more detail, but obviously if you're walking upright, then you have a very important thing at your disposal, which is use of your hands. Right. So then you got australopithecus and some few other different kinds of branches that kind of branch off. It's a really tangled, convoluted family tree where some kind of led to blind alleys, others lead to others. But they think that australopithecus was a really big, long lasting group that was a little more human, definitely more human than art apartheus, but not quite as human as the genus Homo, which kicked off all of these different species of human because we're alive today, we're on planet earth, living here in 2022, and every single human alive is a member of the same species. So, like, there's different kinds of cats, there's different kinds of fish species, there's different kinds of bird species, there's only one kind of human species. But that wasn't always the case. There were plenty of different human species, some living alongside one another for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. That's right. And almost all the hominins use tools, it seems like, and made tools. And for a long time we thought that was sort of it, that only the homogeneous was the one who did use tools, which is we talk about things like being bipedal and using tools is sort of some of the building blocks of what would become human intelligence. Right. But now we know that there are some older we found evidence that they use tools before that and that's kind of fairly recently. Right. Yeah. We wanted to say that tool making started sometime after the homogeneous showed up a couple of million years ago, but we found even older tools. So it seems like Australopithecus, which again, they're hominids, they're part of the branch that led to us humans, but they're not human in any way, shape or form. So the fact that they're using tools was kind of mind blowing and it also really kind of undermined kind of like what you were saying, like our idea of using tools. Like that's a big sign of intelligence. And humans are intelligent, so it's weird to find out that non humans were using tools millions of years ago. That's right. Should we move on to the hardware software thing? Yeah. So if tools and fire are not because we found use of fire dating back at least a million years. So if tools fire hanging out with one another collectively, if these aren't like the indicators that make human intelligence, we've got to get a little more granular. And fortunately for you and I sitting here today, Chuck, scientists have done that and they've come up with some really interesting ways of looking at this. Yeah, and it's a bit more of a preamble before we get actually to the intelligence. And I like the way Ed put this, sort of like talking about hardware versus software. They were very intertwined and sort of happening at the same time. So it's not like one couldn't happen without the other as far as the hardware software thing goes. But if we're looking at hardware and we're talking about changes that made us better at walking upright, all of a sudden, just don't stand up and start walking like this happens over a long, long period of time. Our hind legs got longer, the shape of our pelvis changed. There's something called the forman magnum, which is a hole in the base of the skull where the spinal cord and lots of nerves and things past to sort of open up those neural pathways, and that changed its location. So these literal physical changes are happening over great periods of time in order just to be able to walk upright. Right. And Bipedalism, it's like the defining characteristic of Hominins right there's. Not really, as far as I can tell, any other animals that walk upright, like, by default. So there had to be physiological changes, but they're not entirely certain why we started walking upright. But the fact that we did, and it's lasted for this long means that there was some advantage to it because enough people walking upright were able to pass along their genes. And they think one big theory is that it helped us survive climate change where maybe things got colder and there were less trees. So since we weren't arboreal anymore, we didn't hang out and live and eat in trees. We were able to kind of move around and find different food sources and different shelters. Whereas our cousins, the Chimps, were in big trouble. They were up the proverbial creek. Yeah. And I love that you point out that we were the only ones who walk upright by default because I think we can all agree there's nothing more fun than YouTube videos of, like, a dog or a cat or something just walking on fine legs for some reason. Definitely. It's the coolest and most fun thing ever. It totally is. I'll take like a Jesus lizard running across some water once in a while, too. There's nothing wrong with watching. Is that what those are called? Yeah, I think I saw one of those in Mexico. That was surprising. Are they not there? I don't know. I'm just saying I've never seen one in real life, so I'm sure it was surprising to see, I saw a lizard that was walking and it wasn't walking on water, but I think it was one of those kinds that can I just didn't know the name of it. Had you recently eaten the worm from the bottom of the bottle of his cow? Very funny. Another thing we should point out is that walking upright is an energy saver. I mean, they've done studies and they found that you use about 25% of the energy rather than bounding around on all fours, like a chimp might or like a chimp does. But to save that energy, to conserve it, our pelvis has had to change shape. Like you mentioned, it was just a consequence of walking upright. And the reason to change shape is, when you walk upright, if you're a chimp, your body swing side to side. You have to hold your arms up to balance yourself. That takes a lot of energy. So we developed like gluteal muscles and other muscles that can cling to a specific shaped and size pelvis so that we don't have to spend all that energy. Our muscles are just kind of keeping us much more balanced. But one of the consequences of that, of walking upright and our pelvis changing, means that the size of the birth canal afforded by the hole in the pelvis that a child passes through during birth got smaller, a lot smaller. And it's really strange to think that the decreasing in size of the birth canal actually was one of the factors that led to an increase in intelligence. Yes. And we should point out this is just the first of what will be a lovely cascade of theories that we're going to lay on your brains today. And that, like you said earlier, there is no one single one. It's kind of when you put all of this stuff together, I think that's sort of the beauty of human intelligence is it took all of these great things sort of coalescing. But the whole thing with the brain is interesting because the size of the brain is one of nature's kind of controversies. Like, we know that as far as humans go, just because you have a bigger brain doesn't mean that you definitely will be smarter. Right. But there are some correlations across species, in nature and in humans. There can be evidence that a bigger brain means you're more intelligent. But it's not one of those things where it's subtle science, where they just say, hey, if you got a bigger brain, you're going to be smarter. No. And in fact, there's all sorts of evidence in nature that suggests that's not the case, because our brain to body size ratio among humans is one to 40. So our brain makes up about one fourth of our body mass. That's the same ratio that a mouse has. I don't care how you cut it, they're just not as intelligent as humans. But on the other hand, an elephant's brain to body ratio is one to 560, and elephants are super smart, right. So you can't really find much there that says there's no direct correlation where it's like the bigger the brain, the more intelligent being. But there does have to be some minimum amount of brain size because it seems like the connections of the brain, as we'll see, are what really matter. And the more brain tissue you have up to a certain point, the more connections that can be made. Right. So that brings us back to the birth canal situation. Like you mentioned, you're walking upright, it changes the shape of the pelvis, you have a much smaller birth canal all of a sudden. So evolutionarily speaking, you might think, well, does that mean we're going to have to have babies with tiny, tiny little heads and therefore tiny, tiny little brains that may not be able to grow very fast because it's enclosed in a skull that's sort of locked down? Right. But that didn't happen to us. What happened was we have Fontanelle's and we have this delayed fusing of the skull kind of closing for good. And so it allows, and it's remarkable still to think about this, but it allows that little baby head to squish down, to get through the birth canal and get through the vagina and out into the world and stay that way for a while. And it's during that for a while period before that skull completely fuses that a human brain really grows a lot. And chimps don't have that ability. No, their skull fuses mostly in the womb and their brain, as a consequence, grows mostly to what size it's going to reach in the womb. So, on the one hand, a chimp baby, you could say it's much smarter and much less helpless than a human baby, for sure. But given enough time, the human baby is going to start to exceed the chimp's abilities very quickly. And it's because our development is delayed. We do a lot of developing outside of the womb and that's afforded by that skull that's not fused for a couple of years after birth. And there is no intelligent design. So this was not like a good solution or workaround. This was just a naturally selected trait. The skull not fusing, that was a solution to the smaller birth canal, not to increase intelligence, but the advent of babies being born that didn't have fusion skulls allowed for the advent of intelligence. Yeah. A solution to the problem of walking upright, which is really interesting to think about. Yeah. And it also just goes to show, like, nature is not always, like, elegantly simple. Sometimes it's really convoluted. And organisms, including us, are held together by, like, duct tape and bubblegum. Right. And that's a good example of it. I think that's a good time for the break, Gay. And we'll come back and drop some plasticity on your brain right after this. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get handson, experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. 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It's the wine that disrupts the Chardonnay category, brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, Martha Shard, is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish framed by a distinctly sweet oat character. Martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowd pleaser the star of your next party or gathering. Because Martha Starr just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on, let's work hard, play hard, and drink martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on nineteencrimescom. That's one nine crimescom. Please drink responsibly. So, Chuck, this is the point we're about to talk about brain plasticity. This seems to be what, if anything, explains human intelligence and certainly the burst of intelligence that happened 30 to 60,000 years ago. Yeah, and I think the opening statement to this whole thing is, all you got to do is look at the fact that we learn almost everything as humans. Like, from the moment we're born, there is some maybe instinctive knowledge, but like you said, like, human babies are kind of helpless little dumb dumbs. And from that point forward, our brains are learning and they're growing, and they're capable of learning, and they're capable of adapting. And this all has to do with plasticity, right? So just if you aren't familiar, plasticity is the brain's ability to basically rewire and create new connections as new experiences come along. And you can even take old experiences that you experience more than once. And the second and third and fourth time those neural connections are going to become more sophisticated and more connected than they were before. So our brains are plastic. They can be molded and shaped kind of like in the rhinoplasty sense of the word. They're not made of plastic. They can be molded and they're molded by the connections that they make. So it's not necessarily that you have a giant brain. It's that you, human being, have a brain that is really highly capable of creating new connections. And it's those connections that forms the basis of intellect. Yeah, and that really frees up. Like once you have a brain that's plastic and that can evolve to figure out a problem rather than taking eons and eons to have a genetically adapt to a solution to a problem, if all of a sudden you have a brain that can figure something out, you do it so much quicker and that frees you up to do more and learn more. And it creates this feedback loop all of a sudden where the process really speeds up. And that's basically what we saw 30 to 60,000 years ago. Yes, and we're still seeing it today. Chuck, 30 to 600 years ago, it was a huge burst of creativity and intelligence, but we're still talking about changes that took place over thousands of years. Now we're seeing changes to the human condition in our society that take place over like tens of years. So it still seems to be speeding up and we're still going through the same process. But I guess the best way to think about what you've just described is evolution, which typically forces changes on us based on environmental conditions, goes into the brain. And now it's the brain that's able to change. And like you said, it changes much faster. And that leads genetic evolution or genetic natural selection to focus on selecting for traits that create more and more intelligence. So it creates that positive feedback loop, like you said, and speeds things up. It's pretty brilliant. So there's been a lot of really interesting research, especially and it seemed like the early to mid 1990s about plasticity. There are a couple of researchers named to Be and Cosmides, great names, and they had a theory basically that human intelligence evolved with all these encapsulated cognitive models. So they did not have the ability to access each of these modules. Right. And each one was very specialized for a very specialized problem or task that was trying to do or problem that was trying to solve. And that's like a language module, spatial relation module. Here's how to make and use a tool that kind of a module. And that all these modules are still around in basically the same form that they were back then because they're on the timeline of humanity that hasn't been a lot of time to undergo any kind of modifications, basically. So I disagree with that. I think speaking about classic evolution, natural selection, that's true. But brain based evolution and natural selection, like cultural natural selection, I think that that's false. You hear that to be so the idea about all this is that these modules that we developed over time is like we came upon new problems in our environments and had to figure out new solutions to them. They started to kind of get cross referenced here and there. Like you could say the same ability to follow the sunset. Right? I wish I would have come up with something better. Can also be used to follow herds of game, right? And so all of a sudden we now not only just know to follow the sunset, if we want to follow the sunset, we also know we can use that same ability to follow game around and now all of a sudden our diet expands, that kind of thing. So as these different modules started cross referencing themselves and got more and more connected, we were able to apply these different things to more and more situations and got more and more intelligent. All right, so that's one sort of grand theory, which I love. I do too. Another one that we're going to talk about is, I think, super interesting because some of this stuff is so kind of rudimentary when you just sort of look at it from a macro view. But when you really stop to think about how important that ended up being, it's fascinating to me. And in this case, we're talking about the fact that one of the sort of side and again, it's going back to bipedalism. One of the side effects of bipedalism is that we lost our ability with our feet to be able to hang on to things like chimpanzees do. These boots were all of a sudden made for walking and they weren't made for grabbing. And if they weren't made for grabbing, then you couldn't hang on to mama like a chimp could with hands and feet. So mama had to hang on to human baby and mama can't hang on to human baby all the time because mama still has to get things done around the savannah. So what you have to do then is leave that baby somewhere and go do stuff like go down to the river and do things. And if you leave a baby somewhere, what? You go down to the river and do certain things, two things. You know what? Unmentionable things. And if you leave that baby, and this is all leading to this statement, if you leave that baby somewhere, you want to be able to go back and find that baby. And it seems so rudimentary and basic, but that is a huge thing in the development of the early human brain, is simply to spatially map and remember where I have left this child, it's important to go back and get that child, and I can do that. Yeah. And then consequently to that, another adaptation seems to have arisen from the same problem, the problem of not being able to cling to the mother anymore, and then also the problem of the baby being otherwise helpless, way more helpless than a baby. Chimp right. So they think that around the same time, babies cries developed. Like, you don't hear other things necessarily crying like a human baby. And they don't think that babies cried like that until around this time because there was that problem. So even if a mom couldn't remember where she put her baby, she could listen out for the baby crying. And they also think around this time that an urge or desire to soothe the baby from its crying would have developed and that it's possible. Chuck and this makes so much awesome sense that language actually developed out of what's called mother ease, that kind of soothing baby talk that calms a baby, that mothers know how to do just naturally. They think that it's possible that that is what formed the basis of language. Yeah. And I'm going to go beyond that. Even. Because what I noticed when I had a baby in the house was that even beyond the soothing thing. If you are holding your baby and you have to put your baby down to go wash the dishes or whatever. Generally. And I think I speak for most parents. You don't just go set your baby down. Go in the other room and do stuff. You're talking to that baby from the very beginning and you're saying, all right, let's go over to our little place here. I'll be right back. I'm going to be right here in the other room. That baby doesn't know what you're talking about, obviously. But there just seems to be this evolutionary instinct to say things to it right out of the gate. It's really interesting. It is interesting. And then wrapped up in this also, there's a better example than following the stupid sunset that I came up with. I love sunset. But if you can now all of a sudden remember where landmarks are and then way find your way back to a starting point, now you can start to use that to follow game further and further afield, and you're expanding your range and you can expand your diet. So it's a really good example of one thing kind of leading to another, and all of it being arising from environmental pressures brought on by changes of us. Yeah. I love it. Me, too. This next one is kind of fits in a little bit with the plasticity. I think the idea of the cognitive niche, which is typically figuring out like a solution to a problem, but this theory is that maybe intelligence evolved as a universal adaptation to all kinds of evolutionary pressures that we're bearing down. It. Has a pretty great example. If you've got an island with a tree that has a certain fruit seed that's really beneficial for your body, but you can't crack into it, it would take a bird hundreds to thousands or millions of years to develop and evolve to have a beak that can crack that thing open. But if all of a sudden you know how to make a tool, you can just walk over and steal that thing from that dumb bird and just crack it open with the tool. So it's your brain at work, and in that case, it's filling a specific niche. But that's a tool that was also used to kill the animal or chop the wood. Yes. And that really supports what we were talking about a few minutes ago, that once evolution, once a brain has evolved to a certain amount of intellect, the brain can take care of the organism. And natural selection and genetics can kind of take a step back and not have to say, like, select for a thicker hairier chest because we're living in a colder time now, because the brain can come up with a way to create a coat. Right. So it just kind of takes over evolution from evolution by doing that and that's that cognitive niche. And one of the consequences of it is that there seems to be, as things change in our environment, we figure out new ways to solve those and then those solutions are inevitably going to create other problems or changes. So then we have to evolve even further intelligence to figure out how to solve these new problems. And you can actually see it still going on today. Chuck, we've evolved a level of intelligence where we can extract petroleum from the Earth, we can build machines that run on that petroleum, and we can develop science that figures out that burning that petroleum is really, really bad for the climate. So now we've altered our ecosystem enough that we have to evolve intelligence enough to figure out how to get out of this new conundrum that we've created for ourselves based on our previous intellect. So intellect builds on intellect through environmental pressures that we often bring on ourselves? That seems like the case. Yeah. I think a lot of people seem to think of intelligence is only solving problems, but it also creates a lot as well. It's interesting. Yeah, it really is. I know we were going to skip this section entirely, but I think just for funsies, we should very quickly mentioned one. The idea is from someone called Terrence McKenna, who Ed describes as a postmodern Timothy Leary type, one of these people that advocates for psychedelic drug use. And just very quickly, the idea is that the cavemen were tripping on mushrooms and that's how intelligence evolved. And I just like mentioning because I feel like there's almost nothing, no leap in history that some person hasn't said like the Enlightenment or whatever. Like, oh, man, they were just tripping, right? They were just super funny. They were on grass. I just think it's pretty funny. It is funny. But it does. I mean, like, if you apply it exclusively to the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, where all of a sudden there's, like, art and jewelry and dancing and all that stuff, it's possible that it was true based, at least in part. Yeah, you never know. All right, so I say we take a break and we come back and get down to the nitty gritty of how food might have brought intelligence along. How about that? 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But that's because dummy leaves that they're not as brave we're courageous podcasters. Okay, I'll buy that. This next theory, I think is super cool because any time you tie in not just food, but sort of an appreciation for a creature comfort, it really turns me on. And nothing that can in certain ways intellectually turns me on. And in this case, we're talking about the fact that we used fire, obviously, and then started cooking food. And people that cooked food said, wow, this is really good and this tastes a whole lot better than that raw meat we've been eating. This charred meat is delicious and let's try and do more of this around here. Yeah, and so that would have just them being responding to a taste preference and that's it. But it just so happened that that taste preference would have had a really big benefit and a big contribution to the development of intelligence. Because if you cook meat, you unlock a bunch of nutrients and calories that are otherwise unavailable to you if you just eat it raw. So over time, the people who ate meat would have had more energy and more calories to contribute to a growing brain, which could have helped the process along if not sped it up. And if you consider the fact that we've definitely seen that taste and smell has responded to evolutionary pressures in that we at some point learned not to eat poop and we learned not to eat rotten food and stuff. And that's taste and smell, it looks like it can have the opposite effect too, where all of a sudden you have a preference for the good and that just happens to work out in your favor. Yeah. And this is another example of one thing leading to another where like, mothers developed an awareness of landmarks and way finding. And then that led to being able to follow game, which expanded our diet, which led to us eating meat, which eventually led to applying controlled fire to that meat, which led to more calories and nutrients available, which led to bigger brain growth, which helped found the growth of intelligence in humans. Just one totally random, unconnected thing, or even connected, but seemingly unconnected, just creating us today. It's just so nuts to me. I love it. Yes, me too. And the fact that think about this, not only the preference for a charred meat, but the preference for a specific charred meat, because different stuff tastes different. It's not like everything tastes like chicken. I know that's a joke. But all of a sudden Tuktuk is out there and says, boy, that one thing that we killed yesterday. You guys. I don't know about you but that was really delicious. And we know that we saw that thing three days ago about 50 miles away. Everyone said what's a mile? And he went, well, that doesn't matter right now, but the point that it was really far away. So all of a sudden, other things are introduced, like cooperation, not just wayfinding, but, hey, let's all get together because this is like a three day journey and this thing is really big, that tastes so delicious. So it's going to take a few of us to bring this thing down and to process this animal and get this meat ready for cooking. So it just introduces like a cascade and it could have all just come from, hey, that tastes really great. Yeah. And so all that hunting and coordinating, all that takes, like, a lot of intelligence. And not only does it take intelligence to coordinate, it takes intelligence to explain what you're talking about, and it takes intelligence to come up with that plan in the first place. So all of those factors combining are just making humans more and more intelligent with every step. And again, it's not like it's just following this perfect linear progression. It's just kind of randomly. And the reason that we're intelligent today is because the attempts that didn't work out got selected out. The fact got trimmed along the way. Is that kind of a ruthless way to put it? But, you know, it makes sense. And that sort of ties into this other theory of smaller prey, like when they were hunting large prey species, eventually they were hunting and tracking these large animals and eventually they were driven to extinction. So humans had to start going after smaller things, or I guess hominems had to start going after smaller things. And the fossil record indicates this. It sort of worked in lockstep with the evolution of human intelligence. So all of a sudden, if you're hunting smaller things, you probably have to be a little bit smarter. You have to be a little bit more coordinated, you have to cooperate a little more, you have to maybe invent new tools. And obviously using a big thing to smash a large thing isn't the same thing as smashing a small thing and just simply the fact that they had to do a lot more of it. If you're eating a squirrel as your diet, you're eating a lot of squirrel every day, whereas if you eat a woolly mammoth, that's your food for the month or whatever. Exactly. And that's a really good example of what I was talking about earlier, that cognitive niche where the more sophisticated we get, the more problems we actually generate for ourselves, the more challenges, the more intelligent we have to become. That's right. And what about this last notion? And then I think this is kind of where it all comes together, right? Yeah. So we have like a real urge and a desire to wrap everything up in a neat little package, and we just haven't reached that point yet with human intelligence. But if you step back and look at some of the theories and see how they all kind of fit together, it seems like most or all of them, with the exception of Stone Date, probably could be right. But they all have to work together and work with one another, which is great because that level of organization requires intelligence. That's right. But the key to all of this and I think we talked about the evolution of language on a whole show, right? I think so, yeah. We still don't quite know exactly how that evolved, but we have some ideas, like we talked about with the what did you call it? Motherin's. No. Mother ease. Mother ease. But all of this became possible because of language. All of this, like you were saying, all of this coordination, all this cooperation, anything that would eventually lead to writing down human history, all of that had to have language. So it seems that all of these sort of theories coalescing around the beginnings of language, and eventually the written word is like the key to it all. Yeah, totally. And one of the other things, because we are so aware that we're intellectually superior, not only to all the other animals, at the very least, we're intellectually different from the other smart ones, we tend to think of ourselves as the most intellectually evolved or the most successful humans ever. And that's absolutely not the case. I think Homo erectus was around for one and a half million years, and modern humans have only been around for about 300,000 years. So we're definitely not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution just in the amount of time and success we've had so far. But also we have a tendency to think like we're the top and there's nothing coming. And that's not necessarily true either. If you look at that acceleration in technology, some of our ancestors used the same tool for a million and a half years without innovating upon it. They just made that same tool over and over and over again. And then somebody came along who was born and figured out a way to make it better, and that kicked off more and more technology, and you can see it's picking up faster and faster. But the fact that evolution has jumped from the external world for us to our brains and in turn to our culture, you can make a really good case that we're not necessarily going to physically evolve any longer. We're going to mentally evolve. So it's not certain what humanity is going to look like in the future, but it's probably going to happen. The changes are going to happen a lot faster soon than they have been before. And we'll all just end up brains and jars, right? Probably. Or uploaded. Right. Oh, boy. Good luck with that. Everybody that had a very so long sucker to drink. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I love these types of episodes. Good stuff. Me too. Since Chuck and I agreed we love this episode, it's time for listener mail. So this is another Appalachian trail. Probably the last one I'll read because Sophie here, aka Tough Cookie Nice, which is Sophie's trail name, is just a lovely human, and we had a nice back and forth. Sophie and Sophie's sister did a no bow through hike in 2017 and just had some kind of fun things to point out. One of the general rules of trail names is someone else has to give it to you. So I think that's kind of like if you're a pilot in the military, like a Maverick and Goose. I think people think they name themselves cool names, but my brother in law and was like, no, you get a name and it's usually not something super cool like Maverick. Yeah. If you name yourself, I'm sure that people are going to be way harder on you and the name they actually select for you. Yeah, I don't even know if you're allowed to. I'm not sure. Sophie says that my sister and I cheated a little bit because we gave names to each other a few days in. I don't think that's cheating. You're still naming someone else? Sure. Let's call getting ahead of the curve. We did have some unofficial trail names, though, that other people would refer to the pair of us as. My favorite was a 60 year old Kentucky hiker from Maine who told us he referred to us as the Kentucky Wonders, which is pretty fun. And one thing I realized after reading all these at emails is that it's really kind of fun. Like, people get together and they start off alone and all of a sudden there's a group of like twelve people hiking together for weeks at a time. That is the very reason why I will never hike the 18th. That sounds like a nightmare to me. You would be the loner hiker. Totally. They'd be like, don't turn your back on that one. I think your trail name might be Ted Bundy. The trail through West Virginia is actually less than 4 miles. And I heard this from other people, too, not 18. So I think we screwed that up. It's an amazing feeling to go through so quickly psychologically, after completing Virginia, which is 500 miles and a quarter of the whole entire trail. And there is a four state challenge that some hikers will attempt to do. A 45 miles day to go through the end of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and into Pennsylvania. 24 hours. That's a lot. Her family hosts a trail magic spot because they live near the trail in Tennessee, so they will go out on the weekends and they pack up a bunch of hiker food and they grill burgers and stuff or make pancakes and just feed people on the trail. That is so nice. And then we'll go back home. I think you could be down with that part, right? Sure. I'd eat a free hamburger. Can I take it to go? I'd be like, Why is there mustard on here but not ketchup? And then finally, during the hike, we would treat ourselves to podcasts for a couple of hours when hiking was getting monotonous and wanted to get out of our heads on. And your voices were a frequent companion listening to stuff you should know. Select these days often had the weird sensation of remembering exactly where I was hiking in the woods when I listen to that episode in 2017. Come to Kentucky sometime. Check out the bourbon distilleries and the Red River Gorge and do a show here. Lexington. I know you'd probably rather go to Louisville or Cincinnati, but Lexington is definitely worth the visit. And Sophie sent along a bunch of cool pictures of Sophie and her sister before and after, and it just looked like a really great time. That's awesome. Thanks a lot for the email, Sophie. That was a great one. And agreed, chuck, that one had to be read for sure. Just stay away from Josh if you see him in the woods. No, I'm harmless. I just don't want to be spoken to, that's all. I want to be left alone. It's too awkward otherwise. You could just hike with big giant, like, 1970s headphones. As if you're listening. That's right. With my head down, sunglasses on and a bag over my head. I love it. If you want to be like Sophie and get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to for more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-10-20-sysk-underground-city-china-final | Living Underground in Beijing | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/living-underground-in-beijing | Chairman Mao’s paranoia of a Soviet invasion led to hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents put to work for a decade building an 85-square-km underground city to serve as a massive bomb shelter. Instead it’s illegal underground housing today. | Chairman Mao’s paranoia of a Soviet invasion led to hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents put to work for a decade building an 85-square-km underground city to serve as a massive bomb shelter. Instead it’s illegal underground housing today. | Thu, 20 Oct 2016 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=294, tm_isdst=0) | 29501387 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles David. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. So it's stuff you should know. Gong the chicken. Chinese edition. Right. Which probably isn't even heard in China. Aren't we banned? Yeah, we say that, and then we always hear from people like, no, you're not banned. I get to hear you guys all the time. The government actually promotes you for being such a Communist lackey. They're like, they send a guy to my house to read your transcripts at gunpoint. Yeah. This is the China edition. And you wrote this, too, didn't you? Yes. This is an old one. Yes. You just dug it out from the old memory bank? Yeah, it was on the list, I think. I just ran across it randomly and I was like, oh, yeah, this one pretty interesting, I think. Yeah, I think so, too. So one of the things that interested me was I got to do some historical research on it. Yeah. Initially, are you familiar with the Sino Russian conflicts along the border starting in the mid 17th century, the Romanovs are versus the Manchu and later Ming dynasties? I'm more familiar now than I ever have been before in my life. Yeah, let's put it that way. But it did surprise me. I just kind of thought, I don't know. I didn't know much about Kamihartcomy. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would have thought, too. Yeah. And apparently I did at some point. But once I started researching, turns out those guys didn't like each other so much. Yeah. And it actually did go back to the 1600 for sure, where China apparently didn't trade outside of China and didn't have any diplomats. The Emperor controlled all trade with other countries. And it was through a system of tribute where you give the Emperor the best stuff you got and he'll see what he wants to give you back. And the Russians didn't like that very much, so they just kind of were a little more tense. A little more tense. Not the best of neighbors. But then yeah. After World War II, when Russia starts taking over Eurasia and China follows the Soviet Union rather. Right, thank you. And then China follows suit in 1949 with Mause Dung's communist revolution then. Yeah. Basically, this whole area was red, and that's how we were taught to view it. Right. Yeah. It's all red, so it's all the same. But that's very much an oversimplification of the geopolitics of that area. Yeah. Like you said, comey hart comma. That's kind of what I always thought, was that they were neighbors. They were politically aligned in the broadest sense. What issues would they have? Right. But as usual, it's like Nancy Reagan said, kill all the commies. Like godsword of mouth. Do you remember that? PSA. I do. Saturday morning cartoons. As usual, the beef is in the land, and neighbors oftentimes, whether it's Georgia and Tennessee fighting over a river. It's water real. Or. It's Israel and Palestine. There are a lot of neighbors that say, no, that stuff is ours, not yours. Yeah. And that seems like to be the heart of the beef between China and Russia. So I think that the border disputes were actually a symptom of a larger thing, which was Mao. Chairman Mao used to publicly deride the Soviets as revisionists, that they'd abandon the roots of revolutionary communism, and they were basically sellouts. Interesting. Yeah. And he used to publicly say the stuff about them. The Russians would be like, we're sticking you now. You talk too much trash. Shut up. And he would talk more trash, like he criticized Khrushchev for backing down from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stuff like that. Right. Just really, like, poking them a lot. Sure. And the Soviets, in retaliation, withdrew all military and economic support, and then they recalled all of the scientists that were over there working on joint projects, and the scientists all left with the blueprints to whatever they were working on, even if it was Chinese technology. So there was, like, a lot of tensions that seemed to erupt in the border disputes rather than it was over the border dispute. You know what I mean? Sure. So when we say erupt, we mean erupt with gunfire. Yeah. For real. And then the spring of 1069, some bad stuff went down. In March, specifically, there was an attack on a patrol boat. What was the name of the river? The Usuri. River. That's on the eastern border of China, of course. And 24 Soviets were left dead. And stuff got real after that. Yes. The Soviets were like, oh, okay. It's like that. Yeah. So they rolled into the area with tanks. They use missiles, aircraft, and took out, like, 800 Chinese in retaliation that same year. Yes. Only losing about 60 of their own, which was a big victory. And so they said, you see that there's more where that came from, if you don't mind your PS and QS. Yeah. And they were saying this, using The New York Times as this, like, international mouthpiece basically threatening one another through the international press. Yeah. China said, what are PS and Q's? We don't have those letters. Right. Well, they have Q and PS. Well, it's just a joke. So Mountain says, I understand that you're coming after us now. I think we should have a plan in place, because I don't want you creeping into, let's say, Beijing, our capital, with all your tanks, like you did along the river there. So here's what we'll do. 60% of the population go Red Dawn and head for the hills. The other 40%, here's what we'll do. Let's all get to work building an underground bunker, but one that can house 40% of our 7 million. Yeah. Which is they didn't quite hit that number. Was that about 2.8 million? Something like that. Okay. They made enough for 300,000 people. It's not even close. But it's still a pretty neat accomplishment that they created, right? Yes. And this is what would be become known as do you know how to pronounce it? Exactly like it's spelled? I looked it up. Oh, really? Go ahead. Dixie Chang. Okay. I thought that was Chinese for Dixie Chicks. I thought it would have been Dicha Chang or something, but yeah, I thought so, too. That's why I was like, I'm not getting this one wrong. Okay. I looked it up and I couldn't find it. I don't remember the site, but there's a site where I guess users submit and say what language they speak naturally. Yeah. So then it'll have this whole list of Spanish from Catalonia or Spanish spoken by Mexican person or Scandinavian or whatever. Right. But if you listen to all of them, they're all saying it the same way. Yeah, Dixie is changing. It's funny, some people say Shang, but it's wrong in the office here. I know people think we probably never look up pronunciations, but we do. And YouTube has a lot of them now where that little thing will spin and reveal the word, and then the polite lady, computer lady will say it. But I hear in the office a lot because it's not worth it to get out the headphones for just that. So, like, I'll hear Strickland to the left or Holly over there to the right, or me. And you'll just hear random computers all day long with, like, dixia ching or menarchy. And you just hear words kind of popping up and everyone's like, Sorry. Yeah. But I think we all get it. Yeah. All right, so Dixia Chang, we should say we'll get to the meat of this stuff. But an underground bunker capable of housing 300,000 of Beijing's residence was built because Chairman Mao got paranoid that the Soviets were going to invade. Also, to a lesser extent, he was worried about American imperialism extending to China. But really he was worried the Soviets were going to either invade or launch some nukes on his people. It was like my dad, when we saw the day after exactly. Except he just put my brother and I to work, whereas the chairman put I think it was 300,000 people. I found that somewhere 300,000 was how many people it could house. No. I thought I saw 300000 working. Maybe it was more than that, even. No, I see what you're talking about. There's 300,000 right there. But women, children, men, all kinds of people digging by hand. Yeah. We found this really cool blog post from 2010 by a guy named Anthony Tao or Dow, depending on, I guess, how you say it. And he said that it was basically like an urban exploration post. There's a lot of pictures of this abandoned stuff. It's really cool. But it turns out his relatives, including his mother, helped build this. So he includes some of their recollections in it where they're like, yeah, we used to go to school. And then you'd come home from school and you'd work like several hours building this, like making bricks or digging or something like that. And so this excavation was being carried out by the very people who were going to use it as part of this cultural revolution, this great communist experiment that Chairman Mao was carrying out. Like, everybody just get to work because the Russians might invade. And he said, very famously, shenwaldong Chang, I'm not saying this correctly. And then bu chang BA. Which means it means dig deep tunnels, store food and prepare for war. He told his population that. And that's what kicked off this thing in 1969. He really liked to get to the point. Yeah, 1979 is when this was going on. And we'll take a little break here and tell you a little bit about Dixie changing. You know, everybody, if you're starting your own business, you will find that it can be difficult. But developing your online presence doesn't have to be. That's because Google and Squarespace have teamed up to give small business owners what they need to succeed online. A custom domain, a business email, and a beautiful website all in one place. That's right. With Google and Squarespace, you can stand out, look professional, and increase your team's productivity. When you create your Squarespace business website or online store, you're going to receive a free year of business email and professional tools from Google. It is just that simple. Yes. Go ahead and visit Squarespace.com google to start your free trial and use our offer code. Works for 10% off your first purchase. Googling Squarespace. Make it professional. Make it beautiful. I think it sounds like I'm saying Chang with an A, but it's Ching Chang with an E. I'm just not good at Southerner. I'm not good at pronouncing the E in words like pen. I say penn. Pen like P-I-N-C ng. Here we go. All right. You say dixia. I'll say chang. You say I'll say chang. Terrible. So what lies underground beneath about 26 to 60ft, depending on where you are? There are 18 miles roughly of tunnels. Supposedly it connects every district in the city. Yeah. And for those of us who don't live in the US or Liberia, that's 30, basically underground living space. 52 sq mi, 85 km squared. It's called an undertaking, was an understatement. It was a big deal, right. Requiring lots of hands. Yeah. So they used a lot of the old city gates, the city walls, as construction material. But again, they were also making their own bricks. And they weren't using like back hose or anything like that. They were using shovels and removing dirt with bamboo baskets and making their own bricks on site. Amazing. And they constructed this amazing labyrinth of not just tunnels, but also they had bomb shelters in the bomb shelter. Yeah, they had ventilation shafts that were designed to keep out fallout and contamination from nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons. I guess they built the Great Wall. They were like, yeah, this is nothing. Exactly. They had recreational stuff, too, like a movie theater, I think, a roller skating rink. Basketball courts. Yeah, they had a barber shop. They had restaurants. If you want to get down in here. This is kind of the coolest part to me is there were about 90 different entrances around the city that were sometimes in parks, sometimes in a private home, sometimes in a shop that you needed a blacklight to read a special map on the wall. It's like, kind of neat when you think about it like that. Oh, yeah, it is. It's like all the residents of Beijing are clued into this big secret, like this official secret. Yeah, it is like a speakeasy, except those places come on, hadn't that run its course? Yeah, like they just opened one in Atlanta, right here next door to us. Where? At the City Winery. Oh, really? There's a speakeasy there? Yeah. Now there's a speakeasy downstairs. If you know the code word, you say it at the unmarked door. What's the code word? McMahon. New York did this 20 years ago. What's the code word this week? Yeah, actually wrote it down because I'm going to a show there tomorrow night. They have shows at the Sticky? Well, no. At the City Winery. Okay. I'm going to see Blitzen Trapper my boys. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah, they're doing, like, this acoustic storyteller tour. Nice. It's kind of neat. Yeah. Apparently if you go there and you say, you know, Ms. Violet, this week, they'll let you in. So I'm going to go down there and make fun of them and probably get a drink. Sure. And leave a big tip. Yeah, that's what you got to do. That's right. You're going to go there, and it's going to be overrun with people. I just wonder if you go to one of these places, especially in Atlanta, like, I get it in New York, when there's supply and demand, they can literally say, no, turn around, go home. But in Atlanta, I would be like, dude, come on. I don't know the password. Just let me in the freaking building. Right. And if they literally say no, then they're dead to me. In fact, I'm not even going to say, I know, Ms. Violet. Oh, yeah? You're going to test them, huh? I'm going to say I know, Ms. Scarlett. Let me know how that pans out. Well, Ms. Scarlett, I'll send you a text of either me sitting on the sidewalk, drink less, drinking a 40? Yes. It's a substitute. I used to drink the occasional 40 in college. Back when you thought you were cool to do so. Right. Because the Beasty Boys did it. Yeah. Oh, I'll drink this swell, and it's totally hot after about the first ten minutes well, you have to hold it up around the neck. Oh, is that the deal? Sure, it's like champagne. I never got to Bong because I was pouring some out for my homies. Oh, wow, that's pretty thoughtful of you. So where were we? Speakeasies? That's right. No, even further back than that. Well, yes, the complex. And by the way, Dixie Ching literally means underground city. Yeah, that's it. You don't even capitalize it. Yeah, it was never used because the big apocalypse never happened. Well, not only that, Chairman Mao died. And apparently I didn't know this, but shortly after he died, I think in the 70s, his Cultural Revolution seems to have died with him, which was news to me because I thought that China was communist to the core up until a couple of years ago. But apparently there was a real opening of their culture, like, starting pretty much slowly and incrementally right after Chairman Mao's death. And so I saw a bunch of different stuff. This is part of the problem with researching China without ever going to China. Sure. Because, like the dispatches you read from the place, they just vary wildly in the accounts. And this is a good example that I saw somewhere that Chairman died. I saw that by 1981, they had the place open for tours. Right. And it cost like ten Chinese ticket. And if you were Chinese, you could not even get in. It was only for tourists. Right. I saw in my own article that they bought it up and forgot about it. And it wasn't until like, 2000 that people started to find their way in. I had the same problem. I was trying to find out literally the current state, because I saw that in 2008, in preparation for the Olympics, they closed it for renovations, and it's still not open. And I've tried to find out the most recent information I couldn't. So I'm going with not even myself. I'm not even going with my own article. Okay. The article where they recounted that it was ten Chinese cents a ticket to get in back in 1981, I'm thinking that's probably right. You're going with that because it has numbers in it, right? It seems legitimate. All right, well, let's take our final break here and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Rat tribe of Beijing. So, Chuck, one of the first things that happened, whether it was in 1981 or 2000, was people started to move into this area illegally. And at first I get the impression that they opened up businesses and there was actually, like an official stretch, like about a 1 km stretch of Dixie Chang that was open for tours, like Underground Atlanta. Yes. But then the other, like, 29 km were closed off permanently and frozen in time. Right? Yeah. Well, that kind of stuff attracts people like moths to a flame, especially like urban explorers. And again, go check out Anthony Tau's post last visit to Beijing's underground city. It's got some great photos of this abandoned stuff, but over the years, there are people who have worked their way into the other shut off. 29 have reported back that it's just, like, eerie. A time capsule. There's, like, posters of Chairman Mao on the walls with slogans like, dig the tunnels deep, accumulate grain. Opposed hegemony. Yeah. I mean, you can see pictures of it. It's pretty neat, right? Creepy. And then get this. Let's say, like, Ronald Reagan had told us all this when we were kids. For the people. Prepare for war, prepare for famine. It's kind of unsettling when they keep you on your toes. Sure. So there's a lot of it that's, like, just kind of rotting time capsule, because, again, like you said, it was never used, but then plenty of it has been used. Yeah. And I couldn't even figure out for sure. These are definitely parts of that complex where people are living. Yes. Okay. I didn't know if it was other oh, no. Shelters. It's both. Okay. It's both. Got you. You're right. It's both. All right, so what we're talking about is the Rat Tribe or the Shuzu, and it's basically about a million people. They don't know exact numbers, but about a million people in Beijing have moved underground. About a million of the 21 million people who lived there. Yeah. And if you talk about a population boom, in 1995, there were about 9 million people in Beijing. Now there are 21 million. That's a lot of people and not a very long span of time. Right. So it's expensive. I really don't know, like, median incomes compared to housing. But this article made it seem like the only reason these people are doing it is because they can't afford to live above ground or that there's just such a shortage. Like, your choice is this. You can live above ground in a dorm like room with six to ten people in the suburbs and pay about what you would pay for your own room below ground, which is about 50 to 70 American dollars a month. Right. So you want to go live with six to ten people in a dorm out in the suburbs, or you want your own cozy little eight foot by eight foot concrete room underground. A lot of people are saying, I'd rather be underground. And they're normal people. They're not, like, a situation like, I'm trying to think of something comparable, but this woman interviewed a lot of these people. Annette Kim from USC, Southern California. Go Trojans for our friend Brian Bishop. Oh, yes. Congratulations to Brian on the birth of his child. Yeah, that, too. So what she found out was that, as she suspected, these are computer programmers and waiters and waitresses and barbers, and they are literally just mainly migrants that have come here from the countryside to work. Right. And they're not weirdos. They're like, this is what I can afford. I have a job above ground, and this is just how I choose to live because we don't have a lot of options. So there's like, the specter of Mao is still around because apparently part of the housing code in China or in Beijing at least, requires that if you are going to build, like, a building, you have to build something between one to three stories of basement or bomb shelter below ground. That's still the thing. Yeah. So in addition to people squatting in Dixie Ch, which does happen, these people are going to the owners of the building and saying, can I please stay here? I'll give you $70 a month. Yeah. And they're like, sure. And even though it's illegal yeah. The owners are like, yeah, just leave it under the trash can out front, and I'll come on. Yeah. Like, I'm not using that tiny room. Right? Because these are small spaces. They're communal toilets and showers. You got to pay, like, $0.50 for a shower for five minutes. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't see that. Yeah. There's this photographer, Simchi Yin, based in Beijing, and he has a collection called China's Rat Tribe, if you want to look at pictures. And there's a stigma to it, first of all, A, because it's illegal, they call them the Rat Tribe, and B yeah. Because they interviewed some of these people, and the guy was like, yeah, my dad was like, Son, no, you can't live down here. And he's like, dad, this is what I can afford. I've got a job, and I don't want to live with ten people in a room. Right. And there's no windows. It's dark. Apparently, there are signs in some of these tunnels that advise people to go up and get sun. Oh, is that right? Stuff like that. Thoughtful. Sure. I think one of the other reasons, too, why they're considered like the Rat Tribe is, in a lot of the cases, they're living beneath fairly tony apartment buildings. Sure. So the people above ground, there's, like, a huge class difference in the same sprout of living space in Beijing, and the people above ground are not in contact with the people below ground, and they do not trust them. They're weird. They're different. They're poor. They're from the country, so they don't communicate with one another, but they know they're there. So the people above ground are very suspicious of the people below ground. Yeah. Apparently, mold is a problem because underground is kind of dank. Right. So they have to work to keep mold at bay. And I don't think we mentioned that. The original plan, too, with Chairman Mao was to grow things like mushrooms, like, things you didn't need the sun right, to grow down there. You know how fast you would get sick of eating mushrooms if that's all you had to eat? If it was me, it would be one bite of mushroom later. You don't like mushrooms, huh? Can't do it. What if you put soy sauce and mayonnaise on it? I mean, I could choke it down, but it's a texture thing for me. Yeah, it's not even the taste. What about uncooked raw? It's almost got, like, a bit of a crunch to it. I'll try one. Yeah, try, like, a white button mushroom. Like, lick it first. Put a little salt on it, take a bite. It's not like the mushroom you're describing. It's that slimy texture. Doesn't have that. Although wash it off first. Yeah. Give it a good scrub with your tongue. I'll bring you one to work. Actually, I have one here in my pocket. I'm good. Okay. Pocket mushrooms? No. You got anything else? No. Do you? No. Oh, I do have one other thing. So there were long standing rumors that they had built, like, secret tunnels in this underground bunker, the Dixie Chain, that connected to the People's Hall and other government buildings, and no one knew if it was real or not until 1989, when the Tiananmen Square uprising happened. And all of a sudden, all these government troops come out of nowhere, flooding out of the People's Hall of the Quells. These protesters, they're like, oh, those underground tunnels really are real. Yeah. And apparently there's only out of the 90 original entrances, there's only a handful of those left. Yeah, because the area where this was built beneath called Kian Mian, I believe, or Kin Min. And it's a very famous stretch of, like, shops in Beijing, and it's been just recreated and rebuilt so much, especially since right before the Olympics, that a lot of these old shops are being leveled, and they're to go the entrances to the places and the fluorescent maps. So it is in danger of being lost, but it will still be there for people to go find. Yeah, go check out the pictures. Pretty neat. Yes. If you want to know more about Beijing, type that word in the search BARHOW stuffworks.com. See what comes up. Press your luck. As I said, press your luck. It's time for listener mail. This is about the mining episode. So it's been a bit, but we always, like, good information, so here it is. I've been listening to your show for about a year now, been blissfully enlightened on so many topics, currently pursuing my master's degree in economic geology in the unlikely state of Iowa, and I have a few friendly clarifications. On your mining episode, you mentioned hard and soft rock mining, and we're unsure of the difference between the two, whether it comes for the rock or the ore. The term soft and hard rock mining relates to the hardness of the rock from which the ore is being extracted, not the ore itself. So that clears that up. Good. I think that's what I said. I don't remember, actually. I think I hedged and said it could be either one, so it's right either way. So soft rock mining typically pertains to sedimentary rock, whereas hard rock typically pertains to igneous or metamorphic rocks. Furthermore, just finish your wonderful episode on Ice Ages and giggled a little from your pronunciation of Lois. I was always told it was pronounced loss, and even though Lois is a bit more fun to say, I just thought I'd let you guys know. Keep up the amazing work. Thanks for making my ears happy. And Megan, that is exactly how you send in corrections in a very nice, friendly way. And that's how you get on the air, right? Exactly. And we love our corrections, and we tend to favor the ones that are hospitable. Sure. Because it's just nice and life, right? Thanks, Megan. Thank you for the demonstration. Top notch. If you want to get in touch with us too, and possibly get complimented by Chuck, you can tweet to us at sisk podcast. Or Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charlesw Chuck Bryant or stuff. You should know you can send us an email to stuff podcast@howstuffworks.com. And, as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshonow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgueref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
Why You Probably Have a Criminal Record | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-you-probably-have-a-criminal-record | If you're an American adult, there's a 1 in 4 chance you have a criminal record. While it's less likely you've committed any serious crime, there are still repercussions to having a rap sheet as more employers use them to decide between candidates. | If you're an American adult, there's a 1 in 4 chance you have a criminal record. While it's less likely you've committed any serious crime, there are still repercussions to having a rap sheet as more employers use them to decide between candidates. | Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:33:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=18, tm_min=33, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=234, tm_isdst=0) | 30175490 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Church. Brian, do you have a migraine or something? No, I don't get migraines. That's good. I don't either. You just knocked on your head. Yeah. There's no wood nearby. I bet this is woodish. Yeah. Yeah, we're good. You put us together and you've got a little podcast called Stuff. You should have that's right. Yeah. We've been doing this for 400 and 450, I would bet. We're very close, so not bad. No. I guess you could say we're starting to get our stride. I wait for someone to come, take the keys away and send me to my room. I think they stopped paying attention. They're not really aware that we're doing this any longer. I know. No one of any importance actually listens, so that's always good. But, Jerry, every single person who listens is important. That's right. That's a good point. So, Chuck yes? You ever seen the movie Scarface? You know, like, the whole beginning part where he comes to Miami from Cuba? So that was based on an actual historical event called the Mariel Boat Lift. Yeah, I think I knew that. Sit back and listen up to something you already know. Okay. Between April 15, 1980 and Halloween, 19, 8125 thousand Cubans were basically allowed to leave Cuba. Wow. That's a lot. And they were also allowed to enter the United States for how long? Was it a window, like yes. From April to Halloween. Oh, wow. I mean, a lot of them came. It was a huge deal. They basically put everybody in jail. Remember the Fulton County Federal Penitentiary where Scarface was? The real Scarface algorithm? Just down in Grant Park, they put a bunch of them there, and there was actually an uprising there, and Delta Force had to come in. I think we might have talked about that in the Delta Force. Yeah. So it was kind of a big deal. One of the reasons why they put everybody in jail is because they wanted to make sure that Castro wasn't just sending over the dregs of his prisons. Right. Which would have been pretty smart. Yeah. So they actually interviewed everybody, and 23,000 of them confessed to having a criminal record back in Cuba. Wow. And that's really saying something, because it's not like Cuba was going to send over these people's records. This is self confessed. And I think that right there basically kind of tells you about that person they're trying to fit in. Right. Well, they're going to come clean. Exactly. Maybe if I come clean, I can stay here, right? Yeah. Let's say that that's what it was. That's what I'm thinking. So, of these 23,000, though, they found that only 2% were actually criminals under US. Law. Really? The other let's see, 21,254, that's just off the top of my head. That's good. We're criminals under Cuban law that didn't have some sort of analog here in the United States. I wonder what some of those laws were. I would imagine they would have a lot to do with dissent political descent. Yeah, probably everything. Or like hoarding items. Hoarding? Yeah, like under communist rule, if you're hoarding toilet paper or you got some smuggling operation going for toilet paper. House swapping apparently is illegal in Cuba because they're like, we're going to give you a house, but we're going to tell you which one it is. Got you. Anyway. So most of these people were allowed to go free, and even some of them were allowed to go even some of the actual criminals were allowed to go under what's called immigration parole. And then of those 2746 who were found to be real criminals, 800 to 900 had to come back to jail. The real pokey this time because they'd broken a US law while on immigration parole. But my point is this without criminal records, I would not have had this intro. That's pretty good. I had a feeling that was going to circle around like that. Because we're talking about criminal records, at least here in the United States. Yeah. And when we say records, we don't mean the good kind, we mean like files. Yeah. Not like you broke a record or like, let's listen to a record. Yeah, those are good records. Yeah. I can't remember what Lisa is doing on The Simpsons, but she has to go to the hall of Records and then underneath, in parentheses, not the good kind. Oh, really? That's good. All right. Criminal record here in the US. At least I didn't realize this. It starts with your arrest. Yes. For some reason, I thought if you were arrested and not convicted, then they would just say, Forget about it. Yeah. Apparently, once you have a charge and there are ways they can say, forget about it, but you have to go ask and they can tell you no because they don't like your looks. There's a few ways these are used here in the States. First and foremost, obviously, to help out. Trying to catch bad guys. Sure. In the database Iding suspects. That's kind of the original point, I think. So they're also used for sentencing now, which makes sense. Yeah. Because if you've done something before and they know it, they have a record of it. That's right. They can say, you know what? Due to your past behavior, we think that we should really throw the book at you. Right. Or if there's like a three strike saw, they have to yeah. Background checks. That's the third thing they're mainly used for. This is the most controversial use of criminal records. Absolutely. Because with background checks, if you enter the military, tried to get a job with the FBI, if you are involved in elderly or childcare criminal background checks are pretty standard. But they're also becoming increasingly used by corporations in what is widely considered over broad ways. Because the original idea of using a background check. A criminal background check for a job. Was that they're checking that you're applying for a delivery driver job. And they're checking to make sure that you don't have a history of. Like. Running down the elderly with your car and driving off. Because they'll get sued for that. Well, now companies are just looking for any kind of criminal behavior whatsoever. And as we'll see, they can actually say, like, no, we're not going to hire you because of your criminal record. They can discriminate based on a criminal record, but you can also not share that criminal record. You can, correct? Yes. Okay, we'll get to that. Back in the day, obviously, they used to just handwrite these things, keep them at your local cop shop. And that's why back in the day, it was really easy for your criminal just to move to a different state or city. Yeah. And you're sort of getting a fresh start on life. Yeah. Because if you wanted to share this criminal record, you might have to sit down and handwrite it out. And who wants to do that? Nobody. Not me. Basically, it was just medieval monks who were cool with doing that, and they didn't have anything else to do. Cops had plenty of other stuff to do. So right about now, if you're out there in podcast land and you're listening to this and you think, dude, why are you telling us your awesome audience about criminal records? Because we're all have clean noses and we're do gooders of the world. I believe you. But here's a set. 6.5% of the US. Population has a felony record. A felony record which is higher than I thought it would be. Yes. And one in 15 people have actually been to prison in the pokey, and I think our fan base would be on the lighter side of that. Yeah. But hey, I know we've got people out there that have been in prison, because when we did prisons, people wrote us. We have people out there who are in prisons right now. Yeah, that's right. Let's do a little shout out to our prison population listeners. Everybody in there, stay up and hang in there. Get out soon. Yeah. Okay, so even beyond that surprising stat, right? 6.5% felonies, right? That's right. 65 million, which is about a quarter of the American population. 65 million American adults have a criminal record, which means they've at least been arrested. Yes. Right? Yes. Do we need to talk about anything in our past? You know, I don't talk about that. Okay. There are some things, if you do have a criminal record that are going to be there for the taking. If you're in law enforcement, that is pretty much your name, date of birth, aliases, what you look like, what you're built like, where you live, what you've done, if you got any outstanding warrants, if you've been convicted. And then the old standby fingerprint and mug shot. Yeah, it's all right there. Basically what's keeping smokinggun.com alive. Yeah. How about that mug shot? The dude, the hooker with a Goldface? Have you ever seen that guy? No. He was arrested for huffing and he's got like the glittery gold spray paint around the nose and mouth. No. My favorite was either nicknames or James Brown. And they look like brothers in their mug shots. Yeah, those are pretty close to the crazy hair. Yeah. So basically you can see just from those details of what's in a criminal record, the idea behind them is we want to find out who you are and what you've done before. Yeah. And that's pretty much it. Aside from the fact that they're not handwritten and just kept, like you say at the local precinct anymore, they're stored on databases, the idea behind them hasn't changed much over the century. That's true, very true. It starts at the local and state level and if you are going to have an arrest record or a criminal record, that's who is in charge of keeping up with it. Like if it was a state crime, it wasn't a federal offense, then your state court and state offices, who's going to be in charge of that? And then they can either report it to their repository or not. I think not all states mandate that. No, it's voluntary. And then the state repositories can either report it to the national repository. Right. I'm sorry, that's voluntary within a state. In some states it's voluntary whether municipalities share their information. So it's all kind of voluntary. Right. If you end up on a federal registry to an extent and you can have more than one record, I would imagine in a perfect law enforcement world, everyone who has a record has one record and it lives in the cloud thing and it's just access. When you do another thing, they just add another thing to it. But from the sound of this, you can have a bunch of different records and they could all have different stuff in them and maybe they'll never be compiled into one. That's true. Well, it's because there's a lot of people committing crimes is one reason. Is there? And I think they're trying to or does it disappear that way because they have multiple records? I think we may have stumbled onto something. I think you're right. There's only like eight criminals in the US. They're just really prolific. The good news, Josh, if you have a criminal record and you want it expunged or sealed, as they call it in some states, you can get that done. If you go through well, you can at least try to get it done by going through very specific process in the court, in the state where you were convicted. So you petition the court and there's lawyers that specialize in this kind of thing, like going before the court and saying, look, this crime was a crime of passion. There's no recipitivism involved. This guy has had an exemplary life since then. He wasn't even convicted. He was just arrested. This is twelve years ago. He hasn't done a single horrible thing. And even if he had had a sentence, he would have completed it and he hadn't been arrested since. The judge thinks about it, they bring out a dog and if the dog likes you, then your record is expunged. I think the judge sits there with the big expunged stamp or denied, like in Raising Arizona. Yeah, I think they expunged. I don't think they should use that word because it gives the impression that your record is wiped clean and that there's maybe a sheet of paper that this stuff all used to be on, but there's nothing there any longer. That's not the case. Sealed is a much better term to describe what happens, because what happens is your record remains, but only law enforcement has access to it. Yeah, but it sort of is expunged in a way, because I guess the key word there, you said the appearance, because you can still, from that point on, give the appearance that you have a clean record to your employees. You can say employers and employees. You don't want them thinking all of you right. But you can say I have a clean record and legally you can say that and get away with it. Yes, if it's expunged, although it still exists, it's just law enforcement. And also government agencies have access to it, but no one else does. If you're in Arizona, you're out of luck. If you're in New York, I think, and see, this to me should be automatic if you are arrested and convicted of something, then they found out someone else did it. Right. You have to still go through that process in New York to get it expunged and I guess in other places, but I figured that would be automatic. No, in New York, if you're arrested and you're not convicted, you go to trial, but you're not even convicted, you still have to petition to get your arrest record cleared. Yeah, yeah. I guess that's everywhere, though, right. I am under the impression because New York, where it's possible only if the case was decided in your favor, that would mean that if you went to trial, your criminal record would be expunged if you weren't convicted. Got you. I have to admit I'm not sure about that one. New York doesn't play. No, but Arizona seriously doesn't play. They have no process for expungement whatsoever, which is too bad. And I think even with kids, that's the case. What, in Arizona? Yeah. Well, with juveniles, since you brought it up, everyone knows that if you're under 18, generally you will be tried as a juvenile, unless you have murdered or raped somebody or some other really terrible crime, they will try you as an adult, but if you're under 18, they'll try you in juvenile court. And here in this country, we have a little belief that, you know what, we're going to wipe your record clean once you become an adult. You might have messed up as a kid, but you're going to get a second chance out there in life as an adult. Don't worry about your juvenile record anymore, which is great if you stay on the straight and narrow. Right. If you don't, then it's still attached to you if you start committing crimes again. And actually, if you are a juvenile convicted of an adult crime, tried as an adult, and you want to get that expunged, you have to go through the same process as any adult would. Yes. As well as if you have a sexual crime, you have to register for the sex offenders list, just like you would if you were an adult. Right. Which is super important, I should say. Also, in its defense, arizona does have a process for destroying juvenile records, so they do? Yeah. Okay. I guess it's just adults. Got you. So I guess the sex registry is kind of a version of the specialized criminal record depository, right? Yeah. So for many years, I guess, until very recently, states weren't mandated to have a sex offender registry. There's a girl named Drew Shading who is like a 22 year old North Dakota college student. I remember this very well. Do you? I didn't remember who was abducted, I believe raped and murdered by a guy who was level three sex offender. And level three is like, where the justice system is basically like, this guy is going to do it again. Yeah, he had raped another woman. He kidnapped and stabbed a woman, and he just got out of jail for 23 years for those crimes, and he did it again. Did it again. And one of the ways that he was able to do this is because North Dakota didn't have a sex offender registry. Well, they do now. Allstate do now. And this is, I think, like 2002 or 2003. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago, but they named the national Sex offender public Registry after Drew Shadin. So it's very appropriately called the national sex offender public registry. And basically, this is a publicly accessible database. Go to it and type in where you live, and it will be like, here are all the sex offenders in your neighborhood. It's pretty disconcerting, actually. There are apps out there where you can see who lives where, and you'll find also that they're very frequently there will be one apartment complex or something where there's a bunch of them. And the reason being is because most states have laws where you can't live X number of yards within a bus stop. Right. You can't live X number of yards within a school, what have you. And in states like Florida, they're so restrictive that sex offenders frequently have to live under overpasses in the middle of nowhere. Well, that happened in Georgia camp, I think it's still there. Is it? I believe so, yeah. I think probation officers, too, will set people up in housing. And a lot of times that's like the apartment that they go to, the apartment complex. Got you. But obviously that's a really important thing to have because sex offenders have the highest recidivism rates of, I think, all criminals. Yes, I read that somewhere, too. It's very scary. So now they're stored on databases. Obviously, we've talked about Interpol before, and they're shared internationally. They're getting better about that, at least. But it's not like an open book, right? It isn't an open book. And in fact, you have a legal right to access your criminal records through the Freedom of Information Act. And I went and looked The FBI will give you whatever they have on yourself, or else they'll send you something that says you have no FBI record. Yeah, I think you're only in the National Crime Information Center database if you have been booked and fingerprinted by the FBI or the FBI has your record. Right. I'm sorry. The Interstate Identification Index. I think that's the one where you're only entered if the FBI obtains your fingerprint data. So, like, somebody has sent it to the FBI at least. But the FBI, did they maintain a national database of criminal records? I don't know if they maintain it or not. It doesn't say. I know the Dot maintains one for traffic violations. Like big ones. We should have mentioned that. If you've been convicted of some sort of traffic offense, speeding ticket, what have you or anything, it's not on your criminal record. Yeah. Unless it was like vehicular homicide or something like that. That would be in there, right? Yeah, I think so. Instead, it's things like DUI, suspended licenses, driving without insurance, fatal accidents. Yeah. They're maintained on the National Driver Register, which is separate from your criminal record. So, perjury, you could have two records out there. Me, maybe. No, perjury about the operation of a vehicle that's if you get in a wreck and you're a drunk driver and you get your best friend to switch with you who wasn't drunk, which they should have been driving to begin with, that's perjury. That's felony. Yeah, it's a big deal. So, Chuck, you can get your criminal record? Yes, I can. The government can look at it at any time they want, and employers can. What she talked about at the top of this podcast yeah. With permission with your permission, you can't give anyone else besides a potential employer or an employer permission to get your record. I can't get yours even if you said no. Really? He can get it. It's fine. No, but an employer can. And like we said originally, this was something that was just very targeted, where, like, if you were a driver. They wanted to know if you had any vehicular homicide record or that kind of thing. And it's getting more and more broad and apparently because criminal records, you weren't a member of a protected class, so you could be subject to job discrimination based on the fact that you're a criminal record. There used to be like freewheeling. They would tell you to your face and maybe smack you in the mouth when they told you that you weren't getting the job because you were a crook. Right. Courts have started to rule in people's favors, finding that some laws or some convictions have been shown to disproportionately affect, like black people, Hispanics, so that job discrimination based on these kind of convictions amounts to racial discrimination. And some courts have found in the favor of people who were turned down for jobs, even though there's no law that defends against job discrimination based on criminal records. Interesting. Yeah. And you can also be discriminated against for, like, public housing. I love in the article and in general treated differently. Yeah. People can be a jerk to you if you have a criminal record, apparently with no retribution. And the one exception, which I thought was interesting, was that if you have a felony for drug use, they can't use that against you to not give you a job. Right. It's part of rehab, the rehab process. Got you. Yeah, that makes sense. You have a very powerful rehab lobby. Got that loophole put in there. Well, it certainly strikes a notch on the side of people who believe that people drug problems have addiction problems and that they're not bad people. Right. So good for them. So let's say you talk to your employer and they're like, look, we know you have a criminal background, but the test dog we brought out like you, so we're going to take a chance on you, but we want you to pony up some money. They're going to tell you to go get what's called a fidelity bond. I had never heard of this. I had neither. Like I've heard about it in the case of Robert Downey Jr. Needing extra insurance after he went through his bad drugs phase. Probably the same thing. It probably is, but movie companies, production companies, would have to purchase this massive extra insurance or not be allowed to work with him at all. He was too big of a liability. Right. Not anymore, of course. No, he's really clean up his act. Yeah, he's great. So, yeah, there's a regular people, not just Robert Downey Jr. Regular people can get fidelity bonding, too, which amounts to an insurance policy that you get or your employer gets on. You saying, we think you're kind of a screw up, maybe, and we want to make sure all of our pets are heads. You're not fired. Right. But we think you might really screw us up one day. Right. What else you got firearms. You got to go through background check when you purchase firearms here in this country. Don't worry, you won't have to wait very long for your firearm. Yes. How long is it? It's like, instantaneous. Is it? Yeah. But if you have a criminal record, if you've been indicted for a crime of more than a year in prison, you are ineligible to purchase a gun, which means you're just going to have to buy one off the street like other criminals, which is sad. It doesn't preclude you from traveling to other countries, necessarily, but as everyone who's ever been through customs knows, they can deny you whenever they want in any country. Pretty much, they have to allow you to come in. They have to invite you in like a vampire. Right. And it doesn't preclude you from coming to this country if you have a criminal record, either. Unless you're on a boat from Cuba. That's right. But the same deal, we can deny people coming in, they suggest to get a visa. If you're coming to this country to work and you have a criminal record yeah. Good luck with that. That's what I say. I say the same thing. Good luck, everybody. Got anything else? No, there's another one down in our endless string of law enforcement podcast. We definitely have a suite of, like, ten at this point, at least. If you want to learn more about criminal records and all that kind of thing. How stuff works. Won't judge you if you search for that. You can just type it into the search bar, like I said@howstoughfworks.com. And I said, search bar. So it's time for Facebook. Facebook questions. Josh, we have 230 of these, and so, yeah, let's go ahead and start here. Doug Callaghan, if you were to dive into a pool filled with any kind of fruit, what kind of fruit would you choose? Mango. Pineapple. Gary thought that was funny. How does being a team mascot work? That's a crazy question. I think that's a request for a show. Oh, okay. Like team mascots. Got you. Shelene chuck chuk. Chuk. Chuk. Best favorite theme park in the US. I mean, there's no question. What are you going see your point? Yeah, I guess you're right. I've only been there once, so it was pretty good, but Magic Mountain was pretty awesome in La. Dude, Cedar Point is the greatest in the world. I'm kind of sucker for the studio ones, too. Like, Universal Studios. Like, the rides are lame, but I just like the old Wet show and the Miami Boat Show. Yeah, the NCIS Boat show. Oh, wow. Yazdan. Adiri. The Fifth Element. Good or bad? I wasn't a fan. I know people loved that movie. I didn't think it was that good. I've never made it all the way through. Okay. Right. When I see Gary oldman and a stupid haircut, I'm like, I'm done. I'm down. Then what do you got? I'm reading. We won't read that one. Let's see. Is there anything worth not knowing? That's a good one. From Craig jacket. No, I don't know. That's a really great question on its face. No, of course there's nothing that we shouldn't know. But I also believe there is such a thing as knowing too much. Yeah. Like personal stuff about people. There's a lot that you shouldn't know. Right. But also, even beyond that, Chuck, like, do we really need nuclear weapons? Do we need nuclear capabilities? What if we didn't know that? It's a great question. Craig Jacquette, you get first prize today. James Hamilton, which sport has the fittest athletes? Clearly. NASCAR. What do you think? The fittest athletes? Yeah. I would say hilie. Or soccer. Okay. Jodi Jackson. I have good news for you. We've done. How China's one child policy works. Another person thought this was called for request. That's right. It is not. It's really called for silly questions. Cody Quimby, who's your favorite Beatle and why? Josh's answer would be none of them. Right. Mine would be George Harrison, because, yes, he's great. Really? Yeah. His soul was, like, orange. Like, I love John Lennon, but he was sort of a whiny little baby and a bit of a pretentious artist. Paul McCartney is great, but Paul was a bit of a power control freak. George Harrison was just like, there, dude. What about Ringo? Ringo, he plays down a nice backbeat and he's fun. I love Ringo, too. Let's see one more. All right, andrew Jordan, what current TV shows do you recommend? Stuff you should know. Coming to Science Channel. Nice. January 2013. That's so current. It's not even out yet. Obviously. Madman is, to me, the best show on TV right now. I disagree. I think 30 Rock is the best show on TV. 30 Rock is great, and Louie, to me, is like, a tie for the best show on TV. He's like, dude, he's making, like, French arthouse movies every week on television. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. I watched The Killing. I watch True Blood. Do you watch the killing? Yeah. Well, Taxing, isn't it? I watch eastbound and down The Killing isn't Taxing. I mean, it's kind of depressing. Yes. Walking Dead. I don't watch a ton of TV, but there's, like, eight shows. I like Dexter, so that one went off the rail so bad the past couple of years. I haven't seen the past couple of years, and I just wait for it to come on DVD. Good luck, man. Spoiler alert. Off the rail. All right, so that's it for now. I think we have one more addition to this, and then we'll wrap it up. Okay. Thank goodness. If you want to catch up with me and Chuck, digitally speaking, you can send us a tweet to s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstepychenko, and you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other. Topics visit houseofworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?" | ||
872ae744-3b0e-11eb-9699-d72b66d95d0f | Why Is DC Not A State? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-is-dc-not-a-state | The residents of Washington, D.C., the capital of the oldest democracy in the world, are not allowed to pass their own laws without the federal government agreeing with them first. That’s because DC is not a state, something DC residents want to change. | The residents of Washington, D.C., the capital of the oldest democracy in the world, are not allowed to pass their own laws without the federal government agreeing with them first. That’s because DC is not a state, something DC residents want to change. | Thu, 18 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=322, tm_isdst=0) | 41297367 | audio/mpeg | "What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, US. And global health. Listen in as host Baritoon de Thurston connects with impactful organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky. Plus inspiring individuals like Amy Allison and Juan Acosta to discuss ways to maximize our impact. Listen to Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you were an apparel company facing an avalanche of demand, so you called IBM to automate your It infrastructure, and now your ecommerce platform can handle spikes in orders? Let's create It systems that roll up their own fleece. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibmcom. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And it's just the two of us. And that's okay, because we are here. We are ready to do this thing. We should know that's, right? Wading into political waters. Yes. No way around it. No way around it. What does that DC license plate say? Taxation without Representation. That says it all. It really does. I love it because it's so subversive. You know that's, right. We're talking about DC statehood, and why the District of Columbia is not a state when they have 700,000, roughly, people living there, about 250,000 of which were born and raised there, and yet they don't get the benefits of statehood, which we'll talk about for reasons that are kind of terrible relevant, I think. Yeah, if you aren't aware, if you live in DC, you have some voting rights, but mostly you are very much limited or restricted as far as what you're allowed to do to participate in democracy, at least compared to other states. Right. And all of this is, like, because of a layer after layer after layer of rules and laws and regulations that basically prevent DC residents from voting or participating like other residents of other states. And so this idea that this isn't right has been something that people have been talking about for a very long time, and yet we still can't reach this finish line to make D C the 51st state, which, including most of the people who live in DC, want they want to become the 51st state. They want to be a state. They want to be treated like a state, and they just can't quite get it to the finish line. But it's possible, Chuck, that we're closer than ever. Actually closer than ever, but still not too close, if you ask me. Well, we'll see. I think we'll see. So let's talk about how DC was even established and why all of this is, like, this hodgepodge of weird laws and rules and where it came from. Yeah, so we didn't have a capital as a country at first for about, I guess, from 1776 to 89, the continental congress met in different places. They met in philly, of course. They met in maryland. Some they met new york city. Some they even met in new jersey, some, believe it or not. And in 1787, the philadelphia convention, they wrote the constitution and said, that's really kind of beefed up the federal government and said, we need some place that's like, clearly ours that we will meet that is permanent. And it was written right there in the constitution, article one, section eight, clause 17. Yes. And exactly where they were going to put this new capital was a huge debate. Like, everybody just presumed it would be someplace like new york or philadelphia, where the populations were very established and large, where they'd already written the constitution and where a lot of the early founding fathers were from. But the southern states said, hey, man, we don't want the capital all the way up there in new york or in pennsylvania. We need it somewhere that's a little closer to the middle of this country, this string of 13 colonies along the eastern seaboard. So they came up with what's called the compromise of 1790, which said, okay, we'll place this capital further south towards you guys, but you have to say that the colonial debts and obligations that were accrued during the revolutionary war, we get to move those over to the federal government's responsibility, because we these northern colonies are swimming in debt, and we just can't pay them off. So one of the first things we have to do when we establish this country is laden it with revolutionary war debt, right. And with the residents act, they said, we literally need land, like physical space. So, Maryland, Virginia pony up. You got to give up each a little bit to create this area. And I think they eventually not I think I know they eventually got back alexandria, Virginia, in 1846, but initially, that was a part of the tranche of land. And I think from the very beginning, they weren't a state because of something that happened that kind of feels a little more contemporary of the past couple of recent years. The pennsylvania mutiny of 1783, when these veterans, hundreds of veterans, stormed congress and said, this is what we want, they were angry. We want backpay. We want this and that. And the pennsylvania executive council would not send the state militia to protect congress, and they had to move to new jersey temporarily. And so they were like, this is not good. We need to be able to be in charge of our own defense, really. Right. And so we need a federal land that is not a state so we can have our own defense system, our own soldiers system. They just saw that if it ever came down to a federal versus a state kind of situation again, that they couldn't rely on the state malicious. So the capital couldn't be associated or affiliated with the state. It had to be a stateless capital that was its own territory. It made sense. It definitely did. And it was all because of that Pennsylvania mutiny of 1783, because those war veterans were owed back pay and they were mad about it and were chasing congress all over the country for it. That's why DC. Was stateless to begin with, so that the federal government could have its own jurisdiction over this area, over the capital. That's right. And in 1800, congress set up there in Washington, DC. And like I said, Alexandria is part of it first. Georgetown was and still is, and they were port town, so there was a lot going on there. But for the first several decades, DC. Was pretty rural and didn't really start growing a lot. And we have some population breakdowns, but it was really post civil war is when the population boom happened there. I think in 1800, there was 8000 people there. 1860, 70,018, 8175 thousand. It's a big jump. Yeah. And these are people that work for the government, and these are also free people now that come up from the south, set up residence there. And so DC. For many years had a majority black population. And kind of right away, the federal government was like, well, that won't do either. Yes. And so the reason that they were not okay with it was because at first so people in DC. Have been agitating for what's called home rule, which is just basically you're allowed to self determine your own government. You can elect your own officials, they can pass laws. Other people in the country can't tell you that your laws are invalid. It's just basically the right to sovereignty that any state holds. Right. So people have been interested in that in DC. Since the outset. But as you said earlier, it was a really rural and small population for a while, so it didn't really matter as much because it affected so few people. But as the population grew, it became more and more of a pressing issue until they finally said, and I think 1867, you know what? You're totally right. We should let DC. Residents vote. And they passed an act that said everybody in DC. Can vote by saying everybody in DC. Or I should say every man in DC. Can vote. They were, for the first time in American history, enfranchising black men to vote. There had never been a law that allowed black men to vote in the history of the country to that point, and that was the first one that was ever passed. And so, starting in 1867, for a full three long years, black men were allowed to vote in DC. For things like federal government positions, like president and vice president. Right. And when I said, that won't do, that's what I was talking about. They quickly realize that you have a large city or a larger city now that is being controlled. There's a lot of political power with black people for the first time, and this alarm them. And so they said, all right, we're going to replace this with a federally appointed commission. And they did that really quickly, and it was exactly for that reason. It was to redis enfranchise black people. Yes. There's a famous quote from a senator named John Tyler Morgan who was describing it years later, why they repealed that law and appointed that federal commission to rule the city. He said, I'm sorry for this, everybody. After the Negroes came into the District, it became necessary to deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being, to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats, the rats being the Negro population, and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia. So what he said, he said it out loud. He did, and wrote it down like it's in quotes there. So what he's saying is that to keep black people from voting in DC. They had to remove the voting rights of everybody. And that's what they did. And what's crazy is that's how it has generally remained for 150 years now for basically the same reason. Unfortunately, yeah, it was from the 1800s until 1973, like I was born and alive, when Washington DC. Was still a territory that had a governor and a ruling council that the president appointed. They did have a single delegate to Congress, but they were not given a congressional vote. So there was a delegate that could do the things that delegates do. They could even introduce articles, but they can't even vote on their own articles. No, they can be on committees and all that. Almost everything that a House member can do, a congressional member could do, but just not vote. It's a non voting delegate. And so in that way, yes, you had somebody who could advocate for DC. The people of DC. Couldn't elect somebody who could go vote on their behalf in the House of Representatives. And that's just the house. They have nobody and never have had a single representative in the Senate. So the only representation that DC. Has is a single non voting member of the House of Representatives. And that's it? Yeah, like constituents without a real say. At the end of the day, it gets even far worse than that, because I'm sure people are like, oh, come on, how much does that affect these people really? Well, we're going to explain exactly how it affects them, but one of the big ways, if it stands out to me is that when the Home Rule Act was passed in that said, okay, you guys can elect your own mayor and you can elect your own city council, bully for you. There's this thing that we have to tell you about, though. It's not all great. Every single law that gets passed by you in your town is subject to congressional review. It doesn't actually become law until congress says that your laws that you came up with and passed yourselves are okay. And that means that any congress person, any house member from anywhere in the country who is offended by one of your laws, who takes an issue with one of your laws, can strike that law down basically single handedly by attaching a rider to your annual budget. And so if you don't like that rider, well, then you can do without it, but you have to do without the money that makes up about 25% of your operating budget every year. That's the kind of, like, draconian rule that congress holds over DC. To this day. Yeah, and this is why, unfortunately, this does wade into politics, and we'll get into that more later, but it is kind of purely for partisan politics. Why DC. Is not a state at this point, and the ironies are pretty rich here, and that generally republicans do not want DC to become a state, but they're also the same party who decry government overreach and state's rights. And I guess they'll say, well, yeah, but it's not a state. But it is certainly government overreach when you have the local people of a district voting for their own laws that their constituents want, but the federal government can override those. And again, you might say, like, what laws? Who cares? What's the problem? How are these people actually really harmed with that? Well, there's actually, like, a lot of laws that DC has passed that congress has either dragged its feet on or overturned that have actually harmed people. DC had a needle exchange program to try to slow the spread of HIV, and it was overturned by congress in 1998 and was not allowed to happen again until 2007. And it turns out that when that was finally allowed to start up again, the HIV infection rates in the city. And by the way, DC. Had one of the highest rates of HIV. After its needle exchange program was banned by congress, its HIV rates dropped by 70%, and an estimated 120 people were prevented from being infected with HIV in just two years after the needle program was allowed to start up again in 2007. There's also one on abortion access COVID-19. They got the short end of the stick as far as funds go. And then there's another one where they tried to repeal their sodomy law, which outlawed sex between men back in 1981, and congress didn't let it actually go through until 1993. Wow. There's just been a lot of stuff where, basically, if you have somebody in congress who doesn't like the idea of DC. The people of d. C. Having legalized marijuana or being able to use taxpayer money for abortions, DC. Doesn't get to do that because the rider gets attached to their budget and they have to take it and that covet thing you were talking about. Every US. State got $1.25 billion in aid, but Congress cut that in half for DC. Even though they had well, first of all, they're like, well, we're bigger than Vermont in one other state, too, right? Wyoming. Yes. And they're almost the same size as Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Delaware, population wise. Yeah. And they had more confirmed copied cases at the time than 19 other states, yet they got half the aid just because yes. So it's mind numbing and crazy. Just put yourself in the position of somebody who's interested in the political process and lives in DC. And the idea that your city can pass a law huge, like, with huge support, I think the marijuana legalization law passed with 65% supportive voters and somebody from Arizona could come along and be like, no, you're not doing that. That law doesn't go through. I'm attaching that as a writer to your annual budget. How outrage inducing would that be? How frustrating would it be? At the very least. So, yes, it actually is harmful to the democracy of Washington, DC. And their self determination and their ability for home role the situation as it stands right now. All right, well, let's take a break. I think it's pretty clear where we stand here, and we'll talk about the Electoral college, just that little thing right after this. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the city Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you advantage miles and loyalty points and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to builtin travel benefits. 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With fewer major transit system, with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year, you aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right, so people have been allowed to vote in Washington, DC. For elections, for presidential, national elections for a long time now. In 1961, they ratified the 23rd amendment to the constitution. That was specifically for DC electoral college votes in the presidential election. That was when they started to be able to vote for president. Vote at all. That's right. So 60 years is how long the residents of DC. Have been able to vote. Yeah, I mean, when I said quite a while, it didn't mean on the beginning of time scale just sort of got you. I didn't know if you're being facetious or not. No, I mean, for many decades now. But I guess in that context, it's an outrage for sure. And so that 23rd amendment, that's the whole purpose of the 23rd amendment, is to basically say, yes, DC. Can now vote in presidential elections and they can contribute electors, but they can never have more electors than the number of electors that the least populous state in the United States has. It doesn't matter how many people DC could swell to. Well, it probably couldn't handle it, but it could swell to the size of 2 million population. And it doesn't matter. You get your three electors, right, and it's always going to be three at the minimum, because your number of electors are based on the representation you have in the house and the senate. Every state has two senators, and every state has at least one congress person, and DC probably would always still have one congressperson anyway. That's how many Alaska has in Vermont. In Delaware? It's just based on population. So they will probably always have three electors. And so those electors, ever since I believe the election, the first time DC. Ever contributed electors to the electoral college, those electors almost invariably go 100% toward the democratic candidate, right? Like DC. Is one of the first states that gets called on those electoral maps during every presidential election, and they go towards the Democrat. So if you made DC estate, that's not going to be a huge change. Like nothing's going to change. They're still going to have their three electoral votes, and they're probably going to go toward the Democratic candidate for president. They're only going to have one Congressperson, and that one Congressperson will probably be a Democrat. But it's kind of a drop in the bucket when you're talking about like 430 or 60. I can't remember however many are in the House right now. But when you talk about the Senate, now we get to the problem, the partisan political problem with why DC. Is not a state. Because DC is and has been for a very long time, majority black as far as the population goes and as far as their voting base goes. Traditionally black voters lean Democrat as far as voting history goes. That's typically the case for the last several decades at least. And if you have two new senators that just did not exist before the Senate, would go from 100 senators to 102 senators, and those two senators were almost guaranteed to be Democratic senators. Well, imagine what two extra Democrat senators would do right now if you had two more Democrats in the Senate than what we have a funny number right now. Now we've reached exactly. Now we've reached the reason why DC is not being allowed to be a state and why it's a partisan political matter. Right. And here is where you're going to get into me some very disingenuous arguments, for sure, that are just it'd be so much easier if they just talked about what the reality was instead of disingenuous arguments that everybody knows isn't the real reason. It's just that that's the stuff I hate about politics in this country is no one's talking about what the real situation is. Some people try and call it out. So there are sort of two avenues that have been bandied about over the years, is basically the two main paths for making DC estate. And one is what we need to do is the idea is that what we need to do is shrink what is called the Federal District to only the buildings that are under federal control, like the White House and the Capitol Building and kind of everything there in DC. All the government buildings, basically, and just make it that. But no one lives there except for no one lives in these buildings. These are office buildings except for the White House where the President and first Family live, and maybe some of the staff. So one of the disingenuous arguments that comes up is, well, we can't have a situation where there's only three or four people, like, let's say, living in these places that get this kind of representation, right, like three electoral votes. Yeah, that's completely disingenuous. Sure. And especially if that president is an incumbent running for election again, then that incumbent President would have three electoral votes to cast for themselves, right? Right. So on paper, you're like, oh, yeah, I could see that being a problem. Let's just give up because of the 23 Amendment and that quirk that it attributed. Right. But there are a lot of workarounds, too, that people are like, no, that's a ridiculous argument. Right. The President could, in fact, usually does vote absentee from their own home state. That's one. And then, so if no electoral votes are cast, or if no votes are actually cast in the District of Columbia, then there's no electors to be given. Right. So you'd have those three electors that just didn't go to anybody. That's one solution. Right. Another one is to just take those three electors and give them to whoever wins the popular vote regardless. And then a lot of people are like, no, you just repeal the 23rd Amendment if you make DC estate like it's a one two punch. That's just how it has to be. That's right. And we'll talk more about some disingenuous arguments and deconstruct them as we go. But that's the one that seems to be bandied about most commonly, right? Yeah. And we've talked a little bit about why it matters to begin with. We mentioned at the very beginning their license plate taxation with representation. And that's a little bit of a snide license plate, but it's very true. They pay federal income tax and like really high federal income tax, so much so that they contribute more than they receive from the federal government. One thing I saw, Chuck, is like, I was like, well, wait a minute, can DC. Even handle being a state? How much does it get from the federal government? And apparently it is not in any way, shape, or form or the area that receives the most federal funding. I guess that honor goes to Mississippi. 35% of Mississippi state and local budget is made up of federal funds. 34% for Louisiana, New Mexico and South Dakota. 27%. DC's. Is 25%. So just a quarter of all of the money that DC. Uses to operate comes from the federal government. The rest is from local taxes. And DC. Apparently has a little flower in its bonnet in that it typically has a balanced budget every year, too. Oh, really? So we could do just fine without being a state. It would be like, yeah, we should still get federal funding because other states get federal funding too. But even if you kept it at the federal funding they get now, they would be doing just fine as far as federal law is concerned. They are treated as a state, yet they're not a state with representation, like a state. We already talked about congressional representation. They can't vote on bills. It's really weird that you can introduce a bill and write the bill, but not vote in that bill. Yeah. And because constitutional amendments are typically what's thrown around about making DC estate or not, or has been up until recently. It's kind of ironic that DC wouldn't be able to vote on its own ratification, like its own statehood like, because it cannot vote on constitutional amendments because it's not a state. So basically, DC has to rely on everybody else to go to bat for it because it doesn't have self determination. That's right. You want to take another break and then talk about some of the arguments for and against? Yeah. Okay, well, we're going to do just that, everybody. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because Adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you Advantage miles and loyalty points, and two times Advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations so your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs. And with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. 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They have all the tools you need to get your business off the ground. They have ecommerce templates, inventory management, really simple checkout process, and secure payment. So whatever you want to sell, you can sell it on Squarespace. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comsysk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's Squarespace.com. SYSK. Squarespace. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyber attacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a. Security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right, so we've made our position clear that most of the arguments against statehood and these aren't our arguments, I mean, like I said, any honest person will tell you that it is strictly partisan political issue. It's because they don't want to more Democratic senators in there. Yeah, they just don't. And that's their right to fight against that, I guess. And they do, but it's disingenuous and it's an antisocial sentiment. Like how somebody or some group of people are expected to vote has nothing to do with whether they should have the right to vote or not. You can't just keep people from voting because you don't like the way they are going to vote. That is an anti social act. Anti Democratic. Yeah, it's both. And that's exactly what's going on right now. That's it. Boil it down. I mean, get mad at us just like you did a gerrymandering episode or a voter suppression episode. It's still the case. That's just how it is right now. It's one of those political fictions that it's anything but that's. Right. One of the arguments is that it's unconstitutional to begin with. That's why you said that. Up until recently, most of the attempts to make DC estate have tried to come via constitutional amendments. And here's the thing though, there's nothing specifically prohibiting DC from becoming a state in the Constitution. Now, you had mentioned that some people are like let's shrink DC the capital, down to just the federal buildings. Basically, as Ed, who helps us out with this one, puts it like tourist DC. Right? And then everything else, commercial and residential DC that would become the state and then that federal district would become the capital. And people are like, no, you can't do that. There's like a size requirement in the Constitution can't change something like that. And people are saying, well, actually there is a size requirement. It's a maximum, not a minimum. It doesn't say how small it can be, it says how big it can be. It can't be more than 10 miles square. Yeah, I think 10 sq. Mi. Yes, 10 sq. Mi. Yes. You totally could shrink it. So just shot down that argument. But one more thing, Chuck, about that. One of the reasons why they have abandoned a constitutional amendment making DC estate is twofold. One, that's a huge hurdle to jump over. I think you have to have two thirds of the state to ratify. First of all, you have to get it through both houses of Congress, which is an impossibility to begin with, and then you have to have two thirds of the state, many of which are controlled by Republican legislatures, to ratify that amendment to make DC estate. So it's just too huge of an obstacle amount. But also, it's really disingenuous to require a constitutional amendment to make DC estate because since the Constitution itself was ratified in 1788, not a single state that was admitted into the Union from that time was admitted through a constitutional amendment. There are no constitutional amendments that have admitted state. They've all come in through congressional decree instead. That's right. Well, we'll talk about that in just a second in more detail. But another one of the paths that has been bandied about a little bit is, well, not past the statehood, but past to making it not a state and ensuring it never becomes a state and saying, well, why don't we just make it part of Virginia or Maryland like it used to be? Give it back to them. And nobody, you know who doesn't want that? DC. Virginia and Maryland. Yeah, none of them want it. Maryland doesn't want to assume those 700,000 people. Virginia doesn't want it. DC. Doesn't want to be a part of either one of those. Like, the only people that want that are, frankly, Republicans who don't want it to become state. Yes. Because it might add a few more electoral votes to Maryland or Virginia, but it would not add a single extra senator. You can't have more than two Senators, no matter what your population size. Again, the crux to the matter yeah, another one is that the idea that the city can't take care of that federal property. And I don't think anybody who's a prostatehood advocate says, oh, yeah, they can. That's just not true. But they say, well, we wouldn't be taking care of most of that property. It would be shrunk down to be the capital, so it'd still be the federal government's jurisdiction. People said, well, there's other federal buildings outside of this little tourist area. What are you going to do about that? And DC. Says, do you know how many states and cities have federal buildings in them that the state and the city takes care of in conjunction with the federal government and with funding from the federal government? Yeah, totally not a problem. I think disingenuity. Is that a word? It is now, buddy. It's one of my least favorite things to witness. It is, because it's just dishonest. It's just a bunch of garbage acting just call it what it is. It's so frustrating, it's almost disingenuous. So you mentioned earlier that no other state needed a congressional I'm sorry, a constitutional amendment to become a state. The Tennessee model is sort of where DC. Has tried to go more recently, the Tennessee Plan in 1796, when Tennessee wasn't a state yet. And they said, you know what? We're tired of waiting around for Congress to do anything about it. So we're going to hold our own referendum. We're going to vote to become a state, and we passed it, and then we're going to write and approve our own state constitution and how we're going to administer that, and this is how we would do things. And they did that. And then Congress is sort of like everyone sort of sitting there twiddling their thumbs, staring at Congress, like, we're all ready to go. Just unlock the door and we could become a state. And it worked. And it also worked in Michigan, Iowa, California, Oregon, Kansas and Alaska. And so DC. Recently, I think about five years ago, said, maybe let's try this Tennessee plan. Forget constitutional amendments, let's just have a referendum. And it passed by 85%. And they said, Great, let's draft the constitution. And they did that and it was approved. And they said, the mayor is going to become the governor, city council will become the legislature. And here we go, congress, let's get this done. We're ready to roll. Yeah. So this was in 2016 that that referendum passed and they started to adopt the Tennessee plan. And what sucks, Chuck, is that means that they were distracted by that idea that they had to become a state through constitutional amendment for decades. Yes. If they take up this Tennessee plan decades ago, who knows where they would be now? They might be a state by now. It's really sad to think that work, that boondoggle work that they needed for a couple of hundred plus years. Yeah, basically. So that's why I'm like, I don't know, we might actually see it's possible we could see DC estate, because this referendum and the plan that they follow, where they basically made themselves an instant state, like just a Congress kind of thing, it came in just the last five years. So for the first time ever in the history of the District of Columbia, a bill passed that says DC is a state. Please go ahead and pass this bill. Senate. It passed the House. Everything else has been like, we're the House of Representatives, and we think DC should be a state. It's just like a resolution in support of DC. Being a state. It's not an actual law. This is an actual law that passed the House of Representatives. Of course, it died in the Senate because it was while Mitch McConnell was the majority leader, and he didn't even let it come up for a vote. I can't believe it even made it onto his desk before catching fire. But the fact is that it did pass the House at least once, and that is brand new. That is definitely new. Yeah. In 2020. It's amazing. And it's amazing that we have a situation on our modern day government where one person can say, no, we're not going to vote on this two party system. Does not work. It's broken. It doesn't work. Yeah, it was reintroduced in 2021 just this year past the House again. Well, sadly, in this case, it's probably not going to happen because Democrats can't agree on anything. Yeah. Terrible irony of the whole thing, isn't it? Yes, it really is. You mentioned two people earlier. Probably would be the same two people. That's what I saw from happening. Yeah. The only other question mark is mark Kelly? No. Angus King from Maine. Oh, really? And he may be retired now, but yes, from what I saw, it would come down to Kristin Cinema and Joe Mansion, and both have not supported previous, like, DC statehood stuff before. Other people who have not actually didn't actually co sponsor that bill in the Senate have supported other stuff. So they would be expected to vote yes. So it could come down to two people again, both of whom Democrats, that would keep DC. From becoming a state. Now, it's pretty interesting stuff. I've heard different names bandied about over the years that it did become a state. I knew that New Columbia was what they were going to call it for a long time, but then in more recent years, christopher Columbus has become less favorable in the eyes of history. So they're saying maybe New Columbia is not the right name after all. No. And I didn't know this, but they planned as part of that referendum draft constitution that was passed, they would change the name. They would keep it as Washington, DC. But DC. Would stand for Douglas Commonwealth after Frederick Douglas, the abolitionist former site. I like it. Isn't that neat? Yeah. DC. I think people that go to tourist DC. Which is a lot of fun, we both done that thing a lot of times. It is that. But DC. Is a rich city with a rich history in and of itself. A rich history of music and culture and black culture and great food. And there's a lot to DC. Besides the mall area. Oh, yeah. And every time I go there, I try to check out different areas and do different things, and it's awesome. We have a great, great time when we do live shows in DC. It's one of my favorite places. When we go to what is it? The Lincoln. They give us the Lincoln Logs. Pastry. Where do those come from? What do you mean, where they come from? What's the bakery that does this? Do you know? I don't know. I think it's nearby, but I don't know. That on You Street. I don't remember always just sitting there backstage, and they're so delicious. And we always eat like ten each of them. They're like Swiss cake rolls, but like the bakery version of a Swiss cake roll. Yeah. So before we go, Chuck, I feel like we have to talk about how some recent events really kind of have brought the idea of DC. Not being a state to the fore, both of which occurred in 2020, actually. Oh, like the storming of the capital. That's one of them for sure. Yeah. And I think that kind of harkens back to the mutiny of 1783 and that there are some people who think it could have gone down a lot differently if the government had been able to call on the state national guard, like super quickly. Yeah, because the DC. National guard is not under control of DC. Just like any other state's national guard would be under the state's control, which is why that's what congress wanted it to be like. They wanted DC's. National guard to be under control of the federal government because of that mutiny of 1783. But the exact opposite thing happened on January 6 because DC. And the capital wanted the DC. National guard and definitely would have activated them and brought them out hours before, but the federal government at the time kept them from doing that because they were under federal control. So that was one that really just kind of pointed out, like, oh, well, this is harmful, this is not good. The other way that it was pointed out was kind of the opposite of that, where during the black lives matter protests in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and people took to the streets in DC. They were basically beaten out of the streets, harassed out of the streets, used tear gas on by the DC. National guard that was deployed by the federal government. Whereas you can pretty much guess that if Muriel Bowser had been the governor of the state of DC. Rather than just the mayor and had the power over the national Guard, those national guard troops would not have been deployed against those protesters. So both of those events just within months of one another. So the protests were in 2020. The insurrection was in the beginning of 2021. Yes, that was this year. I thought 2020 was long. 2021 seems longer. This year has been a long decade, you know, but both of those events have pointed out, like, because of that mutiny of 1783, those things were able to happen the way that they did. Really interesting. Yeah, it is. So now you guys know DC. Statehood. Make up your own mind about it. But them is the facts. The facts. And since I said, them is the facts, it's time, of course, everybody, for listener mail, I'm going to call this baby shout out. We don't do a lot of shout outs, but this is kind of special, I think, because this is a future shout out. Okay, I've been a long time listener, and in January 2020, I had a baby. Who's your youngest listener? Well, I was pregnant. I worked as an assistant manager at local horse boarding facility near Augusta, Georgia. Every morning when I fed the horses, I put my phone in my phone belt and turned on stuff you should know. Babies can hear nearby sounds in the womb. So Clara has been listening as long as she's been able to hear. Now we listen to stuff you should know during our afternoon walks together. If an episode finishes before it's over. Clara will sign and ask for more. The little toddler sign language is the best. I know. It's adorable. I didn't realize it was the thing one of Yummy's best friends taught her kids, and I was like, oh, this is really cool. Yeah, we did some basic stuff. We didn't get too involved, but there was a little bit of that early on. Man, kids are so neat these days. They're so neat. Not like us. We were just dummies. Yeah. Here's. Oatmeal, and a television. We played with a stick and a wheel. Back to the mail. I would love for her to have a shout out on an episode so one day we can go back and listen to her episode. So, Clara, your episode is on DC statehood. Maybe things will be different then. Yes. Wouldn't that be something? That would be something. But this is from Kara's Texador, and she just says, thanks for all we do. We really help fill the long hours of coba, shut down at home with an infant, and for helping learning new things. Fun. That is Kara Texador. Great name. That's awesome. Thanks. Karis definitely a great name. You sound like the last starfighter or something. That's right. And hello, little Carla. I hope you keep listening, and I hope by the time you're 20, we're still doing this show. No, maybe not by then. Recently retired. Yeah, I'll be 70. Yeah, I guess that's right. Thank you very much for writing in Keras and Carla. Best wishes to you on a fantastic life. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Karis and Carla did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Hey, it's Delilah. We can all use a hug now and again. I wish I could deliver them all in person, but since that's not possible, my daily podcast, hey, it's Delilah is the next best thing. It will wrap you in ten to 15 minutes of happy, heartwarming, hopeful radio content every Monday through Friday at whatever time of day you need it the most. Find hey, it's Delilah and get your radio hug." | |
How Cliff Diving Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-cliff-diving-works | As far as sports go, cliff diving doesn't require much equipment. It does, however, require a certain amount of chutzpah, a dash of derring-do, and a deep body of water to land in. Tune in and learn more about cliff diving in this podcast. | As far as sports go, cliff diving doesn't require much equipment. It does, however, require a certain amount of chutzpah, a dash of derring-do, and a deep body of water to land in. Tune in and learn more about cliff diving in this podcast. | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:16:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=15, tm_min=16, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=119, tm_isdst=0) | 26406887 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. With me is Charles W, chuck Bryant. We're a couple of writers for how stuff works.com. When we sit down in front of these mics, though, to become Stuff You Should Know, we tear open our shirts and there's a big S-Y-S-K on our chest tattooed. That's exactly right. Chuck? Chuck yeah? You ever jumped off a cliff? I have indeed. You have? Yeah. The rock quarry and Sparta. Do you ever go there? No, I've jumped off of that one. That was pretty high. There's a Rock Corey in Toledo that I never went to, actually. It was in White House, whitehall, Bowling Green, somewhere around there. I never went. My dad was certified as a scuba diver there, though. Oh, really? Yeah. They put something in a bus that was sunken at the bottom of it and he had to go get it out to prove that he could in fact scuba dive. Wow. Yeah. Sounds creepy, doesn't it? Yeah. I myself have never jumped off a cliff. I love it. Is it thrilling? Yeah, it's fun. How high was it? I think I'm probably overstating it, like everyone probably does when they do this kind of thing, but it seemed like it was probably about 40 or 50ft. Wow, it was high. Yeah, that is high. And actually there's a place at the Chattahoochee that I used to do it, too, but that was like 30ft, 25ft. Well, Chuck, you have a hairier chest than I do, because I've never jumped off a cliff. But I have been to Acapulco before. You got me there. Did you read about these guys? Oh, yeah. The Lake Brad divers. I think it's nice that you bring that extra accent. You don't have to bring an accent. You do. Anyway, that French dude emails this week and he said he appreciated it. Oh, nice. With my frost. Yeah. He's like, I'm totally wrong, but he thought it was funny. Yeah. So, yes. Lacabrata yeah, it's pretty cool. These guys are jumping off of the highest cliffs that anybody routinely jumps off of in the world. I did. Oh, I didn't know you actually witnessed the performance. Yeah, I mean, you can't go to Acapulco and not see it. I believe it's daily. Right. Except maybe Sundays, but I could just be making that up. But the guys, they jump off something like, I think, 148 foot cliffs. That's crazy. Yeah. What is that? Meters. Chuck. Josh that would be about 45 meters. Okay, nice. Thanks for that. You're just a walking calculator, you know, it's written right in front of me. This is an enormous cliff. This is what a 14 story building? Isn't a story like 10ft? I think so, yeah. So they're jumping off of 14 story buildings into water. It's like a little inlet and they're on one side and then you're on the other with railing, so you don't try jumping off. Right. And these guys just start jumping. There's like 1015 of them. They do it every night. And actually it was started by a 13 year old boy back in 1934. Yeah, that's what I hear. And I will pronounce his name as Enrique Epak Rios. Very nice. So this little boy started this tourist attraction right. And what has arguably become one of the cooler, extreme sports as well. Oh, heck. Yeah. But the story goes back further than that, correct? Yeah. But I just want to point out we're on the 15th floor, so this is ballpark within about ten or 15ft of where they switch out the window. Wow, that's high. Jerry's Giggling she's either going to cut that out or leave it in, we'll find out. Right. That is very high. That is real high. Yeah. I mean, we would have jumped onto the street had we just jumped out. Plus it would have been an extra 10ft. This is water. But I'm telling you, there's, like boulders at the bottom, there's waves breaking, it's an inlet at the ocean. Yeah. And that's part of the trick, is to time it with the water coming in and out and then obviously mine the boulders because you clearly don't want to jump into a boulder. But what I also noticed in this article that if you hit, like, a fish, that could be bad news, right? Yeah. And we'll get into the physics of cliff diving soon, but like I said, where do we find the beginning? This is one of those rare pieces of world culture, because everybody does it everywhere. Anywhere. There's cliffs, there's cliff divers, pretty much. But this is one of those rare pieces that you can go back and be like, this guy actually started it. I don't think this is the first guy. I would say he's probably the first guy in recorded history. Do you want to take his name? Yes. I'm going to go with King Kahikile. Nice. Kahiki of Hawaii. He was the last king of Maui, and in 1770, he reportedly jumped from canon. Let's see. This is where I get in trouble. Kalnolu. Kawanolu. I think it's pretty much how I would hawaiian words in my head. I can pronounce it better than that, but once it goes through the tongue, you know what happens. Chuck that was about 63ft and he entered the water. Didn't make much of a splash, so he earned the name Birdman and then apparently would challenge his warriors to prove their bravery by doing the same. So that's where it started. At least that's what the Lord says. And I can imagine his people calling him Birdman and him going, no, it's King Kahiki, actually, to you, actually. Lee every night at the Sheraton Maui, they reenact this thing. They have some guy go up to the top of a cliff in a loincloth cliff he jumped off of, right? I think so. In a loincloth and jump into the water. And the reason he jumped into the water was because this is where the Maui's yeah, right. Maui ends. Sure. Where they believe that souls transferred into the next world through yes. The spirit world. And I guess he was like, let's see what the hell happened. Right? So now they reenact it with the loincloth dude, and he offers up in each direction to the sky and offering he has the lay and then a torch and then he'll jump in. Right. And when he jumped in, absolutely no one outside of the greater Maui area had a clue. But many years later, the cliff diving concept really started to take off. Thanks to Timex and ABC. Correct. So Timex, back in the late 50s, timex used to like to show off the impact resistance that their watches could boast. Yeah, I remember the and I was about to say I remember this one when I was reading do you remember when it first broadcasted? Well, it was the 19th 50s, so clearly I didn't but they ran this campaign through the 70s because I remember that takes a look and keeps on picking things. That's right. Yeah. That was the tagline. Right? Yeah. So this commercial, though, they jumped in, john Cameron Swayze. I don't think any relation to Patrick, is he? I was wondering the same thing, actually. I have to look that up. Okay. He hosted this commercial and they give a torture test, right. He didn't actually jump in. He was just like, check this guy out. Exactly. And they had some cliff diver jump in fist first with the Time X, like, exposed. So it was the first thing that hit the water. And I imagine that after a few takes, he eventually didn't break the watch and they were like, look what happened. So that was the late fifty s. And then really Cliffdiving took off. If you'll excuse me. In, I think. March 1968. Yes. It took the leap in 1968 so bad. Yeah. With the ABC's Wide World of Sports, which was a great concept. Man, I love it. All over the place they show the craziest stuff. This is long before anybody ever thought of the X Games or anything like that. They just were like, these people are engaged in some random sport and we're going to broadcast it. By God, I love that show. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Yeah. In the lumberjack, the guy that skier that had that awful accident was always the agony of defeat. I don't remember that guy. Was it in the intro? Yeah. And then when they said that it showed, this skier had this just awful crash and flipping over and like breaking everyone in his body. Did he die? No, I don't think so. Okay. He lived, he walked away. Okay is what I say. And then here we are today, actually, Chuck, I think about four weeks away from the 2010 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Championships. Yeah, the World Series. By the time this is published, it will probably be within a couple of days, but it's May 15, if you're interested in going to France to watch it. They jump off platform. But it's at a cliff still. Right, but on the site, I was checking out some Frenchmen who were cliff diving, and they went to this old early 19th century fort that Napoleon had built off the coast of France in the Atlantic. Cool. And it's, I think, 20 meters high, which places at around 60ft. Okay. Meters first. Huh? Huh? Meters first. Well, it's in France. I just thought I'd give, like, a little head nod. And these guys were just jumping off this old stone fortress in the middle of the Atlantic. It's pretty cool. Well, I don't want to say the middle of the Atlantic. It's actually right off the coast, but it's surrounded by water. Awesome. Yeah, I saw that picture. I didn't know what was going on there. That's what was going on. Okay, mystery solved. Yes. Is it physics time? This is your bag. Actually, I understood it's really not that complicated. No, it's gravity. It's free fall physics is what we're talking about. Sure. Chuck, when you walked in here to sit down and contribute your fine, fine half to this podcast, you were being pulled toward the Earth by gravity. Yes. But you were also meeting resistance from the ground, which caused friction. Had you actually walked off a cliff on the way in here that'd be sad. You would have still been pulled by gravity, but there wouldn't be any resistance from the force of friction. Right. Which makes it free fall, which does make it free fall, which galileo was the first to figure this out. Free fall physics. When you are pulled toward the Earth by gravity, you're actually pulled at 9.8 meters/second per second. And the reason that extra per second is there is because for every second that you're in the air falling at that rate, you're increasing in speed. So you go 9.8 meters/second per second to what, 19.6 meters/second per second. Okay. And so on. So every second, you double your speed. The velocity is constant, but the speed can increase given time. But the acceleration is constant. Right. That's what it is. Yeah. I'm sorry. The acceleration is constant, but your speed, your velocity can actually increase, right? Yes. Given time. Now, in the case of cliff diving, the height of the cliff is pretty much interchangeable with time. The higher the cliff, the more time you're going to be in the air, and the faster you go. Right. So when you jump off, I think, a ten foot cliff, how fast are you traveling? It's not much of a cliff. We call it a rock. Yeah. Pretty much about 17 miles an hour. Right. But if you jump off a 50 foot cliff like you were jumping off of in the quarry. Yeah. We'll say 50 from now on. Sure. That goes up to, what, 38, 38 miles an hour. That's cruising right now. The problem is, when you hit the water, you encounter that force of friction again, and your velocity goes from its maximum speed to almost zero. Almost instantaneous. Yeah. It's like a second. Right? Right. Now we've encountered why cliff diving is dangerous, because eventually you're going to land on something. Yeah. And before we move on from physics, I just thought it was interesting that when you do jump out, or if you get a running start, you're going to go even faster than if you just drop. You've added horizontal velocity, right. Or horizontal force. I am definitely not a physics guy. You had it right. Velocity. Thanks, buddy. One of the cool aspects of free fall physics as far as it relates to humans, also, Chuck, get this. Do you remember learning, like, a long time ago that no matter what the mass of an object, it'll fall at the same rate? Oh, yeah. Galileo again, right? That is Galileo, yeah. And he actually disproved Aristotle with that one. Some say they're both geniuses. They both are. Did we mention them in the genius podcast on that list of 50 that ended in George Washington? You might say that I've dropped a piece of paper and a hammer right. At the same time, and the piece of paper took longer. That's because it met resistance from the air. Yeah, exactly. And actually, Commander David Scott of the Apollo 15 mission famously took a hammer and I think a feather on the moon and dropped in, and they both landed at the same time. That must have been cool looking. There's video of it on YouTube, actually. Oh, really? Awesome. But I'm almost done with my physics spiel. Okay. Okay. And it ends as such. Let's hear it. When you jump off a cliff, remember, you're not meeting friction any longer. Yeah. So there's no resistance besides this negligible air resistance. Right. You actually do encounter what we would consider on Earth as close to weightlessness as we can get. Right. So your body is being pulled as a whole by gravity, equally all parts except for your internal organs. Right. Wow. Which actually lose weight and rise up in your chest, which is why your stomach feels like it's coming up. Is that what that is? Actually is. Wow. Isn't that cool? I've always wondered what that was. That's what it is. Goodness me. All right, we're done with the physics part. Yeah. Well, two to three GS, we should say, like at the World Championships, they hit about two to three GS, and those dudes are going at speeds up to 60 miles an hour. That's fast. That's really fast to be hitting the water. Yes. And you want to since we're at the water entry point, which is, I think, where we left off with the physics. You want to go in really, really, really straight. That's the key. Because if you flatten out it is the room you hear the legend about. It's like hitting concrete. Yeah. It is like hitting concrete. Right. And you would die. Yes. You would. Or not be the same person afterwards. Actually, there's a website by a woman, Quebec named Patricia, I think her name is, who's created this website dedicated to warning people about a famous tourist cliff diving site called Rick's Cafe in the RIL, Jamaica. That's only 35ft, though. It is, but this woman jumped off the 35 foot platform. She belly flopped. She couldn't have gone in feet first. Right. What happened to her is she suffered a broken spine, broken sternum, displaced diaphragm, which is never good. Did she look in her purse? Terrible. Sorry. And posterior vitreous attachment, which means the jelly in her eye is loose now. Oh, man. A 30 foot jump. Well, the deal there, though, at the cafe is they have it set up with the platform. Right. I mean, do you have to sign a waiver or anything? I don't know. I think if you were a smart owner of Rick's Cafe and you were encouraging tourists to jump off the platform yeah. You would have them sign away their firstborn child. Heck, yeah. Well, they do say in here, though, that official tourism boards don't encourage this because it's dangerous. Yeah, it's really dangerous. Yeah. And we should also probably take the time to COA and tell you that we don't encourage you to cliff dive, either. No. I mean, a ten foot rock is one thing, but even then, if you land on another rock, there's a lot of people, like you said, a fish. Yeah. Fish. You're traveling 60 miles an hour and you hit a fish. It's not as, let's say, liquid as a water. Right? Yeah. Although it will be after you hit it at 60 miles an hour. Yeah. That's bad news for the fish, too. So, Chuck, in addition to Rick's Cafe in the Grill, what are some of the other well known Cliffdiving locations? Hot spots, Josh? That's one way to put it. Well, I know Jamaica. The West End cliffs in the Grille. That's where Rick is. It that they have the limestone cliffs. Those are really popular. Sure. I'm pretty I imagine so. There's two phrases or terms that the Hawaiians use, depending on whether you make a splash or not with a big jump. So, Lily kawa. That sounds right. Thanks. That's to leap from a great height and enter the water without a splash, which we should say is what King Khikilei did. Kahikili. Kahiki. Yeah, I think that's right. Is that the name of the idol that the Brady kids found in that episode where they went to Hawaii? The two parter, was that a kahikilee? I don't know. Those are great episodes, though. They really were. Debbie would know that. My friend Debbie would know. Well, tell her to write in. Okay. The other expression is lily PAHO. That sounds right, too. Thanks, man. That's entering the water with a big splash from a great jump. And that's a bad thing, right? Yeah, it's like competition. Let's do a cannonball. Well, say so long to your shins. Yeah, exactly. So we've got Hawaii Acapulco again. The La Cabrada Divers. Seriously? They're jumping off of 147 foot cliffs. Right. The next highest that I've seen, actually, that I've seen in this article is in Croatia in Dubrovnik. Yeah. And those are 85ft. Right. And that's about the height that they do the competition dies. They don't do competition dives from 148ft. Right. Because they're doing flips and twists. Actually, I got some stuff on that. But they're not just diving in. Right. They go in feet first, generally. Oh, really? Well, for the competition. I haven't seen many of those guys going head first. Dude, the guys in Acapulco in mid air and dive in like it's not just jumping off of a cliff. And they'll do it several at a time. It's amazing. Oh, yeah. I did see on YouTube a tandem dive or whatever. This is multiple. Also, if you ever get a chance to go to Acapulco, I wouldn't recommend going now with the raging drug war in Mexico, but if that ever dies down and you do get to go to Acapulco, do go see the cliff divers. I think that's a great move. Thanks. Or if you can't go there, just go to YouTube. You can check it out there. Check out some awfully bad video. The World High Diving Federation, Josh, they recommend water depths of 43 to 49ft for a dive of 65ft or less. And they also recommend that no one dive from 65ft or higher unless you're a pro and you have, like, scuba divers down there to retrieve your lifeless body. Right. Or at least your shattered body. Exactly. Okay, Chuck, let's say somebody out there is going to try this, whether we tell them to or not, and let's just do it again. Let's just tell them not to cliff dive. Okay. Don't cliff dive. Thank you, Chuck. If they're going to do it anyway, should we give them some safety tips? Yes, Josh, we have some tips. The first one on the list slow and low. Don't charge out there to the 60 foot cliff right off the bat. Start on the ten footer slow and low. That is the tempo you want to check out. Very nice. You want to check out the water beforehand. Swim around down there at your landing zone. Scare off any fish. You can scare off any fish, maybe in the water to ward them away. Feel around for rocks and things. Barnacles, underwater spears. Sure. Anything like that. Right. Go with a friend who's always a good idea. You don't want to cliff that by yourself. No, dummy. You might as well dig your own grave and lie in it and start shoveling dirt over yourself. They recommend to wear a wetsuit because it can add a little cushioning. But if you've ever seen cliff divers, they generally wear the Speedo. I know. Which makes it one of the sexiest extreme sports around. You don't see Tony Hawk in a speedo, do you? No. Wow. I'm trying to imagine skateboarding with the Speedo. I'm sure somebody has done it. Probably those crazy kids at Jackass or whatever. Yeah. That one guy always wears his underwear. We need to talk about Orlando Duke, though. He's like the King Daddy of cliff diving. He's Ill duke? No, actually, they call him the Duke of Dive. He's Colombian, but he lives in Hawaii now. He's a Ninetime world champ. Wow. And his personal record in competition is 111ft. And he holds the record for the perfect dive. He's the only guy to ever get judged to get scored. A perfect dive. Nice. Across the board. Do they factor in how you're looking to speedo into that score? Yeah, he's a handsome man. Busy. Yeah, he is. Also, he wanted to be a high diver for Columbia, but they didn't, like, an Olympic high diver, but they wouldn't fund him. So he was like, okay, go dive off cliffs performance shows. Right. So he makes a lot more scratch doing this, I'm sure, than he would have as an Olympian. I'd like to mention somebody. Who's that? His name is Djwan Ron. He's Chinese, if you couldn't guess. Okay. He's 51, and he actually holds the world record that he set in 2008 for cliff diving off of waterfalls. Wow. I want you to think about this for a second, okay. In most cases, with waterfalls, there are rocks at the bottom, and there's a little something that we like to call a vortex. Yes. This is a swirling funnel of water underwater that sucks you in and holds you there. This guy aims for the center. Does that make sense? Apparently, because he survived. It would soften the fall, though, probably. Right. I have no idea why he jumps into the center. He just does. Wow. Yeah. How high the twelve point, 19 meters. So what's that? It's like 45, 50ft. Oh, that's not that much. It isn't, but he's jumping into a vortex, for God's sake. Right. And he's 51. Yeah. There's high divers, too. That's a different deal. Like, the show people, the high diving show people. That's not a cliff thing situation, obviously. But they think the world record is due to named Oliver Fare, 178ft. Wow. What do you jump into? They jump into those pools like a little cup. Yes. Riding an elephant. A cartoon. Yeah. And the previous guy, I can't remember what his name was, but I saw it on YouTube. It was in the remember watching this when I was a kid, and it might have been on Wide World of sports, but it showed oh, Dana something. And it had the camera view of his little platform up there. And it was crazy, man. I mean, I got, like, butterflies watching it in my cubicle. Imagine, I guess. Wait, there was one more thing I want to say. What? Competition. The Red Bull deal. You get three heats per competition and you're judged on drop, position in the air and dive, which means your flips. There are three things you can get scored on. Number of twists, summer salts and position during the summer, salt, and then entry into the water. So it's sort of like regular Olympic diving, the way that's scored, but just much higher. And they call them heat because of the speedos. I think you might be right. If you want to learn more about cliff diving, just type Cliffdiving in the handy search bar@howstepworks.com. Which means we've arrived. Now friends at Listenermail and breaking. Yes, we should just do the Facebook Twitter thing real quick. Facebook. We have a great streamlined Facebook page, that's stuff you should know. You can type in the search bar at Facebook. Yes. We also tweet now. We do that's syskodcast. Yes. On Facebook, though, I should mention we have some fan art already there. And if you have, like, cool fan art stuff you've done upload, it because we want to get all kinds of stuff for people to look at. We want it to be more than just you and I running our mouse, because that's all we ever do. Yes, that's right. To get involved. And you're going to be releasing T shirt details eventually. Eventually. Okay. We'll look for those on our Facebook page, right? Yes. So back to it. Beautiful. Josh, I'm going to call this hinky email. I saw this one. This is nice. I like it when people have weird dreams about us. Hello. Josh and Chuck and Jerry. Yesterday I was going to email you to tell you that due to listening to your podcast on my daily commute, I've begun to describe things as hinkie. Instead of dodgy. She's from the UK, which is the word I would usually use. This means that whenever I use it, I have to explain what it means. It's not a widely word used in the UK, as it seems hi is. This ends up in me recommending her podcast to a lot of people. So she's actually spreading the word. Nice. Thanks to the hinky thing. Then I thought, it's not that exciting of a story, so I decided not to send the email. But last night I dreamt I had a dream about you guys. I dreamt I bumped into Josh at a beach bar, which she says she's never been to a beach bar and she has no idea where it was. I told him the Hanky story and then behind him, he pointed to a big sign that said Hinky. Then he told me a lot of things. Chuck does rubs off on people and he proceeded to show me a bare snarl complete with swiping paw action. So I took this as a sign that I should probably send the email. I just think that's hysterical. That was clearly a sign. Yeah. I see the parishnar over the swiping. Paul. Wow, that's nice. The dream was by far the most normal dream I had last night. By the way, I also dreamt I got married by postal marriage. I didn't know there was such a thing. Yeah. Mail order bride. Is that what you mean? Maybe. Okay. Anyway, I hope that you take some pride in the fact that you were spreading the word hinky around the world from Rachel X. Okay. Thanks for that. Rachel, right? Chuck. Right. That was a good one. It was. We always like it when we're factored into dreams, right? Sure. This is cool. It is. Especially. I mean, consider that we have people who we've never met dreaming about us. I dream about people I've never met. I guess so. My celebrity dreams all the time. I told you about those where I'm like hanging out like buddies with people I love. Have you ever had a dream about Chuck paddling around with a celebrity? Never met. We want to hear about it. Even if you make it up, put it in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Want more? HowStuffWorks? Check out our blog on the housework.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | ||
How Street Gangs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-street-gangs-work | The street gang problem in America peaked in the 1990s, but recent FBI reports find that gang membership doubled from 2006-2011. What's driving this increase, and gangs in general? Wander into gang territory with Josh and Chuck in this episode. | The street gang problem in America peaked in the 1990s, but recent FBI reports find that gang membership doubled from 2006-2011. What's driving this increase, and gangs in general? Wander into gang territory with Josh and Chuck in this episode. | Tue, 02 Jun 2015 16:02:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=16, tm_min=2, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=153, tm_isdst=0) | 44192569 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's with us. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. Yeah. Not affiliated with any gang. No, I would have thought that goes without saying. You never know. Stuff you should know. Army. That's our gang. Yeah, I guess so. Which is nerds. Rolling around, dropping knowledge. That's how we roll. Sure. Our symbol is infinity. That's our gang sign. I don't think that should be our symbol. No. A perfect circle. No, I think the mic with the you should name our regular logo. Sure. All right. That's a symbol. We just need to learn how to make it in spray paint. Yes. Actually, that's david, what we just said. We just mentioned spray painting your gang sign. What? This old time? They still do that? No. Gangs have evolved so much. Yes, some people do still do it, but from what I understand, gangs have basically come to see that as like, why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense. You're marking your territory, right? You're marking yourself, whereas it's better to stay out of the hands of law enforcement and not throw a gang sign or tag something with your gang symbol then to do that in jail, gangs are wisening up, and they're just not committing crimes any longer. Because that puts them under the police microscope. No, I'm saying that they are committing crimes still. They're just not I don't think they spray paint their stuff as much. They're definitely getting more sophisticated in some gangs. I've seen that, like, mortgage fraud and identity theft and counterfeiting are some of the human trafficking some of the new crimes? So before we get started, though, Chuck, I want to say that throughout this reading the How Stuff Works article and doing research, I was plagued by this idea that we don't really have a real idea of how many people are in gangs, how many gangs are in the United States. Exactly. What kind of problems? Like, gang problem we have. Is it overstated? I suspect it might be overstated. 33,000 gangs. The FBI compiles this report every few years, and in the original House of Forks article, it cites the 2005 National Gang Threat Assessment, right? Yeah. And it says there are 21,500 gangs and 731,000 active gang members. 2011, which is the most recent one from what I could find, has not too many more gangs. 33,000, but 1.4 million gang members. Wait, 12,000 more gangs isn't a lot. I guess it is. Okay, but 1.4 million gang members? The number of gang members between 2005 and 2011, according to the FBI, doubled. Okay, if that's the case, right? Yeah. Why? What happened between 2005 and 2011? I don't know. Because the gang Hiday was in the all right, so what would cause gang membership to Skyrocket to double from 2005 to 2011? Significant. I have one guess federal grants going to police departments that say they have a gang problem. So maybe they're inflating the numbers. Maybe, yeah. Okay, what if they're not inflating the numbers? The thing that I think the internet. No, the economic crisis. If you go back and look at the history of gangs, and if you look at all gang activity, gang banging, if you try to find the underlying cause, one of the underlying causes, if not basically the underlying cause, is a lack of access to economic opportunity. Sure. Aka. Nothing else to do, no job prospects, and then already being surrounded by gangs or the possibility of gangs leads to an increase in membership. So we have this economic crisis in the United States. So if gang membership really did double, I would put my money on the idea that it was because of the economic crisis. Didn't that touch the middle and upper middle classes more, though? Was there a housing crisis? Oh, man, everybody got totally messed up by the economic crisis. Yeah, I mean, I know it touched everyone, but I didn't know it wasn't just housing. Like, housing kicked the whole thing off, but the job market. All of a sudden, all these people, even if it did affect, say, the middle class or the upper middle class, all of a sudden they lose their jobs. They start taking the lower classes job because they've got to survive. Now what are the lower classes doing? Interesting theory. If gang membership doubled in the US. Between 2005 and 2011, I would bet any amount of money that was because of the economic crisis. Yeah, you would stake your stuff. You should no fortune on that. Yes, I would. All the millions. All right, well, we may as well go and talk about why people join gangs, because you just teased it. Poverty is a huge reason. Yeah. These are usually in poor areas of the city. Not a lot of money going on. You can make money by robbing people, by dealing drugs. It provides a financial incentive to join a gang, basically. Yeah. I've read about one study from Los Angeles that found that neighborhoods that had unemployment rates of between 14% and 16% had about 15 times more gang related homicides than neighborhoods that had unemployment rates of between four and 7%. Yeah. And they say that gang related homicides account for close to half of all the homicides in the United States right now. Yeah, that's another thing that I found, like really? I saw also somewhere between 48 and 90%. I saw other places that are like 90%. This is all way overstated. The gangs peaked back in the we haven't had a real problem since then. I don't think that's the case, though. But there are some sociologists out there saying this is overstated. Yeah, I don't think anyone's saying there's not a gang problem, though, is there? No, I don't think anybody's disagreeing that there is a gang presence I think the degree to which there is a gang presence. So, Chuck, for example, you can go look at something from the Justice Policy Institute yeah. Called Violent Children 2010. Look up the youth gang violence problem as exaggerated, and it provides kind of a counterpoint to it, because there's one thing I'm not saying. There's not a gang problem. I'm not excusing the idea that you have low economic opportunities. So you join a gang. Totally get it. No, there's still morality. There's still plenty of people in the same situation that aren't joining gangs. Oh, yeah. Like 98%. What I'm saying is when you read articles that are just like, there's gangs everywhere, and they're killing everybody, 90% of the homicide rates are because of gangs and their immoral little kids coming out of the inner city. Your antenna should immediately go up, and you should start asking critical questions about where this data is coming from, what they're basing the data on, who is giving you this data. Do they stand to benefit from people being scared? Do they get funding to study this kind of stuff? Yeah, you just have to ask questions like that. Yeah. They're creating hysteria. Yeah. Anytime you encounter hysteria like that yes. You should stop for a second. If you have that amount of self possession, stop and just start asking questions like, whoa, whoa. Everybody calmed down. Agreed, sir. Or just wrong, because the gangs are coming for you. All right, that was it for my soapbox. All right, so back to why you might join a gang. Peer pressure. I love that that's listed because it's true. I mean, it sounds kind of like a very high school thing, but a lot of times is when you're getting pressure to join a gang, they seek out children. Right. That's where a lot of gangs find the Roots, the Crypts, Bloods, both high schools. That's right. The blue, the red. Those are the high school colors. That's right. We'll get to them later. Boredom. We talked about that. A lot of these communities, there isn't a lot going on. They don't have the neighborhood pool or maybe even a neighborhood library or a neighborhood youth center. Sure. Or a playground that's not in disrepair. So these shuttered communities don't have a lot going on. So kids are bored, and then they fall into a sense of despair, which means maybe I don't have a father who's a role model. Maybe my father or mother or both are in prison, but I have a family right over here. This gang says they love me, they're going to get my back. And now I have a sense of community finally, through this gang. And some gangs actually have set up overt community programs, like job training programs, things that basically said, we have been so neglected by the community at large that local gangs are the ones setting this up. And, I mean, that's a pretty good reason to join a gang is when they're holding community outreach programs in your community and they're the only show in town. Yeah. It's not just a TV thing. The gang leader with the heart of gold that secretly funnel the Wesley Snipes to build the playground. That stuff happens. Sure. And we're not trying to say, like, gang leaders are just the best, like big teddy bears. They have been known to quietly reinvest money in their own communities. Well, yeah. You don't want the place falling apart, especially if that's your major market. Yeah. And plus, also, it's a really great way to ingratiate yourself with the local community. Absolutely. Sure. So let's talk a little bit about the history of gangs. If you'll indulge me for a moment. You can consider yourself indulge. I love the way and this is by the Grab, sir, Ed Grabinowski. He says criminal gangs have been around for as long as crime, and that makes total sense because they're strengthened numbers. And I think you've seen the movie Gangs of New York. Striped pants. Striped pants. Oh, man. They're a bunch of striped pants. Yeah, a lot of them fashion. Did I like it? No, not really. Yes. I went back and watched it recently. I really liked it. I did not like Cameron Diaz. Oh, I forgot she was in it. Yes, she was missing. She has, like, a Cockney accent, now that I think about it. No. Okay. That must have been a nightmare. I had. I've had that same nightmare. I think she had some sort of a weird accent. Maybe she was trying to do Cockney. Maybe. Good movie, though. I think I really enjoy it. I could stand and go back and see it as a warm up. I liked it. And what's this? Daniel Day Lewis? Man, what a great character in that movie. So, anyway, that movie was based on fact, because in the 19th century in New York and Five Points, you had these ethnic gangs, the Irish gangs, Polish gangs, Italian gangs, and they all fought for territory and robbed and mugged each other and had violent fights in the street. That was pretty crazy. In lower Manhattan. Yeah. Five Points gangs. Yeah. Very tough. But sometimes they band together and fight other parts of town's gangs like the Bowery Boys, that kind of stuff. Yeah. So they're just fighting all the time. Turf wars like today or what? Gangs, they kind of have always been about turf. To a certain degree, they were about turf. And that is we'll see one of the ways that you can divide gang gangs. It's one of the definitions of gang, turf gang. But they are also ethnic gangs typically as well, like Irish gangs or Polish gangs or Italian gangs. You might ask yourself, what happened to Polish gangs? What happened to Irish gangs? Yeah. Do you want to hear my theory behind the economic crisis of the 19 Seven S? No. These gangs went away by the most of the gangs in the United States were Hispanic gangs and black gangs. Yeah. Ethnic gangs, like we think of as Irish or Polish or whatever, just disappeared. And the reason why they disappeared is because the Irish and the Polish stopped being considered ethnic, and they were just white after that, then all of the economic opportunities afforded to white people were afforded to the Irish people and the Polish people, and they had very little reason to be gang members any longer, and they became skinheads later on. But don't you think that that's probably what happened? Maybe so. I couldn't find anything definitive anywhere. They were, like, not a disenfranchised ethnic group any longer. Right. They were just part of the white machine. Exactly. That is United States. Yes, I could see that. Man, you got theories out the wazoo today. But a lot of them became like cops. That was a big thing, especially for former Irish gang members. A lot of them moved right from Irish gang members into Irish cops. You're like. Where can I still go? Crack head? Right. Exactly right. What's strange is, as we'll see that's kind of going on today, still gang members moving into things like law enforcement in the military. Yeah. Boy, that was frightening. Hysteria inducing, isn't it? It is. So in the 1950s and had what were called car clubs, and they were gangs. And this is when you think of the outsiders, like, when you rumble over territory. Sure. These were the car clubs, and they would get together, and they would fight in a parking lot with chains and knives and things like that. Go rescue people from burning houses end up in an iron lawn stay gold phony. Boy. And they began to languish in the 1960s, and then in the 1960s, a man named Raymond Washington and a man named Tuki. I say, man. Two boys. Yeah. I think they were high schoolers 17. They might have been middle schoolers even they were young, because they originally called their gang the Baby Avenues, the after school special. That's a good gang. The Baby Avenues. It was a very small gang at first, and then it later became the Cribs because they were young, like Baby Cribs. Is that right? And then it became the cribs in South Central Los Angeles. And they were blue, like you said earlier, because Fremont High School, where they went to school, where that was their school colors. Yeah. So it is kind of funny to think that it was rooted and, like, it's not like it burst out of school pride, but they did base their colors on their high school, and then as a result of the crypts kind of taking over the area, raymond Washington was murdered, by the way, in 1979, so he didn't last too long. Ten years is a pretty good run for a gang member. Yeah, probably so. I would think that's longer than you would predict and took he went to prison for murder. But in the 1970s, and the Bloods were born as a result of the Crypts in their activity. All these smaller gangs that had been, I guess, messed with by the Crypts kind of came together and said, all right, we need Arrival gang, so we're going to be the Bloods. That's why the Crypts formed originally for other rival gangs. It was a couple of gangs that came together. Yeah, it's banding together. Right. Which still happens today. True. If you believe that stuff. And they were from the high school, tenure high school, yes. And they were red and they were founded by Sylvester Scott and Vincent Owens. So then you had the Bloods, you had the Crypts. They are still thriving today. They do not get along well, do they get along? So allow me to mention the truce, man, the 19 what, the Watts in South Central Los Angeles. All right. The blood and the crypts came together with Jim Brown. Football legend Jim Brown. Yeah. I remember this actually in, like, I think, a YMCA auditorium or a high school auditorium or gym and sat down and worked out a peace treaty based on one between, I think, Israel and Egypt that have been used. It was a peace treaty between the Crypts and the bloody two, and it was abided by so much. So as far as I can tell, it's still going on. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a big deal. But that's not to say that there's not interrelated gang violence, because now that the Crypts in the Bloods had this 1992 Watts truce signed, there was much more infighting among different Crypt Sets and different Blood Sets. Well, yeah, I guess we should talk about the idea of nations like the Crypt Nation and Blood Nation. They're Bloods and Crypts all over the country. Yeah. Which makes them super gangs. Yeah, but they sound terrifying. It does. The guy who did the article I read said that he thought that they would all be sort of cut from the same cloth and they would all get along. But apparently within nations, it's very much still broken down into your own neighborhood gang and you might not get along with the other Crypt gang that's nearby. Even so, the Crypt is the Nation and the Set is like the local chapter, basically. Yeah, but like you said, this guy named Mike Carly, PhD. He's, I think, from the University of Missouri or no Missouri State. I'm sorry. I think it's a sociologist who went in and just, like, assimilated with gang members and hung out and ended up writing this treatise on it. And he said you just said that he expected everybody to get along if you were a Crip. That's just not the case, because if you're a crip, your Sets territory is much more likely to butt up against another Crypt Sets territory than, say, a Bloods territory on the other side of the freeway. And if you're selling drugs on the corner and they're selling drugs on the corner, well, you're fighting directly for the same customers money. So you're much more likely to erupt in violence or whatever. Yeah, in the 1980s is when the narcotics kind of came on the scene. Before that, gangs didn't really deal a lot of drugs, like more petty crime and muggings and stuff like that. Yeah. Supposedly it was drugs that changed everything. Not only unleashed the spasm of violence that started in the 80s in Los Angeles specifically, but also, I think, even prior to that, in the 70s in Chicago is where the idea of taking street gangs and turning them into hierarchical drug dealing businesses was formed by a couple of guys named Larry Hoover and David Barksdale. That's the guy from the wire. It wasn't David. That was Avon Barksdale, wasn't it? Yeah. I wonder if he's named after David Barksdale. That seems like a nod. So Larry Hoover formed the Black Gangsters and David Barksdale formed the Black Disciples. And they were rival gangs in Chicago that eventually formed the Black Gangster Disciples. A super gang. Sure. And they had this idea that they would take all of their gang members and just turn them into drug dealers. And the crack epidemic helped that tremendously. Sure. Which, by the way, if you're interested in this kind of stuff at all, go listen to our crack episode. It was one of our best, if you ask me. Yes. We have a few episodes that touch on this. I think the Hell's Angels, even though that was a good one. Biker gangs are not quite the same. Is that correct? Yeah, that's very different. Categorization. Those are called outlaw motorcycle gangs. Seriously? OMG. Yeah. OMG. I think the one on zoot suits. Oh, yeah. That was a lot like yeah, that's a great history. One that we did, you should look into. Yeah. And gangs. So Bloods and Crypts, they have this way of talking where the Bloods won't say they'll substitute C in words for B, and Crypts will substitute B for C because they won't even say a word with B in it. Like, let's go to Starbucks and get a Starbucks. Starbucks and get a coffee. Yeah, because they're just hanging out in Starbucks. No, they're hanging out in Starbucks. Starbucks. And they also have their own way of walking. C walking, and B walking, which is sort of like a little dancy sort of move. But I looked at them both and I couldn't tell much of a difference. Which means that I would be a bad gang member because I would do the wrong walk. I would guess that you would pick it up pretty quick. Yeah. And of course, they also have their besides the blue and red clothing, they have their gang symbol, which in case you ever were like, I kind of want to wear my red hat today because I'm a Los angeles Angels fan. But I don't want to get in trouble because I'm a crypt, so they still have the signs to rely on. Well, I would guess you would have to be a Dodgers fan. And if you're a Blood, you'd be an Angels fan. Yeah, but the Angels, they're anaheim. I don't think anyone in La. Is really an Angels fan. Oh, really? You got to be from Orange County. Although we're going to hear from people like, I live in La. I love the Angels. So that's the Bloods and the Crypts in a nutshell. That could be its own show. But we'll take a break here and we will talk a little bit more about gang history right for this. So, Chuck, we keep throwing out the word super gangs. Yeah, it sounds like a media creation for you, but it does basically what it describes as a franchise gang like the Bloods or The Crypts or these larger groups like the Folks or The People. Yeah the people nation and the folks nation So I think the Bloods are affiliated with the People Nation and the Crypts are affiliated with Folk Nation. Yes, but this basically this network of gang members who are related to one another through their gang in different cities. Say somebody in Chicago wants to get into the St. Louis market, they'll send some people and set up a gang there. Easy peasy. It's called Franchising. It really is. And all of a sudden now you have an interstate gang, which makes it a super gang. Those are I don't want to say peanuts, because it's a big deal, but compared to like a transnational gang yeah. The transnational gangs are the ones where I'm like yeah, that's a real problem there, I think. Well, let's just read the names of the People Nation and the Folk Nation, just so people know what's going on. In the people nation. You have the Vice lords and I believe they are out of Chicago. Right. The almighty Vice Lord nation. And they've been around for a long time, too. They were one of the earlier gangs. Yeah, like in the late sixty s, I think. The Black Pea Stones, the Latin Kings, the Gaylords, the Southside Popes, the Mickey Cobras, the Four Corner Hustlers and the Almighty Saints. And affiliated with the Bloods. That's the People Nation. Okay. Then the folk nation. You have Peter Pollen, Mary. You have Bob Dylan. Terrible, sorry. You have the Gangster Disciples, the Insane Spanish Cobras. Yeah, that just sounds scary. How about a Cobra? That's insane. Right? Because the Cobra is not bad at all. Right. I like Cobra. What's worse than the regular Cobra and insane Cobra? Yeah. Where could he be from? Spain. Right. The west. Spain is what they're saying. No, okay. I think they mean like a Hispanic hispaniola. Yes. The Latin Eagles, the Maniac Latin Disciples, the Simon City Royals and the Spanish Gangster Disciples are a part of the folk nation. All right, so we talked about ethnic gangs. They can be skinheads or neo Nazis, or they can be largely Hispanic or African American. Even if they are turf gangs, they are usually also divided among ethnic lines because people tend to live a segregated lifestyle here in the United States, like in Five Points, if you're an Irish gang, your Irish neighborhood gang was probably all Irish people, not necessarily just because it was an Irish gang, but because it's where everybody lived, right? Yeah. There's also prison gangs. Most of the time they are just affiliations in the prison of the gang you're in on the outside. Right? Like, there's Bloods and Crips in prison, but sometimes they form new gangs in prison that are not part of the outside world. And I love how one of these guys, one expert in the article here said putting young gang members in prison is like sending them to criminal college. So it's not like, oh, we took a gang member, put them in jail, and then you don't have to worry about that anymore because they're in prison. Right. But lots of bad things still going on. Listen to our prisons episode for that, man. We've covered a lot of this stuff piecemeal. Heck yeah. So there's also female gangs. Yeah. Those are on the rise. Yeah. Female gangs supposedly originally started out, it's basically like booster gangs made up of gang members, girlfriends and wives. Like, here, hold all these guns for us. Right. Or they're just like, we're going to do our own thing or whatever. Yeah, female gangs that have nothing to do with other male gangs. There's also coed gangs that really don't care what gender you are. Do you want to hear some of the sister gang titles? Their name? Sure. The Bad Barbies. That's a good one. The Harlem Hilton and the Hood Barbies are some of the what they call sister gangs. Got you. And like you said, they originally were just sort of like helped out the men. But in some cases now they are like their own legit gang who are pretty tough because they want to make a name for themselves as a gang of women who can also be murderous. We can do these things as well, right? Feminism. Actually, Darticle, I read. No, it did. Darth I read said that second wave feminism is one of the underlying things, but they said it's a very tenuous link I got you. Like, that may have spurred things. Right? I'm a woman. I'm going to go off and do my own thing. But it's a gang after all. But that coed gang that I mentioned, that's an example of another type of gang, a hybrid gang. Yeah. Juggle o's. It seems like hybrid gangs are the ones that are the ones on the rise because this is where I got the idea that people don't tag like they used to. They don't wear colors like they used to. Because there's hybrid gangs, and hybrid gangs are made up of people who might come from rival factions. They break up and reform with different membership from time to time. I don't think on any set schedule or whatever, but I think it's probably something that happens organically. They may have coed members. They have members of different ethnicities. They may not have colors. Right. It's a balance of gang members that aren't cut and dried and hierarchical like the traditional idea of gangs are. And apparently these are the gangs that are around these days, mostly I can't say that. That are maybe the fastest growing type of gang or hybrid gangs. Yeah, I was not joking about the jugglers. They do list them as a hybrid gang in four states. What state are they? I know New Mexico is one. I think Washington is another one. Interesting. Washington state. Yeah. They said that they're not super organized, and their crimes are sort of sporadic and willynilly, but they're increasingly violent, the crimes are so they are worried about them. You just laughing. I'm over here just being quiet. Got you. Gang initiations. If you go to join a gang, there's probably an initiation that you will have to go through, and there are many different things throughout the years that have taken place. To join a gang initiation by cop is you got to kill a cop. I said that's pretty rare these days. Understandably. Again, I really feel like we might be entering just urban legend territory here. Oh, no, dude. This is a gang expert researcher. This is, like, from a Stanford paper. Okay. He's just making stuff up. I don't think he's making it up, but I wonder how much of it is just verified or if it's just chatter. Well, he went on to say it's a rare thing. Okay, all right. So he's saying no one's ever killed a cop. No, I'm not saying that, but I think it's fine. Go ahead. Okay. Being jumped in or beat in, that's when you have to basically get whaled on by all the gang members. Right. At one time, sex, then, that's used to initiate women into male dominated gangs, where basically they have to have sex or are forced to have sex with a bunch of guys in the gang. Right. And what I read is, like, in a co ed gang in particular, that's not necessarily the way that women get in. Some women get beat in. Sure. Jacked in, and you commit a theft. There's something called the gauntlet, where you basically run between two lines of gang members, and you have to run the gauntlet while they're beating on you as well. A lot of these sound like little games. There's one called catching a flag or a rag, where it's literally like there's a rag in the middle of the thing, and you got to get the rag and get out of there in one piece. Wow. Or one where. They drop freeing Hoover where there are six pennies that are thrown on the ground, and you can't leave until you get all those six pennies off the ground. What does that have to do with Hoover? I have no idea. Hoover? I don't know. I don't know. This is Lincoln. It didn't say freaking Lincoln, though. And then being courted in, which I thought was super interesting. This is when they invite somebody like a doctor or a lawyer who is sympathetic to their cause. Got you. And like, you can be invited in very nicely. And it said or electricians. That's kind of funny. Weird. Yeah. I guess somebody's got to keep the clubhouse wired. Exactly. I had not heard about courted in, but I did run across it indirectly with talk about gangs going after military and law enforcement and lawyers or legal field people to join their gang. Yeah, biker gangs, especially, apparently are really target former military, and that's for good reason. These people are highly trained and skilled in weapons and they would imagine be highly sought after. And it's not just former military, supposedly. Apparently there are also, like, active duty military. Yeah. They said 53 different gangs are represented in the US. Military. Yeah. That's scary. Yes, it is. Because these people have access to some really high powered guns. That's right. Should we take another break? I think so. All right. We'll talk a little bit more about what's going on these days in gangland. Right. For this. Alright. So what's an average day of gang member like? I love Ed's description here. Yeah. They sleep late, they sit around the neighborhood, they drink and do drugs. Later on, they meet up at a pool hall or some other, like, local hangout right. And hang out and do some more drugs and drink some more. I think probably what he mentions next is what a gang members daily life is like. It's like selling drugs, depending on your hierarchy. Yeah. If you are, say, a member of M 18 or Ms 13, you're doing local enforcement for transnational drug cartels. And so you may be involved in picking up a crate of humans that were shipped across from Mexico, or you may be involved in mortgage fraud if you're one of the sharp ones. That was probably corded rather than jumped in. Yeah. There's a lot of different stuff you're going to be doing. And right about here is where it becomes clear where you should stop and ask the question, like, wait a minute, what is the difference between a street gang and just organized crime? Oh, yeah. I mean, not too much of a difference, I imagine the answer that I could come up with, the closest thing to an answer I could come up with is a street gang is a looser association of organized crime. Sometimes. Other times it can be a very tight organization of organized crime. Yeah, but basically they're almost indistinguishable. It's just a street gang will have more overt affiliation, and it's usually a lot more localized. That makes sense. So listen to our episode on the Mafia. Yeah. Which is basically street gangs that were whipped into shape and organized weapons these days are getting kind of scary. It's not the old days of chains and knives, especially with the former military and involved and the just accessibility of these weapons these days. Body armor, police gear, like high powered assault rifles, you name it, man. Right. Armored up. Another thing where if gangs have infiltrated the military, are actively infiltrating the military, or trying to recruit military or law enforcement people, that is a real danger to that is getting their hands on, like, some serious guns, because it's not like these are guns that you can just buy anywhere. No. You have to steal them from the right people. That's right. Or get the right people to get them for you. Yeah. They're not going to the gun show. Well, yes, they are. Oh, are they? Yeah. But you can't buy military grade weapons necessarily at all gun shows or the good stuff. Native American gangs is the thing, though. Yes. Apparently, they were born in the 1980s, and reason was sort of identity and solidarity that has been declining in Native American parts of the country over the years. And protection is a big one. Between 1992 and 2002, Native Americans experienced violent crimes at double the rate of the rest of the United States, and 60% of that violence was incurred against them by white people. Oh, yeah. So they're kind of banding together. And 50% of those cases weren't even pursued by police, apparently. I guess I would lead to increased gang activity. Yeah. So they're banding together, informing gangs, and I think they're affiliating with a more Hispanic gang culture. Oh, yeah. From what I could tell, it was a really interesting article on Al Jazeera website, which is really good. Super interesting read. We'll post that with our additional links that we're doing now. How about that? Darn Tooton. What else, Chuck? I've got it. Yakuza. We did the podcast on the Yakuza. Yeah, we did. Asian gangs. Yes. You can go listen to that one. What do you do if you're in a gang and you want to get out? You got to murder somebody. Oh, you don't? So there's this urban legend. I read snippets from a book called Gangs in America Three by C. Ronald Huff, and he compiled a bunch of interviews with gang members and former gang members, and one of the things that emerged was there's this myth that if you want it out of the gang, you have to kill your own mother. Oh, wow. Right. In some cases, you have to get beat out. Like you're beat in. Almost like the circle is complete. Sometimes you have way more people on you than you did when you were beat in. But more often than not, what emerged from these interviews was that they left either by moving or they stopped claiming affiliation with the gang, or like they got a job or something just in their life changed. They just quit. Yeah. They just walked away. And there wasn't like a pursuit to the death because you can't ever leave the gang. There was a couple of people that said they were told stuff like that, but when it came down to it, in reality, and practically, they just stopped being part of the gang. The problem is, when you leave a gang, you very frequently you might have gang tattoos still. Yeah. And you kind of need to get rid of those or else who knows what can happen because you're no longer in the gang anymore. So a lot of post gang transition groups there's this one called Homeboy Industries that I ran across. One of the things they offer is tattoo removal of gang tattoos. Nice. Yeah. They can get kind of expensive. Well, you could get your tattoo removed for free. I thought about that and I'm like, I don't think they fall for it. It doesn't look like a gang type. There are also lots of gangs in the United States now set up for immigrants. Like Somali. Gangs are a big problem in Minneapolis, apparently. Yeah. There's some in Clarkston. Yeah. Right here in Georgia. Somali gangs and then Dominican gangs, sudanese gangs, Caribbean gangs, Jamaican gangs. Every country, it seems like, has some sort of operation going here in the US. I don't know how vast they are. Yes, but in certain areas of the country, they are causing some trouble. Right. And again, it makes me wonder, like, how much of it is, due to a lack of access to economic opportunity, do people want to be in gangs if given the choice to not being a gang? It seems like from everything I ran across, Chuck, the answer is no. They would probably rather have just a regular job or something like that. And this is one of the reasons why gangs have become so attractive over the years and stayed so attractive, is they often offer the best avenue to income around. Oh, yeah, sure. You just have to commit crime for it. Right. And Ed points out that is probably the most effective way to try and stop gangs is not to just have a police crackdown, because I think everyone knows you shut something down on one street corner, it's just going to move to another street corner, and that's probably not doing much good. So they have programs called Weed and seed programs throughout the country now from the Department of justice, where they weed out the worst gang members. And see, that's what I think is going on. When you say, I think they all probably just want jobs, I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think there are the hardcore that have no interest in getting a job. Yeah. Because they're making way more money than they could with a regular job. And it's just their lifestyle. And those are the ones who are trying to weed out in favor of trying to leave the rest that they think can be rehabilitated. And they called the second part of the seating, which means seeding the neighborhood, giving them more stuff to do, maybe job opportunities or a rec centre or a library or a pool. Because, again, you're talking very largely about, like, juveniles here. Yeah, fix the playground, like little things like that, making their neighborhoods less prone to boredom. And I don't mean to sound naive, like, all gang members just want a legitimate job, so everybody go give them good jobs and the gang problem will go away. That's not at all what I'm saying. There's always going to be people who are like, no matter what I do, I can make way more money selling drugs than I can, like, trying to go get a regular job. And I'm comfortable with just selling drugs and, like, rolling the dice and living life that way. There will always be people like that. The only way to get rid of that, most likely, is to take away the prohibition of drugs, I would guess. And then you don't have, like, street corner drug dealers any longer. But from what I'm seeing in this research, if you provide economic opportunities, gang membership at large tends to dry out more. You're always going to have organized crime, but that doesn't mean you're going to have a gang problem necessarily. Right. You got anything else? Could I possibly well, let's close then with the list of the FBI's most dangerous gangs. Florencia 13. Have you heard of them? No. I've heard of some of the other Latin gangs. Yeah. They're tied to the Mexican Mafia. There's the Barrio Azteca out of Texas, and apparently they work with the wireless cartel. So they're doing serious business. Yeah. The Latin King Nation. You went to the Latin Kings. I think so. Ms 13, they're definitely on the FBI most wanted list. They're from El Salvador. Yeah. And then so M 18 is from Mexico. Yeah. Those tattoos on the Ms 13, man, that's pretty amazing stuff. It's like full facial tattoos. We did a tattoo episode, too, we did in New York. You have the Trinitarios. They were formed in the prison system in New York in the 1980s. And then there's a few more. You can just look them up. I don't think we need to go through all these man alive. The Mongols? They're still around. Yes. There's a huge biker gang shooting in Waco this month, I think a couple of weeks ago. Yes. Cops and cops shot a lot of them and they shot each other. It's a bad scene. Crazy stuff at Starbucks, I think. Again, if you were in a gang, we would love to hear from you. So listen up for the ways to contact us afterwards. Or if you're a former gang member, whatever. We're interested. How far off the mark was I? Let me know if you want to learn more about gangs. You're just a regular Joe. You can type streetgangs in the search bar howstepworks.com? And it will bring up this article and says, this the search bar. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this five year old mother. Hey, guys. While working through my 02:00 A.m. Shift this morning, I was barreling through the male puberty episode. For the sake of Stuff you should know continuity when Chuck made a comment about the female body and how it probably couldn't handle childbirth at five years old. Of course, this is the episode where my brain decides to chime in and contribute. I'm not sure if anyone has pointed this out, but there was a Peruvian girl named Lena Medina who gave birth to a baby boy in 1939 via Csection at the age of five years and seven months. Oh, my goodness. And he said he snoped it too. And he said after being brought to a physician due to what her parents suspected to be a large abdominal tumor was discovered, she was actually pregnant. If you're feeling the ambivalence of simultaneous fascination, nausea, I believe that to be the general response. Though they initially suspected her father, the identity of the man whom impregnated was never confirmed cannot help but wonder about the developmental implications that would surely arise in such a scenario. But her son apparently lived at the age of 40, having been raised under the impression that Lena was his sister. Crazy. My goodness. And that's from Brian W. Wow, Brian. Thanks for letting us know about that. It rings the Vegas bell. When was it? Did he say? The 1930. Oh, no, it doesn't. Yeah, I remember when that happened. Well, he could have remembered reading about Brian. Yeah, Brian. W thanks, Brian. If you want to get in touch with us, like Brian did, like we said, if you're a gang member or former gang member, we want to hear from you. If you have a correction or if you just want to say hi or whatever, anybody can get in touch with us via Syskpodcast on Twitter. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyouhadknow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@houseuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househoutworks.com." | ||
43ad155a-53a3-11e8-bdec-7b190e439c0c | Matcha: That Ain't Just Tea | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/matcha-that-aint-just-tea | Matcha is something else, healthy and delicious and all the rage. Learn all about this trendy beverage today. | Matcha is something else, healthy and delicious and all the rage. Learn all about this trendy beverage today. | Thu, 25 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=177, tm_isdst=0) | 44192157 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer, school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends. And we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out. This follow the first ever Stuff You Should Know book. Chuck. That's right. What's the cool, super cool title we came up with? It's stuff you should know. Colon an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. And it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing and there's the look of the book. It's exactly what we hoped it would be and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can. And you don't have to wait. Actually, well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre order the book right now, everywhere. You get books and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering, which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And we are matcha macha men. We are some matcha men. And Jerry's out there, too. This is stuff you should know. That's very cute. Yummy's. Itunes, I guess on her phone is stuck on Macho Man. Like anytime she plugs it in in the car, that's what comes up. What is the deal with that? The same first song starts off yeah, and it varies. It's annoying. I don't know what it is, but that's the way it is because Tim Cook said so. By the way, if I may, here at the beginning, I joined Instagram finally because of that Gwyneth Paltrow thing. What? Or is this totally unrelated to Matcha? Okay, well, welcome. Do. You thought I joined instagram because of Gwyneth Paltrow? I thought that this is a segue into the March episode. No, I just finally got on Instagram because I loathe Facebook. And the only thing I will do on Facebook now is I do not pass Go. I go straight to Movie Crush. And Movie Crushers, which is a great community of really awesome people. It's a little wonderful corner of Facebook that's not snarky and fun and supportive and movie talk mostly. But I finally got on Instagram because everyone was like, dude, you just get on Instagram because it's not like that, even though Facebook owns Instagram. And so I did. So if you want to follow me, you can find me at chuck. The podcaster. There was a pregnant pause. I'm going to say mine, too. I'm at Josh Clark. Yeah, I'm posting a few personal pictures. I'm posting some movie crush stuff. Any shirtless ones? Not yet. I've always kind of considered myself an amateur photographer. Just things I find beautiful or funny or fun or interesting. Not a ton of stuff. But, you know, I'm there now. Sounds like you've got it all figured out, Chuck. How many followers you have? How many do I need to beat? I think I'm at about I think 20,000. Jeez. You'll make it to that. I'll never make it there. You will, too. I think I'm at about that. Got a good little crew going. What kind of stuff do you post? I need to follow way better. Post some momo pictures. Okay, what else do I post? Just momo pictures. Pictures of me with food, that kind of stuff. The usual Instagram stuff. I don't know how personal to get, as much as you want to be. I mean, if you do, like, confessional videos where you're crying, it might freak people out a little bit. Oh, can you do video? Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, you are new, aren't you? I think I might just keep it very basic and just do the old here's the picture. Okay. I predict that will change eventually. You think? Sure. Cut to me crying. I'm going to go follow you right now. I'm at 27.9, by the way. Oh, wow. Chuck, the podcaster. Go ahead. I haven't announced it yet, so don't make fun of my numbers. I'm following you. Probably got no more than a couple of hundred. You got 945. All right, that's pretty good. Not bad. Pre announcement. Well, yes, that's not bad at all. Wow. So the reason I thought let me do this, because I have some explaining to do. The reason I thought you were talking about Gwyneth Paltrow is because Gwyneth Paltrow is the person that the current deep and abiding love for all things matcha that America has. Gwyneth Paltrow is the person that is chalked up is kicking that off back in 2015. Did you know that? Yes. They lay it at her feet. Is that fair? Because I feel like not at all fair. Yeah, I feel like the matcha sort of hipster matcha boom happened before that. But I think what they're saying is she popularized it, and it was no longer just relegated to hipsters because hipsters are so rare. They're rare creatures, and they don't have much reach in the popular culture. It takes a Gwyneth Paltrowho to really spread an idea these days. Well, thank God for her. But there was a post that she made back in 2015 that says that chalat. C-H-A-L-A-I-T. Yeah. Chalait. Machalate was a dreaming new discovery on Instagram, and that apparently made people go start drinking Matcha because she discovered in an 11th century tea powder. That's right. Good for her. It's dreamy. I'm glad we're doing this, because first of all, I love Matcha. Yeah, I do, too. And I think I got into it. I've fallen out of it. But this made me buy some more that I bought online as being shipped now as we speak. Oh, yeah. So I got out of it for a little while, I guess, maybe because I can't go to my little Japanese store and get it in person. But what kicked off my love of Matcha was my friend PJ in Los Angeles. So it was a while ago, and then I was reminded from the watching Top Chef the other night how much I love that show. They had a challenge where it was they had to prepare a traditional Japanese kaiseki, which is a progressive not quite a tasting menu, but a progressive dinner, formal dinner, which is very much reminded me of the Matcha formal tea ceremony right. Which we'll talk about. But I just want to say that I think it would be deliciously ironic if you learned about Matcha from PJ and PJ learned about it from Gwyneth Paltrow's. Instagram. This is way free 2015. So what about Matcha? Everything. Chuck what about matcha KitKats? Are they your favorite KitKat flavor? Did not care for those. I had them. Yeah. I did not like them at all. Have you had, like, a good Matcha latte from Starbucks? Have not had a Matcha latte. It's pretty good. I think it's like Matcha tea. So you like the traditional Matcha powder in hot water stirred together. There's your tea. Yeah. Great. I mean, that's the purest approach there is. And that's, like, what you said. People have been drinking that since, like, the 11th century. Yeah. Or add it to just a regular steeped green tea. Might add a little dash of Matcha. Or to a smoothie, which I have a smoothie almost every morning. Yes. Okay. So there's a lot of different ways that you can enjoy matcha. Hasn't said what it is yet. No, we're about to. I think we should also say that we're not invested in any kind of Matcha outfit or anything like that, because we're talking it up a bit. Like, we are like we're in the midst of a pump and DUP scheme or something like that. We're just fans. Right. Macha is just great. So we should say, like you're saying matcha is tea, but it's tea and powdered form, and it's specifically a very distinct type of tea, grown in a very distinct way and processed in a distinct way, and that it's really unlike any other kind of tea. So much so that it's a really weird thing if you think about it. But then it's also a very delightful and calming, soothing thing to learn about too, I found. Yeah. And big thanks to howstuffworkscom maria C. Hunt the American Specialty Tea alliance. And then this great article on good and proper from Emily Holmes helped me out for this one, but yeah, so the matcha is these tea leaves that have been steamed, then dried, and then you get those stems out. Yeah. The seeds. No stems and seeds. That's the rule. You don't want any swag tea. Right. So you get that stuff out of there, and then you grind that stuff into a fine powder, and we'll talk about the different places where it's grown and then about the history. But what you end up with is this, ideally, very bright, bright, chlorophyll green powder, almost neon green. Yeah. If it's the good stuff, you're right. Yeah. The greener, the brighter the almost day glowy it is, usually the better the actual matcha is. And we'll see exactly why. But somewhere along the way, about the 11th century or the 12th century, I guess it would be, I think back in 91, the Japanese imported this idea from the Chinese. And it's weird to think, like, there was a point in time where they're like, okay, we're going to start powdering tea from this process, and then this will go on to become matcha, where up to that, nobody made tea like that. They made tea like you would think they grew tea. They kind of packed it into cakes or bricks, and they sold it like that. And you would steep it and you would drink the liquor is what they call it, and you would remove the tea leaves. That's not at all what matches the matches. Straight up ground powdered tea leaves. And you're drinking the tea itself, not like steep tea that's come out of the tea and you're throwing the tea leaves away. You're drinking the whole kit. In kaboodle, as they say, Japan. Yes. Which is why there are so many great health benefits, which we'll get to well, first of all, in Japanese, mat means powdered, in cha means tea. So bad matcha, powdered tea. But there was a Zen monk named Issai, I believe. So. Okay. Who brought these teased after going on a trip to China. And I think this is the person who, in 1891, 700 years, started cultivating this stuff and then had a pupil. And this stuff was very popular with the monks because they could get caffeine loaded and stay up all night and pray. Right. But I had a pupil named Mioi, who is a Buddhist monk there in the mountains northwest of Kyoto. And I think this is the person that really took this cultivation seriously and started to sort of make it a larger scale operation. Yeah. The Buddhist temple that Miyoi lived at, I think was in charge of is called Kozanji on the Tongano Mountain. I checked with Yummy, I was like, do you say both those? And she said, yeah. And I practiced and it's not coming outright. But Taga No Mountain outside of Kyoto and Mioi just so happened where he lived, where he started planting this tea, had these incredible natural conditions that just so happened to come together that produced exactly the kind of tea leaf that you would want for matcha. But it was just basically a freak of nature that it happened that way. Yeah, we got this great soil, super fertile. We have this morning dew that comes in because of the river nearby and that really dressed on those tea leaves and just makes it all pop with chlorophyll. And it became more popular. And as it became more popular, it was the third shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate, and his name was Ashikaga Yoshi Mitsu. Beautiful. I love Japanese. I know. It's wonderful, isn't it? Yeah, there's something about it. It just appeals to my eyeballs, and it peels to my tongue when I can manage to get it out of my mouth correctly. There's just something about it. I really like it. I know. He's the one that said, all right, we got to get more of this stuff, and fast, because people love this matcha. So let's get it going here in the Ugly area right outside of Kyoto. So it was originally just on Togo Mountain, and then it was expanded to a wider area, and it was there when they expanded to Uji. And Ugly is now like the place where you get the world's greatest matcha, they decided. But at first, the tea that they were starting to produce an ooji, when they first expanded it, they were like, this is not nearly as good as the stuff that they're making over there on Taga no Mountain. Right. And they could not figure out why. And then they went back and they looked and they realized that on the mountain there was a lot of forests that was naturally shading these tea bushes, and that was the big difference. And they started to study it more and more and more. And they realized that they could kind of mimic this forest. Shading it. And that if they did this at certain amounts or certain times during the growing season. They could actually force the tea to produce exactly the kind of leaves that they would want to turn into macha. Because it takes a very specific kind of growth pattern. And it's just so beautiful in Zen, especially because these were Zen monks who are figuring this out. But it's just like this delicately manipulating the plant to get it to do what you want so you can get the most remarkable leaves to use for matcha. I just find it, seriously, when I was researching this and studying this, I was just so much it was just calm and really soothing. Yeah. I don't think we said what the name of it, but it's called Tencha before it becomes macha. Macha. Is that final ground up powder? Yeah. Everything leading up to that is, like you said, tencha. So technically, you don't grow matcha. So we'll talk about exactly how it's cultivated later. But the upshot of it is that by noticing that the forest around these plants shaded them, they figured out how to simulate it by building structures around them. And what they've come up with finally, in Uji is what you would call ceremonial grade matcha. Yeah, and you know what? I looked that up and saw a couple of things. I saw that ceremonial grade used to be reserved for royalty, and that it's kind of the best stuff out there, as opposed to culinary grade, which you cook with. But then I also saw other places that said that's sort of a tag you can't even trust anymore. That's sort of thrown on there for Americans, right. So I don't really know what to believe. I do know that, like, a high quality Japanese matcha is not cheap, right? So that can always be a decent guide if you're online trying to buy some. If you see something super cheap, it's probably not great, but there are four regions in Japan where it's produced Uji, Fukuoka, Nishio, and Shizuoka. And Uji is the most renowned. Obviously. The article from Eater that I saw said it's sort of like seeing Bordeaux on a wine label. I see the next best would be Fukuoka, which is on the island of Kyushu, and they're sort of newer in the last ten to 20 years, but apparently they're putting out some really good stuff. Nishio is the largest by volume of matcha, right? And they're sort of the more mass market style. And if you get that in the US. It's not going to be very good, apparently. And then the last one is the Shizuoka, and they're the largest producer of all green tea by volume, and it's not very well regarded as, like, really good matcha. I got you. So go for that ooji or go for the Fukuoka if you want the good stuff. So I say we take a break and then we'll come back and talk about maybe the tea ceremony. How about that? Yes, let's take a break. Okay. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about summer. What's not to like? School is out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah. And with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night. There's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Learning stuff with George. Okay, Chuck, so apparently ceremonial grade is totally made up, but if you were going to I don't think it was necessarily true. Okay. I could see people abusing that. How about that? Okay. I could see nonjapanese retailers abusing that. Yeah, but if you went to a tea ceremony, if there is such a thing as ceremonial grade, that probably would be the kind of tea that they would serve you. And ceremonial Grade t, or I should say the tea ceremony is called the chado, which means the way of t, because, again, cha means t and dough means way. So this is like the way of tea. And just the name of it, of the tea ceremony being called that kind of gives you this idea that there's like a Zen vibe to it. And they're most decidedly is. Oh, yeah. Like if you just watch one of these, it's just super calming. Everything it's sort of like that formal meal I was talking about. Everything is just very exact and purposeful. Yeah, those are the two words. Exact and purposeful is what it's all about. You're not just throwing tea around. I mean, everything from the folding of the napkin to how you sit, it's all just very much planned out and it's just super relaxing to be a part of. I think it really is. I was talking to Yummy about it because she was trained in it and she said it's super stressful while you're learning, because every single step and every single hand movement, every sound that you make, like the whisk clinking up against the bowl, all those things are meant to be a certain way, and so much so that there's like, different schools that do the ceremony slightly differently. But the ultimate point of the whole thing is that it's meant to draw you into the moment. It's meant to be a really meditative experience, not just for you, the person making tea, but the person who's being served tea. And it's it is like you were saying when you watch one of these things, there's plenty of them on YouTube. It's real quiet, really silent, and it's really meditative, even just to watch a video of. But it's cool. The idea that there's this whole process planned out and that it's meant to make you observe the moment, it also really shows you how this whole thing has its roots. And Zen Buddhism, green tea does or matcha. Yeah, even the white lady in San Francisco. And that video you sent me was relaxing. It was. But then did you see the French one, too? Yeah, and that was just like I was in my chair drooling while that one was going on, because it was just totally quiet. But when you watch a tea ceremony, you see that there's a specific way that you're supposed to produce to make green tea. Like, the way that you drink it, matcha, where it's just powder and hot water mixed together. And then there's your tea. So you're supposed to use two scoops. If you've ever seen, like, one of those little bamboo hook skewer kind of things, it's called a chush. Those are equal to about a third of a teaspoon, and you want two of those. So roughly a half a teaspoon, if you don't have one of the bamboo scoops for green tea, and then you put in a little bit of water, and you stir it together with the bamboo whisk until a froth forms. And then there you go. You've got your matcha prepared the traditional way, and you're supposed to drink it in about three sips, from what I understand. Yeah. And you can get more detailed than that if you want to. If you want to get out of strainer to keep it from lumping up, you can do that. The water should be warm. You don't want to just throw boiling water in there. No. Apparently, anything over 80 deg will scorch it, and that will increase the bitterness. Unless I don't know, you really like a bitter matcha. I guess that could be a call you could make, but there's a fine line. I think bitterness is a part of matcha to a certain degree, but it shouldn't be the overriding characteristic. No, it's meant to be balanced out by a sweetness, because, I mean, matcha, it's like if you've had tea but you've never had matcha, you can't guess what matcha tastes like just by having had any other kind of tea before. It's got its own flavor, for sure. Yeah. I mean, green tea will give you a hint. Like, if you really like green tea, you'll probably like matcha. But it's still not quite the same thing. No. Because the other thing about matcha, too, is it foams when you whisk it, which indicates that it's got a mouth feel to it that tea doesn't have. Like, green tea is like tea. The consistency of tea. Matcha is almost, like, creamy. Yeah. It has a creaminess to it, even though it's just powdered tea. There's no cream in it, but it has a creamy consistency to it, too. It's basically magic green potion from Japan land. Yeah. And it differentiates there's another type of tea called Hoji cha, which is reddish brown. And they get that from smoking it. Oh, yeah. It has sort of an earthy, smoky aroma. They both have that, umami, undertones. But the hoji cha is not going to be bitter because that roasting process I think I said smoking. They actually roast it. Right. Okay. It makes it a little different. And I think hoji cha doesn't have nearly as much caffeine as matcha. Macha has about 3.2 grams per 100 grams of caffeine. It's a lot of caffeine and hood. 15, if that tells you anything. Holy cow. And it's 3.2. Yeah. Wow. And again, that's because you're drinking the tea leaf itself, not just the liquor of the tea. Yeah. And I found this to be true. It's not a super jittery caffeine. No. We'll talk about exactly why, but no, it's world renowned because it's not a jittery caffeine feeling, even though there's so much caffeine. It has what's called like an alert calmness or a calm wakefulness, something like that, where it's like you're not jittery, but you're kind of in the zone, is how a lot of Westerners describe it. Yeah. Like the samurai drank it for a reason, because they could meditate, but also know when someone was 50ft behind them with a sword. Right, yeah, exactly. Because they would sprout eyes in the back of their head. That's right. The other thing, too, is, I don't want us to make this sound exotic or unattainable, like people have been drinking matcha for a thousand years, more than a thousand years now, or about 1000 years, and it's powdered tea mixed with hot water, and then you drink it and it's wonderful. That's it. You don't have to have the ceremony. No, you don't have to. There's a purpose of the ceremony. It's to take time out from your busy life. But if you just want some good matcha, buy some good matcha, get a half of a tablespoon or half of a teaspoon, some warm water, stir together and enjoy your matcha. It doesn't have to be some you don't have to be pretentious about it. No one does. And it's not to say the Japanese are pretentious about it, but just talking about it like this can come off as pretentious, even though it's not meant to be that way at all. And I don't want to scare anybody off or make it sound like it's unattainable. It's super attainable. And it's really beneficial, too. Which is why I'm saying go try it if you haven't. Sure. I think it's the same sort of inaccessibility that some people might feel about wine, and a wine tasting can be intimidating for people. Or if you go to a place that has the pour over coffee, and there are lots of different ways to skin the cat, and you can certainly I think Gwyneth Paltrow showed us that it was accessible. Right. A dreamy new discovery. She gooped it up for everyone. Yeah. And by the way, you said that to drink it in the three slurps. Apparently that last one is when you turn that bowl fully up. And sort of the point of that is you're sort of in that bowl with the tea. Everything else is blocked out around you because it's completely held up to your face. Just savor that last gulp and that last bit of sereneness before you get on Facebook and talk. Yeah. We didn't say you're supposed to traditionally drink it out of a tea bowl called a chawan. And that's another thing, too. Like, it's nothing to go to your local Japanese store and say, do you have stuff I need for matcha? And they'll say, here's the bamboo whisk. They love it. Here's the bamboo scoop. Here's your T bowl. Give us $12, please. Totally. It's not hard to get into at all, even in the traditional ceremonial way. But it's like you said, drinking it out of that tea bowl, it's a different experience than just drinking out of a mug. And it's meant to be that way. Yeah. And you don't have to be pretentious about it. But there's also something we said for honoring the tradition in whatever way you feel comfortable doing. Yeah, because I was reading about this this morning, drinking coffee, and I'm like, matcha experiment is basically the opposite of coffee. It's not meant to be like, go, go, let's go, let's get the day started. Drip, drip, brew, brew. Right? Exactly. It's meant to be like, let's take some time out of that day and just reflect and chill out for a minute, but get a little buzz going. Yeah, exactly. You can have it all. So we kind of, like, just glanced over the fact that matcha has grown in a really unusual way. I feel like we should talk about that a little bit. You want to? Yes. Okay. So when they figured out that the forest shading the tea bushes were doing something special to it, when they started growing in Uji, and the matcha they produced, or the tencha, I should say, wasn't nearly as good, they started really studying what was going on. And they figured out that if you deprive the tbush of light at certain times and in certain amounts, the T bush will respond by producing exactly the kind of leaves that you want to turn into matcha eventually. That's right. You're affecting the life cycle. And you start this in about mid April. And they figured out what you do is you just build a little covering, a little hut over these bushes, and you can apply straw, more or less straw, to allow more or less light in to the bushes. And around mid April, you cut that light down by about 60% to 70%. And then I think ten or twelve days after that, you cut it down almost to darkness, to 90%. And that's sort of where you get your good money, chlorophyll and matcha going on. Right. And so, I mean, what's neat, though, is, like, we can explain this now, but these guys figured this out centuries, almost 1000 years ago, how to do this, but now we understand that two things that give matcha its sweet taste and its bitter taste are Thiene and catechins. There are two different compounds that are found in green tea and matcha. And thaanine gives it its sweet flavor. Catechins give it. Its bitter flavor, and that through photosynthesis, theanines become catechins. So if you can keep the plant from photosynthesizing as much, there's fewer Thienines that are going to be turned into the bitter catechins. So that's one reason you're depriving it of light. That's a pretty big step. The other step, Chuck, is that they figured out that chlorophyll is related to the amount of theanine I don't know if one produces the other or what, but they're related to one another. So the more chlorophyll there is, the more Thievings are going to be, hence the sweeter the match is going to be. And that if you deprive the Tbh of light, it's going to produce more chlorophyll to try to carry out photosynthesis. So not only does its color get greener, it produces more Thievings as a result. So by depriving it of light at certain times and then using the tea bush, that comes out of winter and has a bunch of nutrients packed down in its roots, and it's now sharing them with the young buds, and that's what you harvest, is the first leaves of spring. That's how you get the tension that will turn into the best kind of matcha. Yeah. And you also get those good the leaves get wider. You get those broad leaves because they're seeking out the light that they're not getting. It's actually very cruel. I thought about that, too. I was like, the Japanese know how to torture some plants between this and bonsai. Yeah, it reminded me of the marijuana podcast, too, the cultivation one, because it's another plant that you can just throw a seed in the ground and grow tea or grow marijuana and not worry about it because it's just a plant. But if you alter the light cycles, they both do something extraordinary. In the case of marijuana, I believe altering the light cycles is what causes it to bud at specific times, and it's kind of really similar with the matcha. It's kind of the same process. So with marijuana, is it kind of like you're making it think like, the days are getting shorter and so it needs to start budding or the days are getting longer. Okay, I got it. Yeah. You're artificially manipulating what would naturally play out over probably a longer period of time is my guess. I've never grown marijuana, but I'm just getting right. You're like, there was a high times at my dentist that's probably about right. So yeah. So they figured all this out to do this with tea, and they started out by adding, like, little bamboo or reed covers to deprive sunlight. And then they would put straw mats over that. Now they use aluminum structures around the bushes, and then they use just kind of that black cheesecloth fabric that you see. Sometimes people put it down to keep weeds from growing up in landscape fabric. Right, exactly. That's exactly what it's called truck. Now they use that to cover up the tea bushes. They've got it down kind of pat, but it's remarkably similar to the same techniques they've been using since the 12th, 13th century. Yeah, they made the switch to aluminum because they would have to take these wooden frames out and care for them in the off season. And I think the same holds true with the straw. I'm sure there are probably some traditionalists that are doing it in the old way, but yeah, aluminum and landscape fabric is sort of the modern version. Have you ever smelled musty straw? It's not a good smell. I believe I've been on a hayrider, too. Is that what you mean? Yes, basically. But when you make something out of straw, like something to cover over shrubs with or whatever, and leave it out in the rain, roll it back up. Oh, yeah. It's not a good smell when you unroll it again. Yeah. Like if you have a straw hat that falls in a body of water, it's never going to be the same again. Has that happened to you? Tom Sawyer yeah. Emily. Emily. She's a gardener, so she has these huge straw hats. Okay. And if they get wet, they get kind of stinky. You're right. I got you. So you want to take another break and then we'll talk about health benefits of matcha? Sure. Okay. We're going to do that, everybody. And we'll be right back. Hey, summer is here, my friend. Which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer. And best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music. That's so good? It's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, host Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. So I think we should say, Chuck, before we get into the health benefits. When tension is produced, apparently all of it is brought to one market in Kyoto. And Kyoto is like one of the greatest cities on the entire planet. And it's just perfect that they have the matcha market is in Kyoto and people go there and say, I really like this leaf and I'm going to buy your entire stock. Yeah, they have an auction. It's amazing that they do this this way. They have an auction, I think, once a year at the Kyoto Tea market, which opened in I'm getting all my centuries wrong. But this was and like you said, these wholesalers and vendors, they come in and they do blind tastings, which is really cool. So you can't say, like, you're just not acquainted with the brand before you taste it, because every year is going to be a little different. Even if you're trying to produce a consistent product year over year, every year brings a little different thing, just like the wine business. So they go in there, they blind taste the stuff, and they're looking for kind of you end up mixing these things together to get your matcha at the end. I had no idea. Did you? Yeah, I think I'd heard that, that it's not just one kind of tea leaf. You want a variation for fragrance, for flavor and for color. And these tea masters pick this raw, tiny leaf blindly and just say, hey, this is what I'm looking for, and I'm looking for this one, and I'm looking for this one, and I'm going to get all three of those and I'm going to bid on them at this auction. And then dry it up. Stone, grind that junk into good green powder. Magical Japanese powder. Yeah. And then blend it together and there's your mancha, pal. Yeah, that's the slogan. So the reason we keep calling this magic powder is not just because of the ceremony and, like, the whole Zen vibe that it has to it definitely has all that, but it is verging on magical. As far as the health benefits that it bestows on humans goes, at the very least, it is very clearly qualifies as a superfood. If there is such a thing as a superfood green tea, specifically matcha definitely is that. Yeah. And you talked already about the Thiene a little bit. They've been using this in Japan and China for a stress remedy for literally thousands of years. They say that it can help with aging, with memory and recall. Apparently, if you drink gentlemen, if you drink five to seven cups of matcha a day, it can really reduce your chances of prostate cancer, is what they say. Yes. And all green tea is good for you, we should point out. But this is just like on steroids. Yes, that's the thing. Like, matcha is green tea, but most of the time when you drink green tea, again, you're steeping green tea leaves and you're not actually ingesting the leaves themselves with matcha powder, you are. And so you're getting exponentially more of this stuff, including theonine, including the catechins, including something called epigallocatechin gallate, which has been shown to improve memory mood, along with altheanine. And then one of the other things is these catechins are antioxidants chuck, which I know you're kind of chomping at the bit. To give a bit of an overview of how antioxidants help us combat disease backstory. We were poking fun at each other because you sent me a thing, a primer on antioxidants. I was like, this is like the fifth or 6th time we've probably given an overview of antioxidants. Right? But out of that back and forth, we agreed to finally do an episode on antioxidants and aging. Right? Did we agree? I suggested it. I just assumed that you didn't respond, that you were agreeing. No, we should do that and then we'll never talk about it again, right? I can't guarantee that, no. But there may be the last overview. So this may be the last overview. How about that? Okay, sure. So in your body you have something that's called free radicals, which is a type of molecule that have an extra electron or missing an electron. Either way they like to go around and bind to other stuff. And when they do that, something called oxidation occurs in your body. Right. And oxidation can be good in that. Like you might have a pathogen floating around your body. These free radicals, which are naturally occurring, can bind to these pathogens and neutralize them. And you don't get sick from a pathogen, so it's good. The problem is you can have too many free radicals in your body. And so when you're out of balance, you have too many free radicals, you suffer what's called oxidative stress, where the free radicals start attacking stuff you need like lipids, fats, like DNA, like proteins in your body. And that's not good. So you have antioxidants in your body, but if you're not producing enough antioxidants, your free radicals can get out of balance and it's good to do things like drink green tea, which introduces a ton of antioxidants to your body. And then they seek out those free radicals. They bind with them and neutralize them. But the thing about antioxidants is they don't lose their stability themselves when they bind it. They just keep on keeping on. But now they also have this free radical attached for a ride and everything's all good. So that's why they think that antioxidants are kind of the key to healthy aging. Because when those free radicals start attacking your DNA, it can lead to things like tumors and cancer. It can lead to all sorts of other problems, breakdown of cells and tissues and just general disease. They think like that is the basis of aging, is oxidative stress. And antioxidants can counter that. And matcha in particular is lousy with antioxidants. Like catechins. Yeah. And matcha is literally good for almost every organ in your body and it's certainly not bad for any of them. It helps with your liver. I think we already mentioned the kidneys, certainly the brain and memory. And the combination of that Altheanine and caffeine supposedly actually helps you multitask and like to go back and forth between tasks more easily. So as we mentioned earlier, you're alert but you're still calm. It is a bit of a miracle powder. It is, because the Altheanine can cross the blood brain barrier. So it goes right to your brain and starts pushing it around like, do this, do that. But it works synergistically with caffeine and that it also releases GABA, which is a calming inhibitory molecule. I'm not sure it works together with caffeine. So that like you were saying, you have all of the focus but none of the jitters. It's just amazing stuff. It's great. I can't wait for them to come in the mail. It fights cancer and it puts you in the zone. Although be aware of one thing. If you like Matcha with, like, a latte with milk, that milk binds with antioxidants very easily, so it neutralizes a lot of the antioxidant effect in Matcha. Yes. Emily I told her that I was going to get some, and it had been a while, and she said something about making me a Matcha latte. And I was like, I don't think I want that. I think I just either dump it in a smoothie or just make my tea. Okay. It's worth trying, though. It's very good. Maybe. Okay, whatever you want to do. I just think it's top notch that we're drinking Matcha these days. We're going to live to 100 and 3140 maybe. Do you have it every day? Do you drink Matcha every day? No, I don't drink nearly enough Matcha, but this has gotten me back into it as well. I made a little bit, had the little bamboo scoop, the shaku, and I started making myself some. And Yummy soda is doing. So she came over and finished making it for me. It was very sweet. She said, here's what you're doing wrong, dummy. But she said in Japanese And I was like, what did you say? And she said, Nothing. Yeah, well, it sounded nice because it's Japanese. Right? Exactly. And then I think we should finish with this great quote from why it's so popular these days. And who is this from? This is from Anna Cabaline of Green Gables, who is a health coach and co authored Matcha Colon a Lifestyle Guide. She says this, the Kermit the Frog color just made it so instagrammable, we have goop to thank for it. That's right. Let's see. That's it for Matcha. Go back and maybe go try it yourself. It's totally worth it, and we hope you like it. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this my tapeworm experience from Travis. Hey, guys. Big fan of the show. Loved the one on tapeworms, and it gave me flashbacks to my own experience. Four years ago, I was working at a fishing lodge in Ontario, Canada. I had severe gastrointestinal issues for several weeks over the summer, and I visited the doctor and after a stool sample discovered, I had a fully mature fish tapeworm inside of me. 30 inches. Wow. It made for a pretty miserable summer. The doctor helped me trace the timeline back to infection, and the likely culprit was a batch of ceviche that a guest had made oh, no. And for those of you listening, ceviche is prepared by soaking fish and citrus juices overnight. Essentially, cooking it. Ideally cooking it. Yeah. Chemically cooking it. Ceviche is great. Love it. I was prescribed one pill to paralyze the worm so it would release its hold and my body could get rid of it. But I had to wait and agonizing three days for the pill to arrive due to my remote location. Nothing like knowing there's a 30 inch tapeworm inside of you leaching away at your body's nutrient. I can't imagine. Can you imagine just a little bit, like, all right, three days. I just got to know this about my no, I can't. I don't know what I would do to numb that pain. He said it took a year of supplements to get my weight back. You lost \u00a320. And B twelve back to normal. Word of caution. The doctor told me if you plan to eat any raw fish to make sure it has a hard freeze for at least 24 hours to kill any tapeworm eggs. A lesson I will not soon forget. That is from Travis in Bend, Oregon. Man, Travis, that was a cruel summer indeed. Yeah. Glad you made it out, though, buddy. Apparently, it takes forever to get stuff in Bend, Oregon. I didn't realize that. I think he was not in Bend, Oregon, at the time. Okay. Yeah, he was at a fishing lodge in Ontario, Canada. Okay, great. Well, thank you for that story. That was just magnificent. It really is a good accompaniment to the actual episode, too, don't you think? Chuck, I agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, like Travis did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradiocom. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
86df220a-3b0e-11eb-9699-03b22685a996 | How Mail Order Marriages Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mail-order-marriages-work | Everybody knows mail order marriages are at best a last resort for jerks looking to boss a foreign spouse around or, at worst, a front for human trafficking. Or are they? Yes and no. Mail order marriage comes with nuance and a surprisingly long history. | Everybody knows mail order marriages are at best a last resort for jerks looking to boss a foreign spouse around or, at worst, a front for human trafficking. Or are they? Yes and no. Mail order marriage comes with nuance and a surprisingly long history. | Tue, 21 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=264, tm_isdst=0) | 48047414 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You weren't about to let any cyberatch slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com picture this, friends. You could be packing a carry on for a trip to Hawaii when you realize you're going to need a bigger bag. But it's cool because you booked your flight with your City Advantage Platinum Select card so you can check a bag for free on domestic travel and still have room for those souvenirs. And surprise, those souvenirs also earned you Advantage Miles. Actually, you earned Advantage miles and loyalty points with each swipe. So let's start dreaming about your next next adventure. This could be you, and you could be anywhere with the City Advantage Platinum Select Card. Learn more@citycom adventure and travel on with city advantage. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know about mail or marriage. The murky waters. Yeah. Really? Yeah. This is one of those where we researched and researched and read and read, and I think it's one of those deals for me that's like and this is just my opening statement, okay. Where it can be a positive thing like a dating service in some ways, but there is certainly a darker side to the whole situation. I already know how you feel about it, and I feel like it's coming through clearly. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those really murky things where sometimes you hear these really great stories about people that do find are looking for love and find love with someone from another country and it works out for everybody. And then sometimes you hear about stories where it's sort of what the National Organization for Women's sonya Asario calls a softer version of human trafficking. Or even worse, occasionally someone turns up murdered. Yeah, that's the truest dark side. So that's just me level setting, and we can talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think that was a great level say. I generally agree with it, but for me, the jury is still out and thinking about it as a whole because there's so little hard data on this stuff. Almost everything is anecdotal true. And when you condemn something based on anecdotal data, what you've got there is a moral panic, not necessarily something in reality. So I'm a little hesitant to go all the way. The jury is still out for me, but I definitely recognize the same stuff you do, for sure. It's definitely there. It exists. For me. The question is how much does it exist and does the good outweigh the bad? And I don't know. So we should probably actually define what we're talking about here because most people, I would guess, are familiar with mail order brides. They're more recently they've come to be called mail order marriages because they've been extended to same sex couples in the United States. But then also even more generally it's called international marriage brokerage. Right? Yeah. There's a full industry built around this with thousands of websites and agencies that are brokering these marriages. And from looking into it, it seems like there are some really above board ones that kind of act like an international dating service in some ways where they group match like people together. And then it seems like there are a lot of really sketchy ones that charge people a ton of money and aren't looking out for the men or the women. Yet none of that money is sunk back into making their website look at all non inclusive. I saw some really bad websites, so bad manic sands at one point. Yeah. It's hard to see those and not think, well, a this is a scam or b this is upfront for some sort of CD trafficking operation, right? Yeah, it is tough not to think like that. But what we are talking about generally is a marriage where the husband and the wife are generally unknown to each other. Maybe have met once, but if they did, it's possible it was just a day or two before or maybe they've met once or twice and have done some correspondence back and forth for an extended period of time. But that's pretty new. In the classical definition they're generally unknown to one another and one of them, usually the bride travels a very long distance from home to move to the husband's home and make a life there and be married. That's not the Webster's definition. There's a lot more stumbling in my definition, but I think that generally gets it across. Yeah. And the kind of the classic thing that you think of is lonely American man who has a little bit of money in his 40s or 50s can't find American woman and ends up getting a beautiful young Ukrainian woman who doesn't speak much English and would love to live in the United States and fall in love with an American man. And of course it happens from all countries but a lot of times you think of Russia and the Ukraine or maybe in Southeast Asia or something like that. Like when people say that term, most people, that's probably what pops into their head. Yeah. Or I think you're being rather generous. I think a lot of people would be like some sad sack who can't find a woman in America, has to go look elsewhere to get really judgy about it. And I think people are really judgy about mail order marriages. I think there's a long standing tradition in the United States of considering people who go outside the traditional channels of marriage and basically take it into their own hands, like through male order marriage, they're very much judged harshly and criticized, maybe fairly, maybe not. But I think there's another component, too, especially these days, is that the men who are looking for women for mail order brides are also dominant domineering, possibly abusive, and they're looking for docile women who will do whatever they say because they're the husband. So they have to go to other cultures where that might be more prevalent, where they can select from women who might respond to that kind of thing a lot better than an American woman who wouldn't put up with his gut. Yeah, I mean, that is certainly a part of what happens sometimes. And some of these agencies promote that the submissive nature. There was one that literally said that these young women are, quote, unspoiled by feminism, and you have potential home making savings of $150 a week because you're essentially getting sort of a living domestic servant. Good Lord. So that's the underbelly in the dark side. But I did find some that do seem very above board and people that do genuinely look like they're looking for love and have struck out at home, so they're looking elsewhere. So I said Chuck. And we should also say one other thing, too. It's a pretty well known thing in America. It's not like on everybody's lips. You don't hear it in every monologue on the late night talk shows or anything like that. But generally people in America are familiar and know about mail order marriages, but it turns out it's even bigger in other countries like Taiwan and South Korea have huge mail order marriage industries that may even dwarf the United States. And it's pretty I don't want to say it's huge in the United States, but it's not like just some small speck of sliver of, like, an arcane group of people. It's bigger than you'd think, but it's even bigger in some other Asian countries as well. Yeah. And Dave Rus helped us put this together, and this was a tough assignment for him, but he used a lot of information from a book by a legal professor originally from the University of South Carolina named Marsha Zugg called Buying a Bride Insert Colon Music. Jerry an engaging history of mail order matches where it seems like she gives a fair but fairly full throated defense of its history through the ages. As far as and we'll get into this. But as far as an opportunity for a lot of women to gain more agency and to gain more rights at a time when they might not have any. All the way up through today. Where she still defends it to a certain degree and says. Sure. These situations can be bad. But what's really bad is what undocumented immigrants have to suffer through in this country because they have no legal rights. They can't go to the police. They can't leave their spouse or their partner for fear of deportation. And it's an interesting take, I think. And I'm glad that Dave found this book because I'm not sure that I would have been as fair. Yeah, no, she definitely almost I get the impression that she is defensive on behalf of the industry just because of how mistreated it's been. And in her opinion, unfairly. In large part, yeah, because I think it very much has an anti feminist rap for good reason. But she does make some compelling arguments that throughout history, it wasn't that way at all. And I guess we can go ahead and dive into some of that. In the early days of mail order marriages in the American colonies, there was a lack of women problem in the early colonies. I mean, like, the earliest colonies. We're talking like Jamestown here? Yeah, like Puritans and pilgrims. They may have come over with their families, but there are a lot of single men that came over, and some of them may run off with an indigenous woman and live among her tribe and be like, you know what? I'm kind of done building things for Jamestown. I'm out of here. So that's no good if they're looking for young men to kind of help build up these young colonies, and then other ones were just lonely and said, hey, there are no women over here. What are we supposed to do? So very early on, they started sort of advertising and bringing women, supposedly volunteers over who wanted to come to the colonies and sort of have maybe even more rights than they had back home. Yes, and this is a really good example of kind of like a thread that ran through the first couple of centuries of America's founding, which was government sanctioned and supported mail order marriages in order to help build more stable communities. Right. So the legislatures did things like create laws that made it more attractive for a woman to become a male order bride in this area. Like, apparently in England, if you became a widow, you got a third of the estate, and that was it. And in places like Virginia, and I think Maryland as well, they set up laws that basically said, hey, you're going to keep a lot more than that. You can run your own business afterwards. Like, being a widow is going to rock. And did we mention also the men are dropping deadlike flies over here, so your husband is probably going to die pretty quick. So if you don't like them, who cares? You still get to keep all this inheritance, and you get to keep the business, and you can't do quite that well for yourself. And those circumstances back in England, so that attracted people, and that was like the government saying, please come over here and marry these strangers that you've never met before. Yeah. And it made sense for a lot of these young women because many of them were from the servant class, let's say. So they were looking at years of servitude in England and then they basically were like, well, hey, forget all that. Why don't you just come over here, get married? And like you said, I think the status, even one in three marriages, lasted ten years. So they did kind of tell him on the fact that, yes, it's not so great. He'll probably be dead soon enough, and then you can have his stuff. Yeah. And actually I mean, that actually did attract some women, I think, at least. I don't know if we have the number, but there definitely were what they called tobacco wives who came to marry new tobacco planters who were setting up their own fortune. And I actually had to prove that they were a financial means by donating \u00a3150 of gold leaf tobacco to the Virginia company to take part in this. Right. And so that lasted as long as it lasted or as long as it needed to. And as the Eastern colonies started to become more self sufficient, became less rowdy, became more family oriented as far as the Europeans were concerned, the need for those mail order schemes kind of went away. But then as America kind of expanded further and further west, the frontier kept recreating itself in different places. So it went from the eastern colonies along the Mississippi and then further and further out west. And every time it did that, this new iteration of the frontier was settled by rowdy men. And they would have to figure out a way to get women to attract women to come out to marry the rowdy men so they would stop beating each other up in bar fights and become more productive citizens. And that kept going on throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States. Yeah. And if you're already thinking, Guys, this already sounds terrible. These marriages based on these financial arrangements and despite these promises of a better life, that's kind of what we're talking about. Welcome to marriage in the 17th and 18th century. Yeah. Don't be so naive. Yeah, that's kind of what it was. And Dave made a good point. Like the notion of marrying for true love. That's a very much like a 20th century proposition. Yeah. Even if it wasn't a mail order bride situation, it was someone's dowry or parents sort of arranging marriages and saying this family should marry this family. Which still goes on today, I should point out, among the blue chip and the high society sure. Like Arthur had to marry Susan. Let's not forget that everybody with a Habsburg jaw was an arranged marriage. You couldn't marry Liza minellius. I didn't realize you were making the movie reference another Arthur and Susan. I thought you were using, like, BIFF and muffy, like January. I got it now. But the point is that marriage was a financial arrangement many and most times back then. I'm not saying no one ever married because they were in love. I'm sure that happened, but they had to take a lot of boxes back then. So it was just sort of the way it was. And so this solved problems for early settlers and for westward expanders. They made things really attractive in California for women. They made it easier to divorce your husband if you wanted to. They made it easier or just legal to own and buy and sell land, which is not something you could do at other places in the country. So they were trying to make it an attractive situation for women to move west because they needed men and women out there. And I think between 1850 and 1860, the population of women in California increased from 3% to 19% of the total population. So it was working. Yeah, it was. And it wasn't just California, but Washington state also participated. I think Oregon may have as well. And these schemes and I don't mean scheme like Dastardly scheme, but like a plan. It's a good scheme. Yeah. Where, like a guy would go around to the bachelor's out in Washington territory and be like, give me $100, or I think $300, which is about five grand today, and I will bring you a suitable wife. And at least one guy did this as a mercer, was a marriage broker, and he would go back east, say, hey, there's like this great booming economy out west. Won't you come with me? And he would return with like 100 women, and some of them would get married immediately, some would wait. But it was another thing where there was a need for women to stabilize an out of control male population. Yeah. And Zug points out very fairly in her book that some of these mercer girls were called from ASA mercer's operation, became abolitionists. Some became women's rights advocates and social reformers. One of them's name was a great name, mahitable haskell elder. And she organized the 1871 women's rights conference in Olympia, Washington, and recruited one Susan b. Anthony as the territory delegate for the national women's suffrage association convention. So in a lot of cases, these women did find agency, and they did get out of a better situation than they were in back east. Okay, so you want to take a break, and then we'll talk about probably what was the real birth of mail order marriages. Sure. Okay, we'll be right back. What if you were a major transit system with billions of passengers taking millions of trips every year? You aren't about to let any cyberattacks slow you down. So you partner with IBM to build a security architecture to keep your data network and applications protected. Now you can tackle threats so they don't bring you to a grinding halt, and everyone's going places, including you. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com what if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in is host Baratoon de Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast, force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Incredible story of what seems to be a large military transport plane that's crashed in a remote region south of Ankara, Turkey. Witnesses authorities are on the hunt for a suspect after two men went to blows atop a fireworks bars, wrecked cars, and destruction. Witnesses claim an unknown assailant left from the tram and evaded a scene after a high speed car chase. The identity of this man still unknown. What do you know about the Sierra program? Reckless mystery, man. You guys send in when you can officially send anyone else. Great, man. We got an urgent locate and destroy Sierra six stone, asset of considerable dialogue agency. That could be fine. The man's got some street cred. They have something they really want. What's? Your gut? My funeral. You're going to next. I'm about to put a hit so big on your boy's head that even his most loyal allies won't hesitate to drop a time. Nameless assassins with limited morality. What could possibly go wrong this summer? From the directors of Endgame and Captain America winter Soldier. You hurt me. I mean, my ego's a little bruised. Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas and Billy Bob Thornton. Want to make an omelet? Gotta kill some people. The uncatchable meets the unstoppable. Maybe not anybody. The Gray Man. Only on Netflix. July 22, rated BG 13 may be inappropriate for children under 13. All right, Chuck, we've been talking to this point about basically, like, government sanction schemes to kind of stabilize male populations. There is also, at the same time, beginning in the 19th century, I think starting in England, actually, in the 18th century, that was kind of simultaneously unfolding and that was the matrimonial advertisement industry, which to me is like the real birth of the mail order marriage industry that we understand today. But it's basically the personal ads. Yeah, the birth of personal ads, the birth of dating services. It's really interesting in that women would put ads in London and then later on in the United States, ads in the paper basically saying, hi, this is who I am. This is what I'm looking for. I mean, much like you would see these days in, like, a dating profile. And it was a way for them to take some agency over avoiding the arranged marriage that their parents had set up for them and maybe get a little bit of choice of suitors. Right. That is like taking control of your own marriage prospects. I guess radical is probably a pretty good word, but it picked up. It caught on, especially in the US. By the end of the 19th century, it really started to catch on to where they were, like, magazines that were dedicated just to matrimonial advertisements. Right, yeah. Like, there was the Matrimonial News, which is actually the most straight ahead of all of them. Yeah. I like Cupid's Messenger. That sounds like a cute one. What about heart in hand? Heart and Hand? And then to me, this one, I guess they were just trying to play it really safe. The Standard Correspondence Club. Right. Good day to you. Right, exactly. Yeah. So these things were, like, kind of popular by the end of the 19th century. But then, it's like you said earlier, by the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, our ideas about what constituted marriage or the reasons for marriage had transitioned from financial arrangements into love in America. Right. And so there was simultaneously the popularity of matrimonial advertisements and people taking control of their own marriage prospects and at the same time a criticism, and society generally looking down upon people who did that kind of thing. So there would be stories in the paper of people like sad sack bachelors or lonely heart widows getting conned or swindled or getting full catfished, basically, is what you call it today. And people love to read that kind of stuff and laugh at their misfortune and look down on these people. And that's where the root of what people still do today to the mail order marriage industry, at least in America, really finds its roots in the 20th century. Yes. And this is when things started transitioning to overseas, when American men started bringing in women from foreign countries. And I think that's when it became a bit more of an industry. And this is when Congress got kind of full on racist and trying to control this thing, because there were women saying, I don't want these women coming into our country and disrupting our feminist agenda that we're trying to push. There were men saying, we don't want this. People from China or Japan coming in here and they can have babies once a year. And there were senators literally saying these things. And so they would enact laws like, we're going to be overrun, basically. So they would enact laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to ban Chinese immigration. There was a loophole for Japan with the gentleman's agreement, which basically said that a Japanese woman and their kids could come over if they were married. So there were Japanese single men already in the United States that immigrated over here that would get married site unseen from like a catalog basically in order to gain immigration status for the Japanese women. And then that ultimately got shut down in 1924 with the Immigration Act, and they just said, no Japanese immigration of any kind now after that. So there was a huge anti Asian thread from the late 19th century and the early 20th century based on immigration, and a lot of that kind of centered on mail order marriages. But then one of the other things that really kind of cropped up as a result of mail ordered marriages going from women back east or women coming from Europe to women coming from Asia to marry white American men, there was this idea that the women were nothing more than like looking for a green card, basically American citizenship, trying to escape their own country. And you run into that criticism today, I mean, just as much as you would have back in 1924 when they passed the Immigration Act against Japanese people. Oh, yeah, and this is from Zug's book. She talks about Mexican women, Greek women, Asian women, Jewish women, Italian women. They were much more likely to be deported under an LPC charge, which is a person that is likely to become a public charge, basically, like to come over and sort of live off the government if they were from these countries, a way around that was to get married and get that green card. So that criticism came pretty straight away, I think. Right. And then the other one is that they were basically all just sex workers in disguise coming over under the guise of being mail order brides, but really they were coming over here to prostitute themselves and behave immorally. And again, this is another accusation that you see today, except the focus, the empathy, I guess, has evolved from being put on society being attacked by these immoral women to the women themselves being trafficked by international criminals. But it's still generally the same accusation. It's just altered itself, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of anti feminist charge from American women saying that these women from other countries are coming over here and they do whatever their husbands tell them, and this is setting us back. They would say the same thing, though, about war brides. If you were a soldier in Korea or Vietnam and brought a woman back over, they would have that same kind of charge levied against them, saying the only reason you're bringing these women back is because of the power imbalance that is now gained. And that can be fair to a certain degree. It's really hard to talk about marriage like this without talking about inequity and a power imbalance from the beginning, not to say that that doesn't change and that there aren't great success stories where both partners are equal and they both contribute and they both respect one another's viewpoints. But anytime you are in a situation where you are bringing someone over from another country that is escaping a bad situation and looking for a more prosperous situation and you can provide that and you are paying the money to the service for linking you, there's a power imbalance there from the beginning. Yeah, well, there's a power imbalance in that. Like you probably don't speak the language as the mail or the bride. You don't have any friends, you don't have any family, you don't have any social structure to depend on. The only person you have to depend on is your husband. He's not very nice to you or even worse, abusive towards you. You're in big trouble. And then it's also like you said, if you are escaping poverty back home, you might show up with basically no money. And so if you just found out that this guy is not always cracked up to be or he is abusive or he's actually got a terrible criminal record or terrible credit or all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise come over for, you're stuck here. And according to some human trafficking groups, that is a broad definition of human trafficking where a person has moved from one place to another for financial means and then ends up becoming dependent financially in a situation that they otherwise wouldn't want to be in, they would not have chosen to put themselves in. That's as much human trafficking in a broad definition as somebody being kidnapped and forced into sex work. Yeah. And even if there is no literal violence or abuse, that doesn't mean that it's an equitable situation because someone can essentially be almost a captive in their own home. Like you said, if they don't speak the language, they have no advocates over here for themselves or friends to help them and speak up for them and you can see why it gets a bad rap for sure. So on the flip side though, there have to be men out there who just struck out consistently with American women or men and took matters into their own hands and looked abroad. And the best way to do that is a marriage broker and there's plenty of places you can do that. And then also the other problem with just basically characterizing mail order brides as nothing but like, victims ripe for exploitation is to really miss the personalities of a lot of them. Where to put yourself out there as a mailer to bride shows or demonstrates like a lot of initiative compared to just staying back home and making do with your lot in life. Like if you're a widow in some countries and you have kids, you might not be remarriable, there might not be anybody who wants to marry you and so you are doomed to a life of solitude and. Single motherhood whether you like it or not. So if you just say, okay, well, that's my lot in life, that's what I'm doing. Okay, fine. But if you say, you know what, no, there's another way out. And it might not be the most tasteful thing that I would have chosen for myself before, but I really want to make sure my kids are taken care of, and I'm going to go seek husband elsewhere. That shows that demonstrates a lot of self starterness, I guess, that I think kind of undermines a lot of the view of male or brides, these kind of like simple minded, docile women that can't fend for themselves or stick up for themselves. Yeah, and it's also a real slippery slope to judge. I mean, we all think like, oh, you should only fall in love with love at first sight, and that should be all it is, and that should be what marriage is based on, full stop. It's a real slippery slope to judge someone else's situation if it's working out for both of them. If it is a rich old guy in his 60s who is like, you know what, I want to live out the last 15 years of my life with a partner, and there's a beautiful young Ukrainian woman who's like, you know what, I've got nothing going on over here. I don't have a lot of prospects. My country is not doing me any favors, and so I'm going to go over and marry some rich guy and we're going to be happy for the last 15 years of his life. And they travel and they do take cruises and they have a good time together. It's a real slippery slope for someone to come in and say, well, no, that's wrong because you guys just didn't meet and fall in love. Like meeting in a bar drunk one night. Like all America again and again. That seems to be a longstanding criticism that stretches back at least a century here in America too, for sure. Okay, so enough of that. I feel like we should talk about some of the nuts and bolts of the mail order marriage industry. Okay, yeah, let's do it. Well, let's start. So I found this contemporary journalism from 1986, you're CJ right in The New York Times, they basically just checked in with the mail order marriage industry at the time, and it gave a really good snapshot of how things used to be. And one of the reasons why mail order brides were called mail order brides, because time was that you would find a mail order marriage service, you would subscribe to that service. The New York Times says anywhere between fifty dollars to five hundred dollars a year. Well, that was for a catalog. Annual subscription, $50 to $500. And then every month or every couple of months or maybe twice a month, probably not twice a month, you would get a catalog that was clearly made by somebody who didn't major in catalog making in college of pictures of a perspective bride. Her stats, physical stats, her likes, her dislikes, that kind of thing basically a blurb. And you flipped through a catalog and you'd get back in touch with the subscription service and say, I like number 8972, and I also like 37, 55. And you just give them a list of women that you wanted them to reach out to on your behalf. And all of a sudden you would start exchanging letters little by little. You would narrow down the women that you were talking to, and then you would eventually probably go over and meet one and maybe in that trip marry them. Like, have your wedding, like, the day you meet them or the day after you met them. That was pretty standard for the as far as mail order goes and I think into the 90s as well. Yeah. And of course. It's all online now. And depending on which agency you go through and like I said. There are thousands. They offer a range of services to bleed you of as much money as they can in the process. Whether it's subscription fees or we'll write your first letters for you and translate them for a fee. Or if you want to video chat or have phone calls. We can arrange that for a fee. Everything has a fee. I think this one and this is from an anti trafficking international website article, they said that estimates show people spend about $6,000. Each client spends about $6,000. And I think this is for the, I guess, more high end, more reputable ones. I think some of those places are happy if they get like, $500 out of you and then you leave. Well, I think you can be like a skin flint husband and just do it strictly online and then go meet them and marry them. But there are ones that offer tours for five grand, which, depending on the country, may or may not be legal. If you went to Vietnam, it would be illegal in Vietnam, mail order marriages, the whole industry is illegal, but it's also rampant there. And there are whole hotels where a woman goes and stays, and then tours of like, guys from Taiwan or South Korea or the United States come through and meet them. And I think human trafficking people are like and do God knows what else for money. And if you hit it off with one, maybe you start talking to them a little more or you marry them on the spot, that kind of thing. But there's tours you can go on, and depending on your view of the male or marriage industry, it's either a tour where you're going and meeting a lot of prospective brides, or it's basically a sex tour to Vietnam. Right? And they also will do things where it's really hard to not read as a man sort of buying a woman where they say. Like. Well. We'll put them up in this hotel and we'll have them go checked out by our doctors and our psychologists. Have a psychological evaluation. And all of this information will be sent to you. The man with the money. To make your decision on whether or not you're going to sort of pay for this bride. And it's really hard to look at it any other way than that. Like, you really got to stretch your mind. But then you will read a story about a couple that are deeply in love for 20 years on and who had kids in America who had a great life together, and they were like, no, it was really more like an international dating service. And they just sort of matchmaked or matchmated. Matched. matchmaked. I love it. I don't know if we've ever had a topic where I was so like, all right, well, this doesn't sound too bad. And like, oh, my God, this sounds terrible. Yeah, I got you. I can't remember. And that may be the industry. Yeah, I think it can be both those things. Yeah. And it surely is both of those things. Again, the question is, is one way more than the other? And if so, which way is it Lopsided? And if so, do we need to follow Vietnam's footsteps and outlaw the mail order marriage industry? You know what I'm saying? It's like, that may be a really big red flag. Like, why did Vietnam outlaw an entire industry that's totally, like, fine and legal here in the United States? Right. Should we take a break? Yeah, I think we should take a break. And we'll talk about mail order marriages in the Internet age because things have changed a little bit. Yeah. And some of the laws. Yeah. Right. Right. We'll be right back. What if you were a global energy company with operations in Scotland, technologists in India, and customers all on different systems? You need to pull it together. So you call an IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely, and your digital transformation is helping find new ways to unlock energy around the world. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change in industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. What if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the award winning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org, which is out now. Yeah. Listed in as host Barrettunde Thurston connects with leaders and doers out there tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, global health. You'll hear from organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors Without Borders, and the University of Kentucky, who are using their platforms to maximize their impact. You'll also be introduced to action leaders like youth activist Juan Acosta and advocate Amy Allison, who are inspiring change in their day to day lives. So join them as they discuss new ways of collaborating and taking action. Listen to the second season of the iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org original podcast. Force multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. Incredible story of what seems to be a large military transport plane that's crashed in a remote region south of Ankara, Turkey. Witnesses authorities are on the hunt for a suspect after two men went to blows atop a fireworks bar. Direct cast and destruction. Witnesses claim an unknown assailant left from the tram and evaded the scene after a high speed car. Check the identity of this man. Still unknown. What do you know about the Sierra program? Reckless mystery man. You guys send in when you can officially send anyone else. Brave man. I got an urgent locate and destroy Sierra six stone asset. A considerable diet agency. That could be fine. The man's got some street cred, something they really want. What's? Your gut? My funeral. You're going to next. I'm about to put a hit so big on your boy's head that even his most loyal allies won't hesitate to drop a time. Nameless assassins with limited morality. What could possibly go wrong this summer? From the directors of Endgame and Captain America winter Soldier. You heard it. I mean, my ego is a little bruised. Ryan Gosling, chris Evans, Anna Dearness and Billy Bob Thornton. Want to make an omelet. Got to kill some people. The Uncatchable. Meets the unstoppable. I can kill anybody. Maybe not anybody. The Gray Man. Only on Netflix. July 22. Rated PG 13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. All right, really quickly, the great article. I found that from the Anti trafficking international site, they did kind of talk a little bit about what it means for your immigration status and how, because I mentioned earlier that Zug said, who's really at risk are undocumented immigrants because they have no recourse. But even if you do come over as a mail order bride, and here's basically what happens. The immigration marriage fraud amendment, which was enacted in 86, is basically the husband will apply for a spouse or a fiance visa, and then the bride has to marry the husband within three months upon arrival in the US. So there's a three month sort of try it out period, right? But the bride only has conditional residence status for two years. So in that two year period at the end of which they have to apply jointly for her permanent status as a resident in that conditional two year period, that is the Dodgy territory, where they're basically, like, the bride is completely dependent on the husband. He holds all the cards. They're very vulnerable at this point. They may have linguistic isolation and or cultural isolation. They may not have that social network that we are talking about or be completely economically dependent on the husband, and they might be afraid that he'll be like, you know what? It's in that two year frame. I can still have you sent home, right? So you better be nice. And this is basically where they're saying this is just sort of a softer version of trafficking, right? And there is real trafficking attached to this. We're not talking about that. We're talking about women who do come over voluntarily, right, but they still see that as a sort of a softer version of that and that power dynamic. And the one where you mentioned where the men were supplied with all the information, where the mailer to brideshead basically none about the men. That's changed in the last few years thanks to the internet and thanks to things like video chat and texting and Facebook and Skype. And now women are able, just through the simple tools of the Internet, to be much more discerning and discriminating in the men they choose. It's not just like I'm going to put myself in a catalog and cross my fingers. They're putting themselves out there much more. At least ones that are members of legitimate mail order marriage brokerages. Right? Yeah. And there were, very sadly, a couple of high profile murders leading up to the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act in 2005. And this is where things really kind of changed as far as at least trying to help adjust that power dynamic. In that if you are a legitimate brokerage agency. You're required to provide these women with a lot of information now about the men. Whether or not they're on state or national sex offender registries. Background on their financials. They are given information on domestic violence and what that looks like and how to go to the police and stuff like that. And that you can do stuff like that. Arrest history, marital history, residence history, if they have kids, all kinds of stuff now that these agencies have to provide about the men for the women. Yeah. And so people who are like, hey, that's not cool, man. If you were an American woman just dating an American man, you wouldn't have access to that kind of information. That's truly invasive. It is true. It's also almost basically a straw man argument because an American woman is not going to be in the kind of isolated, completely dependent situation that a mail order bride is going to be. And so the mail order bride needs a lot more safeguards than just the average American woman is going to need. So nice try, but that argument doesn't hold water at all. Yeah, I agree. You talked earlier at the beginning about a lack of data and statistics. They don't even really know how often this is happening, much less how many are successful and how many times they end like poorly or in abuse and things like that. There are a few numbers out there. I think the how do you pronounce that? I want to say tahiri. Tahiri Justice Center. They estimate between 11,016 thousand women immigrate each year through a marriage broker. The ins has it more like 4000, $6,000. So you kind of can't really tell how much this is even going on. So it's really hard to like you said, if you don't have the data for nob like us, it's kind of hard to form a hard opinion. Right. But it's not just noobs like us who don't have the data. Like, no one has the data, so it's like no one can form a hard opinion. And in that case, you have to treat it like a case by case basis. And if you have nothing but anecdotal data or evidence, you can't just say that, yes, the mail order marriage industry is just a front for human trafficking and sex trafficking. That is a moral panic that you've just started right there. So we have to go out and get the data. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you can't simultaneously offer support to women who might be suffering from that. Like, what if it turns out to be true? Yeah. It's all just a big front for human trafficking and these women need help. Roll out the red carpet. Like, get those services broadcast, figure out how to get them help if they need it, and see if anybody comes out of the woodwork. In the meantime, while you're conducting those studies to come up with that data, one way or another, it can't hurt. It's just money. And that's a pretty good thing to spend money on, if you ask me. Yeah, I agree. There are some studies that show spousal abuse rates are about three times higher, but this is just for immigrant women married to US. Husbands. I think that includes all immigrant men. I don't think it's just mail order situations. That's right. So that's data, that doesn't exactly help. But it does shine a light on that power dynamic as a whole, I think. Yeah. And I couldn't tell. Dave mentioned that there were three murdered women mail ordered brides in the United States, I think between 2010 and 2020, maybe. And if using the high number that the Tahiri Justice Center uses for how many came over every year, you get 160,000 of them. So three murders out of 160,000 population is, I think, 00:18 percent. But out of all the married women in America, it's like 64 million married women, 17,250 on average, died, were murdered by their partner in that same time, which is 2.6%. So I probably got the math wrong. But if it is right, then that means you're actually less likely to be murdered by your husband as a male or bride than you are just as an American woman who was married and just part of the general population. So that's great, right? You can't feel good about no, exactly. That's great. That's an excellent point for sure, Chuck. It shines the light that we need to basically do away with spousal murder. We can all get behind that, right? Yeah. What it does, though, again, is it makes you think maybe let's concentrate on the real problems, right? And if the mail order bride situation isn't the real problem, then we just and we all know this, but we have a real domestic violence problem in this country anyway. Yeah, it's the same thing. What was the last one we talked about? Oh, the stranger Danger, where it was like, oh, no, actually, your cousin is going to rape and murder you way more frequently than just some strangers. But let's all concentrate on the stranger, right? Your spouse is possibly going to murder you, but let's ignore that and concentrate on mail order brides being murdered instead, even if it's just much less of a chance. Like, that's the definition of a moral panic, and you got to sort those out because they obfuscate important things. Yeah. And at the beginning of the episode, you mentioned LGBTQ rights. That's why we call it mail order marriages now, because in 2013, with the Supreme Court striking down parts of the Defensive Marriage Act, it allowed, and there has been since then sort of a big time rise in LGBTQ people doing the exact same thing. And a lot of times, these people in other countries are literally fleeing for their life because they have no rights in their own country as a person from that community. So that's one of those where you look at it and you're like, they could literally be saving someone's life by getting them out of their country over here. Yeah, that's right. And men do it, too. I was curious about male order husbands and if that was even a thing. And apparently Ireland in recent years has got some of this going on where these Irish men are putting themselves out there and saying, hey, I'm a strapping young Irish man and I'm happy to come marry you and live in your country. Very nice. That's the thing in Ireland. Did not know that. I had no idea either, but leave it to Ireland to just try something new. So. Good for you, Ireland. Good for you. You got anything else on mail order marriages? I got nothing else. I can take off my roller skates now. This one was dangerous at every turn, I thought. You did great. It's good, I'm pretty sure. Oh, God, I hope so. Well, if you want to know more about male order marriages, go check it out and see what you think for yourself. Don't take our word for it. And since I said don't take our words for it, it's time for listener mail. Listener mail. This is a sad case. So a bit of a trigger warning here, especially if you lost a family member to covet. But I had a back and forth with this gentleman, and he really felt strongly about reading this on the air in the name of getting people vaccinated. Hey, guys. Haven't written in quite some time. Been listening since 2008. You been around for so many personal milestones, even though we've never met, even though I did ask you the best question ever at your live show in Phoenix. My father taught me how to play guitar. I've been playing for nearly 30 years. Because of his influence, there's never been a question of Gibson or Fender in my family. It's always been clear we're offender family. He played a strat and I played a telly. This last Tuesday, I said goodbye to my father. Covet had done its job and completely overtaken his body after he passed. Later that day, I went into my truck and took a few minutes and decided I needed some Josh and Chuck to get my mind off of things. And I was absolutely shocked on that day, Leo, Fender and Les Paul came through in my feed. Right. My father and I did not have anything we bonded over more than our love of music and playing guitar, an affinity for Fender and a dislike of all things Gibson. Sorry, Chuck. There could not have been more perfect topic to help me through one of the hardest days of my life. I look forward to someday when I might be able to shake your hands after a good hand washing and sanitization and just thank you for being with me through so many good days and so many bad days. And he included a song that he gave his father that he wrote for him. It's great. And this is from Eddie. And Eddie said, please read this on the air. He said, my mother decided to get vaccinated because of this and they were not vaccinated. And he said, just please send the message out to people that it can happen to you and your family and just go out there and get that vaccination already. Thanks for that, Eddie. Definitely our condolences on your father's passing. I'm really sorry to hear that. But I'm glad we could bring you a little measure of comfort at a terrible time. So thank you for letting us know about that. And also thank you for telling everybody to get vaccinated because that's a pretty good thing to use your position for. So I think like Eddie said, go get vaccinated. Yeah, we said it. Go get vaccinated. Okay. Okay. Agreed. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
How Agritourism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-agritourism-works | Agritourism marries farming and tourism, but why do people pay to pick apples or work on a farm? And who does agritourism benefit? Josh and Chuck explore the history and various incarnations of agritourism, as well as the rationale behind it. | Agritourism marries farming and tourism, but why do people pay to pick apples or work on a farm? And who does agritourism benefit? Josh and Chuck explore the history and various incarnations of agritourism, as well as the rationale behind it. | Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:28:37 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=19, tm_min=28, tm_sec=37, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=348, tm_isdst=0) | 32617189 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles. Www. Doug Bryant that makes the stuff you should know. It feels like it's been forever since we've been in the studio. Yeah. My chair no longer stinks. I had time to air out. And, you know, I said it before, I'll say it again. If we could roll the first three minutes before we actually hit record on this puppy. Yeah, man. Well, gold. Do you think so? I think what are the ones that give for spoken word? You can get a grammy for that. Sure. Or if it's like, videotaped and broadcast on TV, you can conceivably get an emmy for it. I think we could win every award with our three minutes before and after we record, and people out there are like, I want to hear it so bad. They get this. That's it. This is what you get. And you'll like it for your freeness. Right? By the way, go like us on Facebook, will you? It would help us out. Personally, chuck and I would be helped out if you go onto facebook. Comstuffy facebook page and like us. Get us to 50,000. Can you please get us to 50,000? And for the gentleman who said that it makes him want to unlike, it because we ask people to like it. What's going on, buddy? What's going on in your life? It's called marketing. You ready? Yeah. You ready? Let's market some agro tourism. Okay. I have an intro. I'll hear it. So back in 2007, the little news item may have flipped past because it was south of the border. Florida. A guy named that's usually Mexico. When you say that, by the way, we're not in Texas. We're in Georgia. So south of border means Florida. Okay. A guy named Ronald Evans senior and his wife, Jacquita Evans got some pretty hefty time. Ron Evans got 30 years for what amounted to indentured servitude. Right. This guy ran some Florida labor camps where people would go, and, like, this is where they would stay and bunk and eat at night. And then during the day, they get bust to farms to work. Right. Orange groves, that kind of thing, wherever. I think lettuce is big there, too. That's all legal and kosher. Sure. They even actually employed the homeless. They would go around to Miami, baton Rouge, New Orleans. I don't think they came to Atlanta, but they went to big cities in the southeast and recruited homeless people living on the street and said, hey, we can give you a job. Great. Yeah. The problem came with the indentured servitude part. They had a company store at their labor camp, and it sold a gallon of wine for $40. And you should know right off the bat that you can't get a good gallon of wine that's all cheap sure. So they had really inflated prices. Cigarettes were through the roof. Right. And the crack cocaine was above market value. The stuff they sold at the company store that they eventually got all the guys addicted to wow. Gave them advances of crack against their paychecks and basically got these guys mired in debt to where they were indentured servants, wow, slaves. The guy finally got busted. He probably thought he was a really smart dude. Yeah, because he was running them not just in Florida, but North Carolina, and possibly South Carolina as well. He's like, I've discovered something really great. Right. So that is the exact opposite of agritourism. And that's your set up. That's pretty good. I didn't see where that was going because the whole time I was thinking, all right, that's fine. He's paying these people get homeless people, put them to work, puts them up in a bunk. What's the problem? Yes. $40 a gallon of wine. Well, the cracks are a kind of a big problem, too. He had all the farmers paying him in cash in return for the labor so he could go buy massive amounts of crack. So the company store never ran out of crack, from what I understand. Well, they were probably fairly secluded. It's probably the only store around. They probably didn't have cars. No, they probably depended on that store. They did. And that's crack. Yeah. So, like I said, that's the opposite of Agriturism. What is the positive? I guess? What is agritourism? Well, it's when you want to attract guests and visitors to come to your business, your farm, to either observe or actually take part in the business, the family business. Okay, let's go. Is that good? That's it. That was zigratourism explained. Like, let's just give it one example. Say you can go to California and you can stay at a winery, and instead of just kicking back on the porch all day and sampling wine, you can go out and you can pick the grapes and you can learn how it's done and lend a hand and eat the food that's produced there. Maybe if it's a farm, that kind of thing. So I think sideways, the film was entirely bankrolled by the California Agritourism cartel. Was it really? I think so. I mean, think about it. Like, the whole movie is about an Agritourism trip that's essentially not even essentially that is in every way Agritourism. Like, they went from one winery to another winery. They watched the grapes get stomped. Did they participate in grape stomping? I don't remember. I don't remember. But did you ever see that video on YouTube, the woman stomping grapes? Yeah. Here in Atlanta. She's yeah, it was Fox Five that it happened on. Anne. Have you seen keyboard Cat play her out? Yeah, it's pretty good. It's really sad because she seems genuinely hurt, but the noise that she makes, once you hear it, once it is stuck in your crawl forever. Yeah, yeah. That's grape stomping. So that's a pretty good example of agritourism. Right. Got me wrong. I think we should well, yes, in her case, but Sideways is a good example. I took that tour. I know. You're 35. No, that was Northern California. We did the little sideways was down in Southern, like Santa Barbara. Oh, I thought it was in Napa Valley. No, it was in Napa where it was well, then all those places I went to that were in the movie must have been wrong. In the movie it's supposed to be Napa. $5. Okay. The one winery with the guy with a big beard, I actually hung out with that guy for like an hour drinking wine. Really? The dude from the movie? And we were the only people in there. The sun was setting. It was one of those magical moments. That sounds touching. So, Chuck, what's the point of agritourism? Well, it helps because farmers are having to diversify a little bit, in most cases to make dough. Yeah, I read a badly. Well, with the advent of the factory farm right. We've got a very small percentage of farms number wise. Right. Say one factory farm equals one farm. It's an enormous farm in both revenue and acreage production. They represent a very small number of the number of farms, but disproportionately large total of the revenue made and of the stuff produced in the US. Right. So that's industrialization. Right. And one of the other aspects of industrial I know where you're going next, but one of the other aspects of industrialization is apparently you have to have a gross revenue of 50 grand a year from your farm to start to actually be able to sustain your family really? Through farming. Wow. 75% in 2007. No, I'm sorry, 2010. This year, 75% of farms in the US. Made less than 50 grand gross a year. So this is one of the reasons why they're saying, well, I don't really want to give up farming and become a city slicker, because I hate city slickers. Right. But I like city slickers money. So let's supplement our income and start some aggregate. Yeah, that's a great reason. What's the other reason that farmers are being forced to go into agritourism? I'm glad you asked. Globalization. Because with the way shipping is now and communication around the world and things move at the speed of light, you're not just competing with the farm, like in your county or in your state, you're competing with a farm across the universe from yourself or the world. The world's bad enough. Don't bring the galaxy into this, you're in big trouble. Moon farmers, intergalactic competition, moisture farmers. So we've got globalization, industrialization. Those are pretty much the two big drivers of Agriturism. But you can't put it past farm folks to, well, smart farmsmart. Is that what they call it? I never heard that, but I love that term. I thought I picked that up from you? No. Are you sure? No, I never have heard that before. Well, there's farmsmart. Farmstrong that said that no, that's live strong. Smart. So, Chuck, there's a few different ways that this can pan out, right? Yeah. Let's say you're at the $49,000 level and you don't care about new stuff. You're just fine selling your old clothes, but you want to keep farming. You would use agri tourism as, like, a supplementary income, right? Yeah. Just add a little like you might do tours, things like that. Right. And, you know, I should add that when I was a kid was it Robert that wrote this? Robert Lamb? Yeah. It's an unusually thin article from Robert Lamb of stuff to Blow Your mind. Well, he makes a point early on that it provides a connection that people have been lost between the stuff we put in our body and the person. Yeah. And I read that, and it really hit home, because when I was a kid and this wasn't in the 1920s, we got our milk from a farm right here in Atlanta, and it wasn't weird. Like, we drove to this farm and they had you pull up to the cooler room, and there was a guy standing there on the porch, and he would just ask what you need, and he'd go in the cooler room and go get it for you. And it wasn't like I didn't live in I was in a hillbilly. And it wasn't the 1920s. This was like in the in de Cab County, Georgia. Yes. But now, I mean, that seems really weird. Anything outside of a grocery store. It's not weird. It's more like token. It's like a token experience. Right. Yeah. And that, by the way, is direct marketing, agro tourism, where you drive to the farm. Like, you just pull up to a farm stand or something on the side of the road. Sure. But yeah, we were talking about what's driving Agriturism from the farmer's point of view. Right. But you just touched upon what's driving it from the consumer's point of view. And yeah. This whole farm to table movement is huge. Well, yeah, it's the perfect time for agro tourism because I think it was in 2008 or nine very recently, the world population tipped towards cities. For the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in a rural area. Right. The sticks. The sticks. So we're getting further and further away from our country roots. Right. People won't walk around barefoot anymore. People wear shirts underneath their overalls. It's just urban. Sure. So I guess this desire to be able to go back to the farm is definitely part of why this is why consumers are going there. Right, well, and Robert makes a point, which is very valid, which is, especially if your family if that was your roots, your ancestry, you may not know anything about that, and it might be a neat way to get in touch with your ancestry and your roots go back, see what it's like to milk a cow because great great granddad did that for a living. Sure. Pretty cool. Yeah. You can feel your great great granddad's ghost looking over your shoulder like you're doing it wrong. Right. You got to yank down into the left. I've never milked a cow. I don't know how to do it. So you've got supplementary there's complimentary, which is where it's about half and half. And a good example of this kind of agritourism outfit is a pumpkin patch, right? Yeah. So, like, they may sell half of their pumpkins to a wholesaler and then they may keep half of them for the fall tours and people can walk around and pick their own pumpkin and then carve it and have some smart nose teenager come and smash it. Right. And some awful band will name their band after that act. Jerry just left it. She's, like, mentioned Smashing Pumpkin. So that's complimentary. And then there's primary. And primary is the one where your farm is growing nothing but weeds, right. Nothing you can sell. And you turn it into an aggregateurism destination. Almost all of your income is coming from the fact that there are people coming to your farm. You're still growing stuff, though. Well, you are. You have to grow something, but it doesn't necessarily have to be sellable. Right. As long as people think it looks pretty, then you're fine. Sure. Now, back in 1999, the director of the UC Davis Small Farms program publicly worried that if ranchers and farmers didn't get in on the Agriturism action soon enough, the market was going to be open wide enough for theme park operators to do this, which would be the primary enterprise aspect. And there's a guy who's a former Disney exec who actually started a company to make mazes that take about 2 hours to get through. Really? On farms? Yeah. Well, that's huge. The corn maze in the fall, that's agitourism, buddy. Yeah. You ever done one of those? I haven't. I've been terrified at the thought of, like, getting trapped in there forever. Really? Wow. Mazes, huh? I don't like mazes. I bet the end of The Shining is pretty harrowing for you, huh? No, because I'm not there, but yeah, sure. I've got like three mirror neurons. If you were Danny, though, then it would have been frightened. I would have just laid down and died. Yes. Can kill me, dad. Make it quick. So, Robert likens it to eco tourism, which is not too far off, wouldn't you think? They both have tourism in the name. Well, yeah. And the cool thing about Agriturism and eco tourism, actually more agro tourism is you don't have to necessarily throw a lot of money into it as a farmer because you got the farm. Sometimes you just got to open the gates and advertise and say, come to our apple farm and pick some apples. Yes. So it's not like you got to sink a lot of money into an enterprise. Right. And I think one of the rules of thumb, if you're an agro tourism farmer and you're actually trying to sell some of your stuff too, you want to keep the littlest kids occupied away from your produce because apparently they represent a huge portion of shrinkage. Oh, really? Yeah. So I guess petting zoos are the best way to do it. And that petting zoo it is. Because if you've ever wanted to watch a small child inadvertently kill a rabbit by petting it too eagerly, then agro tourism is right up your alley. That doesn't happen. Sure it does. That's awful. Kids and their rough love, so they just don't know. Let's talk about some different types of agritourism and checkers. Well, you mentioned the direct market, which is like fruit stands, that kind of thing. Robert calls this one education and experience. And this is more along the lines of, like, a bed and bright, like serenbee. You know Saran Bee? South of Atlanta? I saw. Yeah, it's pretty cool. You know, they have an apprenticeship, too. Really? That lasts from March to November. Yeah, I looked it up. Pays $800 a week plus housing and utilities. Wow. And they teach you the ins and outs of organic farming, keeping farm records. It's pretty well organized, it sounds like. Well, we're on that. If you go on to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service site. Okay. And then search sustainable farming, internships and apprenticeships, it brings them up for the entire country. Cool. Yeah. So if you're into this kind of thing, if you want to be like an agriculturist rather than an Agra tourist, it's out there for you. If I was 15 years younger and single, you would find me down at Sarah and be living right now. Is that right? Yeah. Man, I'd love that. Really? Yeah, it's gorgeous down there. So that's the idea of the bed and breakfast package where they say, hey, stay at our bed and breakfast and work a little bit on our farm and learn how to turn butter and eat the food that we serve you. That's straight from the farm. From the table. Yeah. You saw that one? Maverick Farm in New York, North Carolina. Yeah, I love that. Slow it down. It's in Valley Crescent, North Carolina, and it's a bed and breakfast. It's situated in a 125 year old farmhouse. Right. And it's $120 a night for a room, but you can work off up to, I think, 25% of your bill, $7 an hour by acting as farm labor. Farm hand. Yes. And then you eat with the family in their home every night, the stuff that they grow. Yeah. And they said that you can it's an option. If you want to donate a little money back for the meal, you can. Yeah. I'm trying to picture you there. You'd be like, working 120 is a good rate. I'll just be here on the porch watching you people work. I'm paying to watch other people work on a farm. And then the other type is recreation and event aggregorism. And that's more like the big fall festival. Corn mazes, pumpkin picking, hay rides, sheepshearing contest. Do they have those? Sure. Awesome. Pie eating contest. Basically, if there's an event that you're attending and, say, a pageant and then insert your own vegetable yeah, that's agitourism. The Miss Squash of Canton or whatever, that kind of thing. Sure. Another one that was pretty cool that he mentions in here is the US. Department of Agriculture operates one called Home Place by the Lakes National Recreation Area in Tennessee. And they go a step further and combine a little, like Colonial Williamsburg and with it. So they'll dress up instead of a Civil War reenactment, they'll be dressed up in the old school clothes showing you how to turn butter. I imagine the Amish would probably be like, dude, that's our life. Have you come watch us? Have you read it? It's like the opposite of rum. Spring. Yeah. We just figured out the key to agritourism. It's the opposite of Rome Springs. Yes. Have you ever seen the Ali G episode where Barrack goes to, like, a living history farm in South Carolina? I strongly recommend that one. Hilarious. There's another one called the Connor Prairie Living History Museum, which is sort of what you're talking about right there. This one's pretty serious. Yeah. This is in Fishers, Indiana, and there's an outdoor museum, and you can see how things operated in the then they go a little step further, and they actually have a program called Follow the North Star, which allows you the chance to see what it was like to be a slave trying to escape. Yeah. I wonder how they do that. I think they have guys and dogs running after you. Really? Yes. Tracking you. That's what I took from it. Yeah. That's tricky. That's living history right there. I don't know if I'd want to do that. Can you see yourself running through the woods? Like, I hate agritourism. Yeah, this is horrible. So, Josh, one of the ideas behind agrotourism is that people will be so inspired by their trip that it will form sort of a relationship with the farm and that they will want to support that farm even after they have left the farm. This appears to be, like, a long term goal of agricultural it's not just short term. It's more like they want to remind the city slickers that farms still exist and that the city slickers are welcome to come by and empty their wallets. There, like, keep coming back again and again. And actually that works because I was raised as an agro tourist going to McQueen Orchard in Holland, Ohio, really? Pick apples. And still to this day, like my family, when we visit Ohio, we'll go to McQueen's, we schedule it around the time where the apples are ripe. Amazing. Best donuts in the entire world, like I kid you not. Really? Yes. Everything is just perfect there. Just go to McQueen apple fritters too, I bet. Apple fritters. Their apple cider is just the apples themselves. You just climb the trees and pick them and eat them and take off your shirt. It's awesome. So where I was going though, with the repeat businesses, you've heard of the CSA, the Community Supported Agriculture Programs? Yeah. And that's when you sign up as a collective. Well, you sign up personally, you form a collective as a whole and you basically pay money upfront to get a box of vegetables, like once a month. I mean, the programs are different, delivered to your home or sometimes you go pick them up. Right. And the cool thing is, and you should know this, because some people might not think it's so cool, is you don't know what you're going to get. Yeah. But you get a lot of what you don't know what you're going to get. Well, yeah. So you got to be open minded. You got to be willing to experiment with vegetables you may never have cooked with before. It's probably a good idea to know how to can things. Yeah. Because you really get a lot of stuff. This is one of the things I've always heard from people who have co op subscriptions that hail so much all the Tennessee Tech has a program. They say that they're the first university in the state of Tennessee to offer a degree in agricultural because they say this is the future and you're going to need managers and people that know the trends in this business. I think this represents the people who are like, theme parks are going to get into this. You think so? Yeah. Like, lettuce land, that kind of thing. No, I wouldn't call it that. But possibly they got a couple of stats for you. Yeah. It's successful, right? Well, yeah. I got one for the state of Colorado, at least. They say that aggre tourism contributed $2.2 billion to their state's economy and that 13.2 million visitors engaged last year in Agriturism in Colorado. It's pretty awesome. So the one I have is from the 2007 US census of Agriculture. 23,350 farms in the US have some sort of agricultural thing going on, right? Yeah. And about 3600 of those were making 25 grand or more a year from it. Yeah. This billion number seems really suspect to me. I wonder if it's not million for Colorado. Yes. Because the total for all of the US in 2007 is 566,000,000. I don't know if that was gross revenue because it sounded like your stat was economic impact. Yeah. That would include the gas people got coming into the state and hotels that they stayed in when they were at picking apples. It still seems high, but that's what the Colorado State Extension Service said well, they're pretty well known to be rather liberal with their numbers. Hippies. So let's see, what else? Chuck? I don't have much else, do you? Greatest winery scene of all time. Not in Sideways. Found in the British comedy series. Absolutely fabulous. Really? Oh, yeah. You know, I didn't watch that show. I knew it was supposed to be great, but I didn't watch it. And that particular episode was hilarious. Yeah. Well, I think going through a winery is a great way to participate in Agrateurism. And not just wineries. They have homegrown breweries now, too, as well. Like, breweries like to do that. People grow the hops on their land and make the beer. And you drink it. Yes. I'd like to go to the Sierra Nevada plant. I would say it's one of my goals in life. Go find where they make that sweet nectar. Have you been to a sweetwater? No, I never been to shock. I know, right down the street. It's like a good little happy hour place. That's what I hear. Yeah, it's fun. Give you tastings and all that. Is that aggro tourism? No, not at all. Industrial tourism. Maybe just visiting a brewery. Sure. That's aggregate tourism plus a touch of industrial tourism. Just as an extra little nugget. That was free. Yes, it was. All right. So if you want to learn more about Agritourism, read an article by Robert Lamb just to complete the series. You can type in Agritourism agricourism in the handychurch bar@housetofours.com and support your local farm. Get on the Internet and there's something nearby. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff. And actually, what's that website? You got one? I do. I give you the one for the apprenticeships. If you want to actually be the person working that people are gawking at. Right. If you want to gawk at people working on a farm, go to Rural Bounty. Rural Bounty.com? I thought it would be Aggregalker. Same thing. Okay, it's time now for administrative details. You're ready? Should we set this up for people who don't know what this means because it's the worst title ever? It is not. It's very succinct and to the point. These are gift thank yous from fans that send us things in and hopes that we will promote their little etsy site. Well, not just gifts. Like sometimes correspondence. Yeah, correspondence postcards. So it's been a while, and we've gotten some pretty good stuff. A lot of stuff. It's going to take, like, an hour. It is. Just want to say thanks to Mr. Cone at Waterford Union High School in Waterford, Wisconsin, for the nice letter and the information on goats that produce spider silk, including in drawing go. Badgers. Yeah, he was actually was it badger? Badger. He was for a while. Wisconsin? I thought I made that up. No, you're thinking of wolverine. It was a lucky guess. You go Center College women's volleyball team sent us one of their T shirts. They are the Spandex mafia. We all three got one. Yes. Thanks to Kristen for even more nugget. Thank you. Delicious. Oh, yeah. Kristin Ferguson with her nugget. Yeah. Thanks to Sarah Michelle for the copy of Dianetics hardcover, no less. You got that? Yeah. Wow. I got that. Jeremy and heather in asheville, north Carolina, make eco friendly artwork. Custom wood, carved wedding cake toppers. And they made a little Josh, a little Jerry, and a little Chuck. Really awesome looking. I put it on Facebook. Yes. You are very proud of this. I just thought they looked really cool and it looked like us. And you can shop with them if you would like, at Uristarhouse Etsy.com. That is Urastarhouse Etsy.com. Nice, Chuck. Thanks to Kentucky and Nikki for the postcard of the London Eye. Yeah. Thanks, amillocavin@jadabugroasters.com. It's jadabug roasters.com for the not one, but \u00a32 of coffee. Why didn't I see any of this? You always give me the coffee. I just didn't even pass this one by you, man. I'll bring it in for you if you want. David Polly, San Francisco. He runs a small print shop, and he sent some cool custom concert posters that he prints. And I collect these posters. And he said he would keep me in mind for the future and sending me some of these. That's very nice. Did he send you two versions of the same? Is that the one I have? Jerry got one, too. We all three got one. Okay, that's very cool. I would have liked to have been at that festival. Thanks to Casey from Huntsville for the very nice letter and the sketch of the octopus. Keep listening, Casey, and we will keep you laughing. Right. Jennifer of Lynchburg, Virginia, sent us little enemy Christmas ornaments. Very cute. They are very cute, yes. Thanks a million to Kate in Sunnyvale for our awesome card. That's the one that has us as the Estonian wedding couple. Oh, yes. And thank you to Matt and Zach at the Hourlist podcast. Have you been on there? Yeah. They send a shirt. Yes, they did send a shirt. And at first, without reading the card, I thought it was a drawing of us. I did, too. These guys are doppelgangers. Yes. I saw it and I was like, it's sort of a good likeness, but not really. Right now. I'm like, oh, okay. It's them. So they have a podcast called Our List, if you want to check it out. It's our list, podcast. I believe. And speaking of shirts, standard clothing and Print in Candor, North Carolina, send us some shirts. And I got a hoosiers T shirt. A Jimmy Chitwood number 15. Hoosiers T shirt. It's because you are a well loved celebrity and Jerry got one, and you got one different ones, and that is standardclothingandprint.com. Thank you to Amy, who sent us her copy, a copy of her doctoral thesis metrica with an exclamation point about the metric system and how it should be used. In America, and it's pretty awesome. I wrote a blog post on it, and she mailed it. I got it, like, two days later. Cool. So you can check that out. Just type in am etrica, and it brings up some stuff. I don't think she has an actual site for it, though, although she's on Twitter. Much neglected Twitter account metrica. Interesting. I got two more. Matt invented his own chewing gum. It's good, too. It's called think gum, and it's supposedly brain boosting with herbal extracts and naturally caffeinated, and you can find that@thinkgum.com. And my last one a little controversial. In my house, we got handmade soaps sent to us from Jan Marie Silvera. Yeah, world Soaps. W-H-I-R-L-E-D soap. And I told Emily about this because everyone knows my wife makes her soap. She was like, Let me see that. She checked it out and checked out. She immediately looks at the ingredients. The first thing she always does, she's like, oh, actually made of essential oils and olive oil and palm oils. Yeah, it's really good soap. Thank you to Cameron. Your letter got to us just fine. Thanks to the Pinks for sending their CD. Thanks. Thanks to Elmochelle down in Panama for the postcard. Very titillating postcard. Yeah. Thanks to Vanessa for the jackalope postcard. Still got some more Chuck. Hang in there. Thanks to Jan from Niagara Falls for a postcard of the namesake of her hometown. Thanks to Emirates and Boone, North Carolina for the nice letter. We'll see what we can do. Thanks to Laurel, who sent us the Meyer lemon vanilla bean marmalade. I didn't know about that either, okay? I didn't know if I gave you some or not. You just funneled some of these straight to Josh's house. I never even heard about it. I had to ask you for the gum. Yeah, and I gave you the whole box. Thank you. To Nick from Mudrivercoffee. Mudrivercoffee.com, yeah. More coffee. This is where I got the idea to just keep the \u00a32 for myself. I was like, well, split this. You're like, you're the coffee guy. You keep it. I did say that. Awesome coffee. Let's see. Thanks to Katerina from Lancealu, Hungary for the nice postcard of Joseph Stalin. Thanks to Robert for the Route 66 postcard. Thanks to Zach Netzer for the awesome Mixcd. Thanks to Andrewsmith@andrewsmithartcom for the DVDs. Did you see that? I did. Thank you to Jen from Australia for the postcard of the theme park, and thank you to Staff Sergeant Russin Kozahar, coziar I think it's cozyr. For the postcard from Afghanistan. Be safe. Yes, all of you, not just the staff sergeant. Yeah, everyone be safe. And thank you very much for sending us some stuff. If you guys want to run and drove to the Stuff You Should Know Facebook page, and if you have a link that you want to share with everybody, please do, because all the stuff was great. Thank you. And if you want to send to something, you can find our address by emailing us stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseopeworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house upworks. iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. There's a perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-07-27-sysk-toilet-paper.mp3 | A Dry Look at Toilet Paper | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/a-dry-look-at-toilet-paper | Over or under? One ply or two? How about six? TP has not been around that long, but is has been embraced in a big way by the United States. Learn all about the interesting history behind this decidedly dry product. | Over or under? One ply or two? How about six? TP has not been around that long, but is has been embraced in a big way by the United States. Learn all about the interesting history behind this decidedly dry product. | Thu, 27 Jul 2017 20:41:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=20, tm_min=41, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=208, tm_isdst=0) | 50191960 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. We're going on tour in 2017, so listen up. That's right. You can get all the deeds@sysklive.com. Current cities who love us toronto, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, apple is no, they don't love us so much in Chicago. Oh, yeah. They're coming around, though. And Austin doesn't love us. So we need Chicago and Austin to come out and see us. So you can explain why there's no love. Yeah. And everybody else go to Sysklife.com and buy your tickets now because they're going fast. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. We're about to get our hands dirty. How Toilet Paper Works episode Dumb dude, there were so many puns in this article. I was driving in pain. I will say that this was a draft of the future how Stuff Works'article. Yeah, I gathered. So it hasn't been through the editing and process, and I'm hoping and praying the editor will have some good taste to remove some of these euphemisms about poop. Yeah, because it's not necessary. No, you don't have to get hilarious about poop. It's hilarious on its own. Sure. Yeah. I like this one, by the way. Yeah. Toilet paper has a pretty interesting history, actually. And one thing I didn't quite realize, it's pretty American, actually, toilet paper is oh, yeah. If you go elsewhere in the world, people have different feelings about toilet paper than Americans do. You come back and you realize, like, wow, America really, really loves its toilet paper. Yes. And you start to look at statistics, and it really kind of comes home. Like, for example, here's some editing that needs to happen. This guy's got some numbers wrong. But what I found was that Americans spend something like $6 billion on toilet paper every year. Yeah. It's about 24 roles per person. Is that right? Yes, per year. And we go through something like 36 and a half billion rolls of toilet paper each year in America. 36 and a half billion rolls of toilet paper every year. That is a lot of toilet paper. Yes. And we're not showing many signs of stopping. As a matter of fact, toilet paper is getting more expensive by the year. It's rising by about 2% in cost every year. And we're saying, Give it to us. There's lots of theories that if toilet paper somehow became a luxury item yeah. Americans would just say, well, I have to buy this luxury item. I cannot live without toilet paper. Yeah, but it's because we love our toilet paper. And you don't think about it until you experience something other than toilet paper, which is usually a stream of water up your butt. Yes. And we've talked about this before, but for those of you who haven't heard our various statements on this, I want to officially go on record again saying that toilet paper is gross and disgusting. The idea of wiping poop from your butt with dry paper is counterintuitive. It makes no sense. And if you don't involve water in some way to the process, then you're doing it wrong. You're a communist? I'm a Bedaist, yeah. So do you have one at home? Well, I need to rehook it up. I bought one of the toilet ones because after I said that a couple of years ago, everyone's like, Dude, here you go. Sent me the link to the product, bought one immediately. Right. And hooked it up. But we did some bathroom renovations and it is now somewhere in a bag in my house and I just need to find it and get it going again. So you have a bidet floating around your house in a bag somewhere? Yeah. How's that? What kind is it? Is it like one that's like a toilet lid slashbade it fits under the lid. I got you. And squirts a jet of water to your butt. I've got one of those Japanese toilet seats that has a bidet and a dryer and everything. Really? They're fantastic, buddy. Oh, man. And they're nice. I mean, it's more expensive than a regular toilet seat, but it's not so outrageously expensive. Yeah, you probably save them on toilet paper. I do, a little bit. I mean, toilet paper, you still need to pat yourself dry. You definitely do. Although if you have a dryer do you? Yeah. But you'd have to sit there for 15 minutes to get so what's the problem? Dry. I remember there was a George Carlin album where he was talking about some game show contestant and one of the game show contestants, Hobbies, was sitting on the toilet till my legs go numb. That's so funny, the little things that stand up from your childhood. Yeah, like that's locked in there, but you probably don't remember something really important about your family. Like multiplication. Oh, yeah. Or schooling. Sure. All right, so history of toilet paper, man, like so many things. If you go back to ancient China, they were apparently future people because it seems like so many things the ancient Chinese people thought of and then it just sort of went away for 1000 years. Well, they invented paper. Right? So if you're making paper and you're pooping, eventually you're going to put the two together. Like, oh, I'll just use this. Because at the time or prior to this, all around the world, basically, humans used whatever was handy. Like leaves. Moss was very popular for me. Yeah, let me go through these, actually. Leaves. Not bad. Yeah, moss, I would say a little messy, but softish. I bet moss is the bomb. Especially if it's fresh. It says on here coconuts. I don't even know where to start with that. Yeah, I guess if you went with the grain, it'd be okay. I'm sure it's not like a whole coconut. You're using like a part of a shell or something. Like a shard. Yeah. Don't say shard in that area. But I think a coconut shell, the outer shell, would be at least like it would probably do the job. Right. It's kind of rough. Right? It says shells. Yeah. On that. If you live near the coast, you could use shells. And there's definitely some kind of mollusks that would be better than others. Yeah. I saw somebody point out that there's such a thing as razor clams. Yeah, I know what a razor clam is. Not want to use that snow. You're definitely on the right track with that. Corn cobs. Huge in America. I think that makes a lot of sense. Sure. It's got like the kind of rough bits, but it's you can turn it and about perfectly shaped, continually turn it and get new coverage or whatever. Yeah. The only thing with the corn cob, using a corn cob is that you have to play banjo music in your head while you're using it. It's the only way to do it. Sheep's wool. Not bad. No. And if you were a rich type Frenchy from the Renaissance on, you would probably use lace. I assumed lace. I saw that. And that doesn't make any sense because lace is full of holes. It just seems so French royalty. Like, I'll only wipe my bottom with handmade lace. Right. And I think also if you were royalty, you weren't actually the one doing your own bottom. Like, for example, King Henry VIII, who I know wasn't French, he had a position called the groom of the stool. It wasn't just him. No. So I think if you were super rich, you had people wipe for you, which is now. The only time you do that is if you've broken both of your arms. Well, here's the deal. I looked up groom of the stool because that immediately piqued my interest. Sure. First of all, they're not talking about a stool as in poop. They're talking about, like, a stool sample. No, it means like this portable commode that looked like a stool that they would carry around. I wonder if that's where the term for poop stool came from, then. I don't know. Let's just say yes. Okay. I need a win today. I also found that and this was a position that all of royalty held. He was not the only one. All the kings had them in queens and dukes and duchesses, but they were the very closest helpers, obviously. But apparently they didn't actually help them wipe. They would help them undress, for sure. They would be in charge of the komode upkeep. Okay. And apparently they would just kind of track their meal schedule and dietary goings on, like what goes in and what comes out. But I didn't see anywhere where they actually wiped their butts for them. I see you've passed your beans. Good show. It is Tuesday. Most of them weren'ts. And King George III mad King George actually had a groom of the stool, John Stewart with U-A-R-T who eventually became Prime Minister of England. Wow. How about that? Man, thank you for bringing us up to date because I was grossly misled by this Houseworks article. Well, yeah, it sounds like I wipe your butt for you. I failed to do the proper outside research, so thank you for saving me and shaming me at the same time. Well, that sounds like I don't blame you. You probably read Groom in the Soul and you're like, yes. Don't need to know anything more about that. No, but I should have known better. I've been doing this for years. I'm supposed to be professional. That's okay. All right. Ancient Greeks use clay and stone. And the Romans, they were on the right track. They used, like, a sponge on a stick, which was wet and that they would then clean with salt water. Yeah, well, actually, taking it back a second, the Greeks actually used polished bits of stone. Yeah, that's called stone. Okay. And then there was also something called, I think, ostroiki. And that was where if the town was voting on, like, kicking somebody out, they would have there be these bits of ceramic with the person's name engraved on it, and they just throw it into this pot or whatever. Well, to really show your disdain for somebody, you could use one of these strokes, stone for wiping yourself. You're wiping yourself with the person's name, which sounds about as bad as it gets, but that's where the word ostracize comes from. It sounds like an Australian exclamation astroyky. Astroyky. People get the point. People are using whatever they can to wipe their butts. It's an issue. Things get messy since the dawn of time. Took Tuk was like, it doesn't feel good to walk around after a poop if I haven't cleaned myself right. So it was an issue. And let's fast forward in time to seven. This is where it's starting to get good. In New York City, there was a man named Joseph Gayetti, and he invented something called Gayetti's Medicated paper sheets. And it was toilet paper, but it was not yet on a roll. They were more like a tissue that you would pull out of a box. Like Kleenex. Yeah. They were like, if you want a brand name, buzz it. That's fine. Proprietary Epinemym, about $0.50 for 500 sheets. And he was so proud, he had his name printed on them. Probably didn't think that through, but here's the deal. He had a hard time selling it, because at the time, and this is no joke, americans literally used the Farmers Almanac and the Sears catalog to wipe their butts. Yeah. As a matter of fact, both of them, I think, came with a hole punched in, like, the top corner to make it easier to just hang from a nail in your outhouse. Amazing. So that was definitely one reason why Gayat's Medicated Paper didn't take off. But another part of it was that this is like a taboo thing, right? Yeah. You got the Sears Roebuck catalog in the mail. It served a couple of purposes, one of which was unspoken. Right? Yeah. Like, the mail delivery guy would just walk up and just, like, kind of hand it to the person and say, here's your catalog. Yes. Thanks, Nudge. This should last you a couple of months. All right. Got you. I was wondering how long it would last. I mean, these things were a couple of hundred pages, right. So I wonder how long it would last. But yes. Especially in rural America, that was toilet paper. That and corn cops. I wonder if there are arguments that broke out in families, like, it's winter and we're already to the tool section. Yeah. I'm sure there have always been miserly jerks who yelled about using too much toilet paper. Yeah. So that was one reason that Gayady had trouble with his medicated paper, right? Yes. Another part was that the taboo. Right. No one wanted to talk about that. And he actually sold his thing as, like, medicine. It was meant to be for the prevention or treatment of hemorrhoids. Right. Yeah. Which obviously that would help. And it was very much what we would consider the first toilet paper, but it didn't take off. It wasn't until about 30 or 40 years later that Clarence and E Irving Scott, the Scott brothers, whose name still appears on toilet paper rolls yup. Got together and actually created the first toilet paper on a roll. Yeah. That changed everything. It really did. But apparently the shame, the stigma of creating toilet paper was so much that they released their product in. It wasn't until 19 two that they finally acknowledged that it was their product. Yeah. They were just ashamed. Yeah. They didn't have to put their name on it. I mean no. And apparently they used some of the companies that their company owned to sell it under. Yeah. They really were, like, trying to put some distance in between them and the toilet paper they created. Yeah, I get it. They did manage to sell a lot of it, though, because they were smart enough to market it to hotels and drugstores and stuff. And so they sold a lot of it. Not like direct to customer. Right. And they said, Your hotel needs this. Trust me, no one wants to talk about it, but just put these in your bathrooms and everyone will say, Great. Again. It worked kind of well. But then toilet paper, as we understand it today, really didn't become like a staple, what you would call an icon of American culture, frankly, until, like, three things happened from about the beginning of the 20th century until about the 1930s. Right. Yeah. One of the first things was that America started getting indoor plumbing, flushing toilets. That was the biggest deal, I think it was, because you can't use corn cobs in that any longer. No. So this is largely in the cities where you would find indoor plumbing. Still in rural America, up to the 30s, people were still using corn cobbs and Sears and Roebuck catalog. That's when the second thing that took place that changed everything happened. The Sears catalog went to a clay based glossy paper, and no longer was it soft and absorbed, any longer so mean. It was slick. And you can't use that to wipe your bottom after pooping. No, that was the second thing that happened. And lastly, the third thing that happened was a company called the Hubert Paper Company Hoburg Hoburg paper Company released a brand of toilet paper called Charmin. Yeah. And they very, very wisely branded it in such a way that this focused on its femininity, its softness, its gentleness. And you could talk about how soft and gentle and wonderful this product was without talking about what it was actually used for, which meant that now you could market it to the public and as a result, Sharmin took off. Yeah. That sort of became the name and toilet paper for many years. In no small part thanks to a man named Dick Wilson. Who from 1964 to 85. In more than 500 TV commercials. Played the beloved Mr. Whipple. George Whipple. The grocery store manager. Who very famously would urge usually women in the commercials not to squeeze the charmin because apparently from 64 to 85. Women in grocery stores were compelled to squeeze toilet paper. Yeah. Constantly. Like, oh, it feels so nice and soft, which apparently did something wrong to the toilet paper. Well, yeah, you didn't want your toilet paper. That's what you bought the toilet paper for yourself so you could squeeze in the comfort of your own home. So ad exec John Chervocus actually came up with that tagline or phrase, and the actor's original name was Ricardo de Guillo from England. Yeah, I did not anticipate that. I thought it was going to say Rome, Italy. Another little known fact about Dick Wilson is that he is the father of Stephanie Balkey's love interest in perfect strangers. No way. In real life. Yeah, that's his thought. And another factoid is he was in Bewitch. The TV show? Yeah. He played the drunk that you'd see at the bar who just couldn't believe the witchery had just seen Mr. Whipple. Did you say that he was in more than 500 of those Charmin ads? Yeah, there was a point where there was a poll that was taken in 1978 and found that in America, he was the third most recognized person by Americans after Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. That's so America. That is a home run for an ad agency that's just so America. The president a preacher and a toilet paper guy. Mr. Whipple. I love it. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and kind of bring us into the modern age of butt wiping. All right, so we're at a point now where Sharmin has well, before that, we are at a point where toilet paper is now being championed by plumbers, by doctors, as being a good thing. Charming. Comes along, said, man, this stuff is soft, and don't squeeze it, though. But, boy, I know you want to. Johnny Carson's joking about it on The Tonight Show. Yeah. That was kind of a significant thing. Yeah, he said that there was and this was in 1973, when there were gas shortages and energy shortages, and Johnny Carson made a joke about there being a toilet paper shortage, and people thought he was serious and apparently went out and bought out grocery stores the next day. Yeah. And it was a self sustaining thing. Shortage. Yeah. When people ran out and bought it, it created the shortage. And then the successive waves of people came and saw for themselves that there was no toilet paper. So they panicked and they bought whatever they could. And apparently for weeks, in some places, you couldn't buy toilet paper because it had been hoarded. Because of Johnny Carson's joke, man. Yeah. And he took it back. But back in those days, it takes a little while for people to get that information. Sure. Even on The Tonight Show. That's right. So this one article you sent was great. The history one. Which one you sent the longer one. I think it was a mental floss article. Oh, it absolutely was. You're right. Yeah. So always love to use mental floss articles. Sure. Oh, and by the way, we would be remiss if we didn't mention that Will and Manga, who started Metal to Floss, are colleagues now. Yeah, they are. They have a podcast called Parttime Genius that's put out by our venerable umbrella brand company. That's right. And I made a guest appearance. I think you're probably in the queue as well. Yeah. I have not been approached, but I just assume I thank you. I think. So. Let's hope so. But anyway, congratulations to Will and Mango for part time genius. And go check it out. You can find it anywhere. You find us stuff you should know. Yeah. So, anyway, they made a pretty good point here at the end of it, which I never really considered, but toilet paper is actually sort of a marker of where you are as a country. Like developing nations, when they start buying more toilet paper, that means they are getting more sanitary as a nation, means they have extra money to spend as a nation. That means that they're basically just sort of their demographics are changing in a positive direction. Speaking from a neoliberal standpoint. That is correct. Yeah. But it's interesting, I never thought about it like Brazil. They've doubled the amount of toilet paper they've sold since 2004. Yes. Which is pretty significant, considering American toilet paper has plateaued. Like, we buy as much as we possibly can we're saturated, but we're still spending 6 billion on it. Yeah. And all over the world. When we went to Guatemala, we certainly saw the bucket in the water next to the toilets. There are still many places all over the world where you clean yourself with whatever water you have. And if you do have something to wipe yourself with, you don't even flush it down the toilet. You have a little water hose in a bucket maybe, and kind of take care of business. Right. Or with there are some places where the plumbing just can't even handle actual toilet paper. You just throw that away as well. So flushing it. You want to talk about how toilet paper is made? Yes, we can talk about it for sure. But I strongly encourage everyone to go to YouTube and watch a little six minute Discovery Channel bit from I think it was from how it's made Canadian. How it's made oh, is that what it was? The lady just stopped short of saying a yeah, I did kind of notice that. Yeah. It's amazing though. And I know I can obsessively watch manufacturing videos, like all day and all night, but this one was especially cool looking. Chuck, did you get the same sense where, like, you were just watching this huge rolls of toilet paper going over the rollers and just think, like, that is so delicate. Like, all you have to do is lift your hand up and just completely throw production. I didn't feel like I wanted to do that, but I kept wondering, like, how in the world are these machines just rolling this toilet paper so fast without it breaking? Yeah, it's pretty impressive. It's really neat. So let's start at the beginning. The whole thing starts with a tree. Go out in your backyard, you cut down a tree, you take it to the toilet paper manufacturer, and you sell it to them for a few dollars. And then you leave. And since you've left, it's not your tree any longer because you took money for it. And what the toilet paper manufacturers are going to do with what's now their tree, they're going to grind it up into little chips. They're going to soak it in some water. They're going to grind it up even more. And what you have are called pulp. Well, you got to cook it first. You got to cook it in what's called a digester. Yeah. And that turns it into pulp. Yes. And if you look at this video, it kind of looks like wet toilet paper. Yeah, that's exactly what it looks like. But when it's dried, it crumbles really easily too. Right. So that means you've got a few extra steps. The next step is you got to bleach it because you're removing the color. If you've ever seen, like, the kind of grayish tan, like paper towels or something that you see in like an office building or jail or something like that that is what pulp looks like if you don't bleach it. Yeah. Which I think the only reason they do that is because they found that people don't like their toilet paper to be anything other than white. No. Unless the 1970s. Yeah. Man, I've got to say, I found this blog post from a site called History's Dumpster, and they have pictures of Northern brand toilet paper light green, light blue, and pink. And it was just like, I remember waived my tongue from nostalgia. It was very cute. Yeah. Well, and I guess we should go ahead and say the reason they don't do that anymore is because those ink dyes they found could cause cancer in some cases. They are expensive. More expensive to use dyes. Yeah. It was basically a health thing. People are like, you don't need these plus dyes. The dyes also kept the toilet paper from breaking down as quickly, too. Yeah. And they probably also looked and said, you know what? My poop doesn't look any better on baby blue than it does on white. No, but the whole reason that they had those is because everybody loved to color coordinate every room of their house in the 70s, including the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is bank. So people would buy mauve toilet paper to go with their mauve bathroom or whatever. So great. It is great. It was so super 70s. Too. And that's just yet another reason that the 70s were, hands down, the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Pretty great. All right. One other thing, Chuck. There's a company called Renova. They actually sell colored toilet paper again. Oh, really? Yeah, it's like \u20ac7.15, which isn't that much less than it would be in dollars these days for six roles. Okay, so we're in the factory. Where did you leave us? So we've made the pulp, and we've bleached it. Now it's white. Right. Then you take the pulp and you mix it with water, and you've created a paper stock. That's right. And then you press it onto a screen. This blew me away. Yeah. They press it onto a screen. I guess you're draining a lot of the water is one reason. And I guess that's the main reason, because what you're left with is that dry white product. Yeah. That lady, the Canadian lady on how it's made said that you hit them with a dryer when they're on that screen, and it instantly dries it out. Yeah. That's just amazing, because you think of this stuff is so delicate, but if you watch the process, they're pretty rough with it. Yeah. Well, concurrently, what's going on, too, we should say, is they're also making the cardboard rolls, which is kind of tubes, which is kind of neat to watch that happen on its own. They just make this one long, continuous tube that they cut into, like, 60 inch. It probably depends on which company, but the one they featured, I think were 60 inch tubes, which would then roll toilet paper around. So you would have basically a 60 inch roll, giant roll of TP. Right. Which looks really neat. And then they glue it. That is definitely glue that they use to keep it not tucked, but a fixed. A fixed thank you. So it doesn't unravel. Yeah, like when you rip that toilet paper off at the very beginning. That's a glue that's holding it together. Right. And then they have these circular saws that come through and just cut that big long roll into several small rolls. That was the coolest part. It was. And then they can be individually wrapped or put in packs of like four, six or a million, and then you sell them. It is a very cool short video. Yeah. I could watch that stuff forever. So that's if you're making it from scratch, there's also recycled toilet paper, which isn't quite as popular here in the United States because it's a little coarser. The fibers are a little longer with toilet paper. The shorter the fiber, the softer the toilet paper is going to be. And then they also add some proprietary chemical combinations that include extruders that kind of pull the fibers out of like a horizontal position and just kind of tuft them a little bit. And then they'll put in emboss and stuff like that, too, which kind of gives a quilted feel. So all of that is to make it softer and to make it more grabby grabs the poop right out of your bottom. Yeah. And those fibers is sort of a balance. There delicate balance. They're walking because they want it to be soft, but they also want it to be strong enough because if it's too flimsy like the junk, you get it. Public restrooms and your office probably. Everyone probably has a nightmare story about their fingers busting through that stuff, which is worst case scenario when it's clean up time. So they're trying to basically walk that balance of soft and strong. Right. And one way they've done that is to add more layers. Yeah. Plies. So apparently it's up to six plies. I didn't know that. I didn't either. I can't imagine you couldn't even fold that. What does that feel like, I wonder? Probably a cloud. You're just wiping your bottom with the cloud and that in. That started St. Andrews Papermill in England. Invented the two ply. And I didn't know this. This is another nice little tidbit. Until the 1930s. They would market toilet paper as splinter free. They would. They were forced to. Right. Because apparently that was the thing. So that's where I was going with recycled toilet paper. It's kind of the new splintery toilet paper, which I mean, compared to the toilet papers of your recycled toilet paper is just completely luxurious. But compared to actual like six ply, super soft stuff that you can get, it is a little rough. And again, the. Reason why is the fibers are a little longer and it follows the same process. But there's a step at the beginning where you take all these different papers and you put them in and mash them together in some water and you inject some air, and it creates foam, and the ink in the paper sticks to the foam and the foam floats. So then they just skim the foam off the top and you just remove the ink, and then you start the rest of the process making a pulp again. What a world. It is pretty amazing. All right, let's take another break, and we are going to come back and wrap it up with some more amazing facts about TP. Another thing we forgot to mention before we broke was you said that the embossed ones, right? Like with whatever scallop shell or whatever you find, they say that another reason they do that is just so they know that that's their toilet paper just to differentiate themselves from other brands. Oh, yeah. Never really thought about that. Yeah, but Scott's like, no, that's ours. You can see scallop shell right there, although I don't know what theirs is. There was definitely scalloping in how it's made. Video scalloping. Yeah. All right, so can we talk about the over or under thing? Yes. So everybody's seen that Simpsons, where Mars and Homer go to the spa for a day and Child Protective Services ends up coming by and they write a report, and they call the Simpsons house a squalid hellhole and point out that the toilet paper is hung in an improper overhand fashion. So apparently I'm not sure who wrote that episode weighed in on that, but they're in the minority because apparently only 30% do the underhang. I'm a definite overhang person. What about you? I'm an overhangor, for sure. Apparently. And I remember seeing this online a few years ago. It kind of went around. There was 1891, a guy named Seth Wheeler of Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company submitted a patent for the first perforated toilet paper on a roll, and that showed the over position. And everyone was like, that's it. It's subtle. This is the first one. This is how it's supposed to be. Right. Which really proves nothing. No, I mean, it's still preference, but there are definite pros and cons to the whole thing, right? Yeah, but here's the thing for me, a lot of the pros they list as like, your little kid or your dog won't be tempted to go yank it if it's in the under position. Presumably because it's hidden. No, because if you're a little kid or a doggie and you come up if it's in an overhand fashion, if it's overhanging, you can just come up and start slapping downward on the toilet paper roll and it will just come right off. No, it just flips around and stays together. No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. You have to pull downward on the toilet paper. If it's going from an underhang to get it off the roll, if you slap downward on the front top of the toilet paper roll, it's never going to come loose. Centrifugal force holds it in place. I disagree on this notion. I think that's presuming that you're using the old school built into the wall toilet paper dispenser. No, because I have the one where it sits on a free standing stand. Okay. And if I put my hand on the back of that thing and just give it a spin, it will come unspooled. I see what you mean. Yeah. If you approached it that way, then all of a sudden, now you've changed your perspective. Down is over, up is down. I know. It's all crazy. Yeah. I haven't seen that many of the they're kind of out of fashion now, the ones that are built into the wall. Are they? Yes. You don't see those as much anymore. No, I have mine coming off of the wall. It's not built into it, but you can only yeah. You can't get to it from behind. Yeah. The classic ceramic holder built onto the wall. Right. I don't have that. Although my bathroom is mauve. Is it really? No, I wish. It's salmon. I would love to have a color coordinated bathroom. I know you would. That would be sweet. Yes. We just have those stands where the toilet paper is all stacked up a post. Yeah. And then at the top, it's got a little L shaped thing, and the dude hangs on there. Yeah. We just have one that, like, drills into the wall. Yeah, I get you. Okay. But it's the same thing. I can't get to the backside of it. Yeah. I can get to the back of mine. Okay. But if you are using a kind that's a fixed to the wall, then if you have it under hanged, you can't just slap it pretty easily. Right. Well, that seems like it's kind of a minor thing to really champion as a reason. Yeah. Especially if you don't have kids or mischievous dogs. Right? Yeah. My dog's never done that. And that's the worst dogs. Right, okay. No, you don't. So you've got that that's for the underhang. For the overhang. One of the other things about the under hang is that you can't see the unsightly end of the toilet paper roll. Right. See, that's not unsightly. No, I agree. And in fact, there's a whole book out there you and my sister got it for. It's pretty awesome. It's called a toilet Paper origami. And it teaches you all sorts of different ways to fold the end of a toilet paper roll. Yeah. And you can just wake up one day and there it's all nice and folded, and you're like, Where am I? The Ritz? Oh, no. I'm at my house still, and just surprised Emily and not even tell her, I think, for sure. And then when she goes, what? Turns around, you're just holding the book in front of you with a huge smile on your face saying, it's a new chapter in our life. Yeah. And she says, Pooping, why are you in the bathroom? Get out. Yes, Emily, yes. Speaking of get out, I just saw it last night, finally. What did you think? It was great. And I got Emily to watch it and she was reticent. She loved it. Yeah. And that's really not her jam either. I just don't see how you could not ultimately leave that movie feeling, like, pretty great, pretty happy that you saw it. But there are some pretty scary aspects to it, too. Oh, yeah. It was like a good straight up horror movie. Yeah. I called all the twists, though. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And she was like, oh, wow, you kind of nailed that one. Did you call the bad guy from Billy Madison being the bad guy? Was he in Billy Madison? Yeah. Eric, I don't know if I saw Billy Madison. It's all right. That's another one of those, like, what was I doing not seeing Tommy Boy and Billy Madison? Yeah, I think that was in my, like, OOH, I'm watching art films. Only thing I got you. Anyway, sorry. Get out. Highly recommended. Yeah, I agree. Finally. By me. So back to the overhand underhand thing, which, if you can believe it, we're still talking about. There is one thing in overhang aside from the delightful toilet paper. Origami you can do, I think, definitely says yes. Overhang in an underhang, if you have a toilet roll holder up against the wall, you are inevitably going to brush your knuckles up against the wall of your bathroom to grab the toilet paper. That's something you don't want to do, because if you leave the lid of your toilet open when you flush, an aerosolized cyclone of pee and poop goes all over your bathroom, including your bathroom walls. So if you cannot touch your bathroom walls when you're getting toilet paper, so much the better. Well, that's not a problem for me. But you know that people around here behind your back call you Big Knuckles. I know. Big Hairy Knuckles. It's been your nickname for years. I know, I know. I said it's here. When I hear it, I just pretend like I haven't heard. All right, so let's talk about the future. Let's wind this up with, like you said, Americans. Apparently, you can pry the gun from my cold, dead hand type of thing, except it's toilet paper. Well, it's toilet paper, too, right? In one hand. A lot of other countries, especially in Europe and Japan, have roundly sided with a bidet. Yes. Which I researched the bidet a little bit because I'm like, how do you even use bidets? I've seen them before. And true bidet is you'll have a toilet, and then next to that, you'll have a toilet, but it doesn't have a lid and there's like some faucet knobs and everything in there, and you'll turn it on and, like, water comes up out of the bottom. So a bidet is actually French for small horse. And the reason they call it that's, because you're supposed to straddle the bidet like you would be riding a horse, basically. Right, yeah. And then you turn on the water and adjust it just how you want to, the temperature you want, and then you adjust yourself so that it's getting the spots that it needs to get. Turn it off, dry off, wash your hands and you're done. Right. And the bidet I just described, the porcelain fixture that goes next to the toilet, was actually Americanized. Like, the Americans came up with that version of the bidet and still didn't catch on in America. But Europe, where it had already been invented before, this is like the improved version of it went nuts for this Americanized version, and it just kind of got lost to time that the Americans were the ones who gave Europe the modern bidet and we just never took it on ourselves. Well, it's definitely if you have that style, that's definitely an extra expense, because you have to have that fully plumbed and you have to have the space for it. It's not a cheap thing if you want to get the full deal. No, it's not. But like, you have and like I have, it basically just uses an extra hose that comes out of your already existing water supply and goes into your toilet seat. Yup. And again, the expense is not utterly outrageous to get one of these. If you get a quality one, it's probably going to last a while, especially if you get a Japanese one. Right. But one of the reasons why around the world, bidets are so prevalent, like in Japan, 60% of restrooms have bidets. In Venezuela I didn't know this. 90% have bidets. Actually, one of the reasons why people are behind them so much is because I know, I heard that, too. They use way less water than toilet paper does. Oh, like the manufacturing of toilet paper. Yeah. So get this, man. This is a Scientific American blog post I found. An average bidet use is going to take about an 8th of a gallon of water to get yourself where you want to be. Right. Which is clean. Yeah. To make a roll of toilet paper, one roll, it takes 37 gallons of water what? 1.3 kilowatt hours of electricity. Oh, my gosh. \u00a31.5 of wood. So in America, we use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper every year. That requires 15 million trees. It uses 473,587,500,000 gallons of water wow. And requires 17.3 kw of electricity. Now, I don't know how much a terawatt is, but brother, that sounds like a lot of electricity, man. That's disheartening. I'm going to get my bidet going. It really is. And it really kind of makes you think, like, oh, toilet paper is an environmental catastrophe, so maybe a bidet is preferable. Well, and the other thing, if you use the wet wipes, regardless of their flexibility on the package, they are not great for the environment. Like, it might not clog up your toilet right there, but they don't break down like toilet paper does. Right. Did you see that Consumer Report short video on it? No. Oh, it's like 40 seconds long. And they're like, this is what toilet paper looks like when you flush. And they had just kind of like a little whirlpool going in a glass beaker of water, and they dropped in some toilet paper and it immediately broke apart into 500 pieces. Right, right. They did that to wipe a flushable wipe, no less, and it did nothing. And they're like, well, let's try something harder. They put it into a Kitchen Aid mixer with water and let it sit for ten minutes. It didn't break up at all. So they don't really break up, or no one really knows how long it takes to degrade, but they certainly don't break up like that. They actually grew in size and swelled up and turned into Nicholas Cage. That's right. So the fact that this stuff isn't good for your sewer system, and certainly if you have a septic system, it's probably reason enough not to always use wipes. Some people, apparently, they say if you have an issue and maybe you have a hemorrhoid or something, then you might want to use a wipe for a little while. Follow your heart. Like there's chemicals and a lot of that stuff. Yeah. We found a Self article about women using wipes or regular toilet paper because we're creeps and we read articles like that. And I think a gynecologist was saying I think it was a dermatologist. He said that whenever a patient comes in and says, I got irritation down there, I think it's probably from these wipes I'm using most of the time, it is because they have, like, aloe in them that someone might be allergic to. They might have antibacterial stuff that somebody could be allergic to, and he just prescribed using basic cheap toilet paper instead. Yeah. And with kids and babies, when you're doing the work, doing all that work, you obviously are going to use wipes. But I will buzz market this brand. We use water wipes, and it's just water. What? It's just water. That's the only ingredient in the house. It's not like we're anti fragrance in my house anyway, but it doesn't have fragrances or chemicals or anything like that. And then it's just I'll buzz market them all day because it's a good product, water wipes. One other thing. We'd be remiss in saying that if you are a Muslim, you use something called alota. And I would strongly encourage everybody to go read a great Vice article called A Muslim Guide to Anal Hygiene that explains lotus, which is basically like carrying your own pot of water to clean yourself off with or having one next to your toilet. Yeah. Oh, one more thing, too. You sent this to me. It is not your imagination. Toilet paper is getting smaller. It's decreased by about a half an inch. Narrower. Square. Yeah. Four and a half inches. And now it's a half an inch narrower and shorter. You're saying the same thing? Yes, and not only that, but they're making see, this is how they get you. They make it a little bit smaller, they increase the size of the tube and so you're actually getting less paper. But they're still charging the same or more per year. Right. Remember we said it's going up by about 2% a year, but you're getting less paper. And so here's how they get you. They are increasing the size of the cardboard tube, they're making it narrower. So you're actually getting less toilet paper. Now, actual paper for either the same price or more money, because I think you said prices were going up by about 2% each year. So these companies that make toilet paper selling usually paper towels as well, and napkins. Paper napkins. And apparently those are on the decline, so they're kind of ripping you off by juicing you with the toilet paper rolls. Now, even though they call it like a double roll, it's pretty much what used to be a single roll. So that's my toilet paper soapbox. You want to start a bloody revolution in the streets? Let that word get out. Right? I got nothing else either. Man toilet paper has been done. If you want to know more about toilet paper, you can type those words eventually into the search bar housetofworks.com. You can also check it out at Mental Floss. Just go on to the Internet, go watch some charming commercials, go look at pictures of colored toilet paper from the 70s. You'll love it. Yeah. And since I said the 70s, it's time for listener mail. We call this a proper pronouns. Hey, guys. In your last episode on standardized patients, you read a listener mail and you weren't sure what pronouns to use. For someone they them is always a good way to go when you don't know. Maybe it's because I'm 22, or maybe it's because I grew up in Montessori, but I've always known they then to be plural or singular. That's not familiar for some. Josh also suggested the word cisgender, or a neutral gender. I just wanted to give a friendly correction. The word cisgender refers to someone who is not transgender and identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth. CIS being derived from the Latin prefix CIS, meaning on the side of as opposed to trans, meaning across from. So initial term to use now is agender, the prefix a being without, though that's just one of many terms being used these days. Thanks for everything you bring to my days. I love how much I learned from you guys. Hope I can return the favor. Here your friendly neighborhood queer person, Chase. Hey, Chase. Thank you for that. That's awesome. Yeah, we certainly try to always use the right terminology. We drop the ball sometimes. It's hard to keep up sometimes, but we always will take those corrections and try and do it right in the future. Yes. We will never, ever refer to LGBTQIA as alphabet soup. Does people say that? Yeah, man. It's the worst. What? Just dismissive? Yes. I hate that, man. It drives me crazy. If you hear somebody saying that, set them straight. Yeah. Tell him, Josh. Josh and Chuck. Yeah, I'll get on board. Jerry got that right, buddy. Jerry was over here waving like, hey, don't forget me. She was stomping madly. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Chase did, you can tweet to us at Josh Clark or S yskpodcast you can join us on Facebook.com. Charlesw, Chuck, Bryantovichana, you can send us an emailstaffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid, one week only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
43c6d71a-53a3-11e8-bdec-83bc32d9e745 | Robber Barons! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/robber-barons | The robber barons were not a group of evil super villains. OR WERE THEY? Learn all about these titans of industry from the Gilded Age in today's episode. | The robber barons were not a group of evil super villains. OR WERE THEY? Learn all about these titans of industry from the Gilded Age in today's episode. | Thu, 16 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=198, tm_isdst=0) | 61400359 | audio/mpeg | "Mom, dad, I humbly suggest you save some money and shop Amazon for back to school. It's for my growth, meaning my body's growing at an alarming rate. And clothes you buy me this year will be very small. Very small very soon. Plus, the clothes I love today will be out of style tomorrow. But at least your wallet doesn't have to be my fashion victim. If you shop low prices for school at Amazon, hopefully this is helpful. Amazon spinless small more. Hello, friends. We have a book coming out finally, and it is awesome. You're going to make me say the title again? Yeah, fine. It's stuff you should know. Colon an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And get this, Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call preordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get it. Or among the first. Well, and not only that, you get a pre order gift. You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Minnardo, who is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing a great deal. His name is Niels Parker. And it was just a big team effort. And it's really cool. We love how it's turning out. Yes, we do. So anywhere you can buy books, you can go preorder the stuff you should know colon and incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And then after you do, you can go on over to Stuffyoushoreadbooks.com and upload your receipt and get that preorder poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is preordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you. Stuffyoushoreadbooks.com preorder. Now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chucker's Bryant over there. Jerry was just here doing the COVID set up and then got out of the room really quick. Had her breath for five straight minutes. It's a new record. It really is. New studio record. Sure. And this is stuff you should know. That's no David Blaine record, by the way. No, I mean, that's her studio record. You should see her when she's pearl diving, though, right? Wouldn't that be something if Jerry did have a secret life? Pearl diving? That would be amazing. It would. But we're not talking about Jerry. Chuck, enough about her. Instead, I propose that we have a nice, pleasant conversation about Robert Barons. Yeah, this is an interesting topic because depending on who you ask, the robber barons were either the greatest thing to ever happen to this country right. Or one of the worst things to ever happen to this country. Yeah. And at first, from what I could tell, historians, like, immediately after a few decades after the Gilded Age, which we'll talk about, where the age of the robber barons worked and operated and lived in, really took it to be like their presence, their existence was one of the worst things ever. But over time, there's kind of been a reformation of them, kind of like a revisiting of them that has tried to revive their image or actually make their image possibly better than it ever has been. Yeah, I think a lot of this probably depends on what you feel about capitalism to this extent, where kind of doesn't matter how you make your money, if it's sort of underhanded and you sort of undercut competitors and monopolize things, that's all just free trade, man. Free capitalism. And that's how it works out. And then those guys gave a ton of money to society before they died, and justifies the means. Yeah, I actually look at it. Yeah, that's the conservative way to look at it. And I ran across something, I can't remember what it's called, but it's basically a human imperfection. Did you know that? The idea that humans are imperfect and there's really no reason to try to make a perfect society because it will always be imperfect and end in ruin, that is a cornerstone, a hallmark of conservativism. Did you know that? I didn't. But I mean, of course you can't make a perfect society. It makes sense. Conservatives are saying that in opposition to all of the liberal efforts to make a perfect society, to have government regulation that says, no, we should all have clean water, and we should do it at the expense of making corporations clean up the wastewater before they release their waste into the shared common water resources, things like that. Right. And that there's this idea that you can mold society into some perfect form, that that's the opposite of human imperfection. That that's like what liberals think. And that right there is one of the main dividing lines between conservative and liberal. I've been on the planet for almost 44 years now, and I had no idea that it was just that simple. And it really kind of is. I think the word perfect is what's a stumbling block for me, because I don't know a single liberal thinks that they can make things perfect. The goal is to make things better. Yeah, agreed. I don't know that it's a great word either, but I think that you're going to argue with the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy. I'm not. I'll bring it on. Man, I'll punch that thing right in the face. Speaking of Stanford, did you know that Stanford University was named out? Yeah, a robber baron named Leland Stanford, actually. Yeah. A lot of universities are named after Robert Barons. Yeah, there's a lot of problems with some of the early histories of universities, as we'll find out in the coming weeks. So we should get into the Gilded Age. We should hop in the old wayback machine, because that's the age that we're talking about. And when you hear Gilded Age, it might sound really great, because what's better than a gilded I don't know, toilet? Gilded Lily. Isn't that another one? Another thing. People Guild. I don't know. That's a pretty good band name, though. Gilded Lily. Yeah. Like a 90s power pop. Oh, totally. You nailed it. And I said, what about breakfast at Tiffany's? But the Gilded Age is and Dave Russell helped us put this together, and he points out, it's not a term of endearment. When something is gilded, that means it's got a thin coating of gold, but underneath it could be a gilded turd. Sure. I hate that word so much. I love it. It's so great. I love it and how awful it is. I got you. But I think it's so awful, it comes out on the other side as just plain old awful to me. Okay. Yeah. That's the idea of the Gilded Age, that it looked great on the outside, but on the inside, it wasn't so great. Why is this so this was the second half of the 19th century. Basically from pretty much the end of the Civil War up until the first decade of the 20th century. And it was characterized by a huge. Massive shift in the American economy. Where I saw somewhere that at some point in the 1860s to some point in the early 1880s. In about 15 years. The American economy doubled in size in 15 years. Wow. That's how massive it was, and that's how fast it happened. And what it was is a transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and it happened virtually overnight, as far as history goes. Yeah. And because it happened so quickly and because it was such growth, I think the government was like, we're going to stay out of this and kind of just let you dudes do what you're going to do. No regulation. You can be as competitive as you want to be, and you can satisfy, scratch every capitalist itch you want, and we're just going to let that happen because we're also kind of getting rich on the side. Right. So that kind of raises something that I saw. Is that the idea that it's kind of like a myth of the laser fair government during this era? They were definitely laser when it comes to regulation and letting corporatists run roughshod over labor, but they were anything but hands off when it came to corporate welfare and political entrepreneurship and helping out the wealthy class at the expense of the people in general. So on one hand, they were late fair. On the other, they were not. Yeah, and what we're talking about is stuff like snatching up resources where you could hoarding them for yourself, building such a massive business that you could drive out every other smaller business, drive them right out of business by undercutting their prices. Jobs were more scarce, so you could have people work harder for less and less wages, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And what's crazy is it was a dog eat dog economy. It was just nuts how it happened. And there was a lot of learning on the fly, and the learning curve was extremely steep, because this was just basically a country of farmers who had been looked down upon by europe for a century or more, and they all of a sudden were captains of industry. And the most ruthless among them were the ones that rose to the top, because, like you're saying, there was no rules. There was no regulation, there weren't any standards of business. They were all figuring it out as they were going along, and they went immediately to the worst impulses that capitalism can raise in a person when you're in pursuit of as much possible wealth as you can get, and there's plenty of it to be had. And then, like you're saying, not only did the federal government not get involved, they weren't equipped to get involved, because at that point, most of the government was focused on local stuff. And now, all of a sudden, as the United States is truly becoming a continent wide nation, the federal government is kind of lagging behind to catch up. It wouldn't really begin to catch up in the progressive era, and some would say that the pendulum swung the exact opposite way to the exact opposite extreme direction that it had during the gilded age. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the gilded age. And I guess just you owe it all the trains, really, and trains you owe to steel. So you got to go back a little bit. Steel was a very big deal, and that when they found out mr. Henry bessemer in the 1850s found out how to make steel a lot cheaper. He got a new process going where it was just like making vast amounts of steel for a fraction of the cost and speed. Right. And all of a sudden, you could open up those local rail lines to stretch across the country. And all these regional specialty businesses and industries, whether it was cincinnati was known for furniture, and obviously in places like wyoming, you had coal, and you had copper and montana, and you had a lot of timber in oregon, you could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go. And that changed everything. Yeah. Not only could you get it to where you wanted to go, you could do it exponentially cheaper than it used to be over land or, say, using canals, and then also way faster, too. So now, if you were making really great armchairs in cincinnati, like you were saying, not only did you have the town, they're just known for it. That's their mascot, I believe, with the baseball team. Yeah, the sitters. Right. Not only did you have the town of cincinnati and maybe some other regional parts of ohio as your market, you now have the entire country to supply with chairs. And that happened at a really great time, the steel coming along and building the railroads, because the United States economic engine was kind of idling a really high Rpm for a little while before this. Apparently the war of 1812 caused the United States to kind of stop relying on Europe and turn inward and become much more self reliant than it had been before. So it started to exploit more industry and resources rather than rely on imports from Europe. That was a big one. And then the civil war had brought a lot of factories online in the north that hadn't been there before. And so when the civil war ended, these factories were all ready to go, and with the abundance of plentiful steel, that engine got put into gear and it just kind of took off like a rocket. Yes. When I was reading this and I tried to find out, but I couldn't really get a firm hold, I wondered if back then when this started to happen, you know how people rail against global trade and the globalization. I wonder if people railed against nationalization of commerce back then or if they all just thought it was all great. No, one of the things I read about that's actually a mark in favor of the gilded age being actually a good thing for America is that everyday people were super involved in politics and the political process and agitating for what they wanted. And so if there were people who were definitely in favor of this kind of just taking off like a rocket, knitting the country together, that kind of stuff, nationalization, then there was definitely opposition parties to that, too, I figured, who saw the problems with it. But the cool thing is that everybody was involved in everybody was like they cared about the direction the country was going rather than just sitting back and being like, well, nothing we can do about it. I wonder, though, if it was like if there were business, like if there were furniture makers in Cincinnati going, I don't want to sell my chairs out there. That is not what they sound like in Cincinnati. Is that not a Cincinnati accent? No. Okay. I might be thinking of Maine. Right. But I wonder who was opposing it. I don't know. I haven't seen that one. Some of the things that I saw were one of the big fights was over currency and whether it should remain on the gold standard or whether it should be easy money, which of course, the farmers wanted. I think they wanted easy money. I can't remember who wanted to stay on the gold standard. And others wanted basically to leave the gold standard and make money a lot more easy to come by. I thought you said it was the Rodney Dangerfield movie. That was an easy one, man, that is a tardy movie was, wouldn't it? Yeah. That's good, though. Yeah, hey, even the worst Dangerfield movie is still pretty great. Agreed. And on that point, real quick, I'm sorry. I know we don't like to go off on tangents very often, but I have been watching Happy Days uninsuredly lately. Man, that is some comfort food, isn't it? Dude? But not only that, it's not like junk food, though. They're like well written, well acted, well directed TV shows. It's not at all like throw away or disposable. It doesn't rely on slick special effects or anything like that. It's just good stuff, man. Yeah, I agree. And you know what? Since we're on this tangent, we should tell everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming out this fall. It's called stuff you should Know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And you can preorder it now if you want a special system poster. Yeah. You pre order it, and you can go and upload your receipt@stuffyoushoreadbooks.com. And then there's, like, a little thing that says, get your pre order gift and you upload a picture of your receipt, and they mail it to you, and you will be very happy with it because it's pretty awesome. Yeah. And we do want to sell these books out there. We want to sell these books all over the world. Yes. We're glad that the railroad exists so we can move these books around easily. Oh, man, you ain't kidding. Ship these things to Cincinnati. So where were we? So we were shipping things. Regional businesses were becoming national businesses. People were leaving the farms. They were leaving small towns. They were going to the big city. Immigrants were pouring in from Europe. African Americans were going north. Because reconstruction didn't work out so well. Yeah, because it got abandoned. Yeah. Have we done one on reconstruction? No. We really need to, though. Totally. The more I've been reading a lot about that period in history, and, yes, we need to definitely do one on that. But the point is, there are a lot of people flocking to work this what was called the second industrial Revolution, where we saw over a period of about 40 years, factory output went from 1.9 billion to $13 billion right. Almost overnight. It's astounding how fast this happened. I don't think it even happened this fast in the first industrial revolution, you know, the one that started over in Manchester. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world, as far as I know. I believe it. Oh, sure. I was just getting wrapped up. My own economic engines idling high right now. Well, take your foot off the gas. Okay. And let's take a little break, and we'll talk a little bit about Mark Twain and a few economic stats of the day right after this. All right, we're back. Charles, I'm feeling much better now that my foot is off the gas. That was just good advice. Well, I mentioned Mark Twain, and the only reason we're going to talk about Mark Twain for a moment is because in 1873 he co wrote a novel, a satire called The Gilded Age Colon a Tale of Today, where it followed a poor country farmer who is sort of I mean, does he move to the city trying to get in on the second industrial revolution? Yeah, totally. It's exactly that kind of migration that you're talking about just a few minutes ago. And it didn't work out so well. Right? I don't know, I've never read the book. But from what I can tell, no, it didn't work out very well because he is taken advantage of by all manner of bad people like crooked politicians and crooked businessmen and is basically run through the ringer from what I can tell. But I've also seen that it wasn't exactly the best piece of writing Mark Twain's ever come up with. But the thing is that he releases in 1873 and this is like at the very beginning of the Gilded Age. So he saw it pretty quickly what was going on. And what he saw was this emergence from a relatively egalitarian society of a group of ultra, mind bogglingly wealthy people that just rose up from the United States and through cheating and business acumen and taking advantage of people and over working people and underpaying people. But also like having a lot of vision and foresight. All these things coming together grab control of almost all of the wealth that was being produced by the average American and all of the average Americans put together who had moved to these cities for the promise of better wages, better living than the farm could offer. Some people were exploiting that more than other people. And those people came to be known as the robber barons and they were the lynch pin of why people think of the Gilded Age as a rotten part of American history. Yeah. Here's some stats for you. These should all sound very familiar if you're alive and breathing oxygen today. Right? But in 1890, the top 1% of the US owned 51% of all wealth. Yeah, dude, more than half of all wealth. Isn't that nuts? It is nuts. But you're right, it does sound very familiar. The top 12% owned 86% of all wealth and the lower 44% of the US population, which is about half the population, owned 1.2%. That's even more nuts. Well, I mean, all these just top one another, I think. Here's the last one. In 1897, the richest 4000 families. That sounds like a lot of people, but that's less than 1% of the population. The richest 4000 had as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families combined. Yeah, how about that? So that is what you call economic inequality. Right. And I think the thing is, especially over time, but I get the impression during that age too, the people who resent that liberals typically tend to be painted with this brush that says you're just jealous. You've never made that much money in your life. You probably never will. And it sickens you to see somebody else with that money because you don't have it. And it's that second part, that last part about because you don't have it that I think misses the mark. And that even at the time. During the Gilded Age today. When people look at inequality. That kind of stuff. A lot of them. I'm sure there are people out there who are just jealous and haters for that reason. But a lot of them say. No. That amount of disparity shouldn't exist. Where if there are people who are just genuinely suffering. Who are just poor and aren't able to make it with whatever living they're making. If they exist. Then you shouldn't have people who have that much amount of money. And that was a sentiment in the Gilded Age as much too. It wasn't like they didn't realize this was going on at the time. The sentiment was very much like it is today, except in the Gilded Age, they did things like form labor unions and strike and just basically did something about it. They didn't take it laying down, which is actually criticism that's levied, or has been levied in the past against people today. Yeah. And I think there's also a notion that the more left leaning people are anti success, and that's not true either. Well, that's all I'm going to say about that. That's just not true. It's just not true. They're not anti success. And I don't think that every conservative thinks like, yeah, man, it's all fair, and you should be able to do whatever you want to get ahead and stomp on anyone's head that you want to get there. Right. I think these are just broad brush things that keep the country divided. Yeah, absolutely. I think both sides misunderstand each other. Conservatives and liberals misunderstand each other to a debilitating degree these days. Agreed. So let's get off that and let's go back to the original. The OG robber barons who were not these guys. I'm talking about the term robber baron, which didn't happen in the 19th century US for the first time. It happened thousands of years ago in Europe. I don't know about thousands of years, but 1000 pretty close to 8000, I'll give you that. Apparently along the Rhine River, if you wanted to move goods up and down northern Europe, that was your way to go. But unfortunately for you, there were places where the Rhine River really narrowed with high cliffs, and you were easy prey for local nobility who wanted to set up toll booths, basically, and said, you need to give me some money if you want to keep going. Implying your goods along the Rhine. Yes. And you couldn't just portage your steamship up a mountain and over a mountain, you had to pay the piper. Plus, they didn't exist at the time. What steamboat chips when did those come around? The early 19th century. You have a much better just general world timeline that lives in your brain than I do. Well, I understand history perfectly, and without any error, delusions, or any of my opinions informing my vision of history as well. I think that's what you're known for. Sure. Wait, are you joking? Oh, no. Okay, good. I just always get the time periods confused, so I rely on books and research like a big dumb dumb. So do I. Yeah, I know, but then you keep it in your brain. Mine just floats out. Like you ever cartoons with birds flying around people's head when they get knocked out. Chuck, I've seen every cartoon that ever existed, and I remember each of them perfectly. And without any of my opinions coloring my view of them. Those birds are always above my head. I don't have to get hit with an antville or a piano. So the Rhine gorge was one of those really narrow straits, and in 1250, emperor Frederick III died. There was no successor, and basically, that meant no regulation. And believe it or not, even way back then, a lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that, same as it is today. It's almost like people are imperfect, almost. And so these thieves would move into that gorge, jam up those tolls, maybe just steal stuff if they wanted to as well. And they were named the robber bears. That's where that term came from, those people? Yeah, because they actually were, like, low level nobility, and they already were well off, but that didn't prevent them from trying to take advantage of the merchant class who are just trying to make their way and make a living. That's right. And that became, like, a really great description for some of the most successful business tycoons of the 19th century. I think it first popped up in an Atlantic article in 1870 where it didn't directly say that it didn't say that these guys are the new robber barons, but it said that the old robber barons of the Rhine valley were actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires. Burn. So that's a big time burn. So even in 1870, people were saying, like, this is wrong. There's something really wrong here. This is within just a few years of the gilded age, really starting to take off, and people had already identified that there were some major issues developing. Yeah. It's so weird to look at this stuff and just how apt it applies to what's going on today. And I think some people think that these are all new problems and new issues, but it's as old as time. Yeah. So weird. It is a little weird. What's even weirder, though, is, like, I believe we if look back, if we zoom out far enough, we see humanity kind of ever going upward, even though there's, like, peaks and valleys in the line of the line overall is kind of moves upward towards something great, I think, toward perfection. I wasn't maybe I wasn't alive 10,000 years ago, so who knows? Maybe that was the pinnacle of human existence. I don't know. Maybe. Should we talk about a few of these dudes? Yeah. So I feel like we have kind of set this up, that the robber barons were ruthless business tycoons. And we're going to start with one of the first ones, commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, for my money, was the OG robber baron. Yeah. And Commodore is a nickname, and as you will see later, Vanderbilt University is named for him, and their mascot is the Commodores because of him. And a Commodore is a naval officer, sort of above not quite an Admiral, but above a captain. I think they command a fleet. Well, that's actually pretty appropriate because he did command a fleet of ships. Originally sailboats. Originally a sailboat, I think, when he was 14, and then steamships to ferry people around New York. I thought there were no steamships. There were by this time. And what's ironic, we're talking about steamships and when they were invented. The guy who invented steam, Robert Fulton, remember, we did a whole episode on steam technology. He had a 30 year monopoly in New York to ferry people using steamships. That's right. And ironically, Cornelius Vanderbilt had to overcome that monopoly using ingenuity and his own resourcefulness, and eventually was successful in breaking that monopoly just through good business tactics that actually resulted in far lower fares for everyday people and companies. I think just at his first try, by improving the size of the steam engine and using cheaper anthracite coal, he managed to drop the average ferry price from like seven dollars to three dollars in his first try. That's amazing. Yeah, I think that's really kind of like instructive, though, man. Think about it. We think of this guy as a ruthless robber baron, and in many, many ways he was, as we'll see. But he was able to get to that position by outwitting and outsmarting other robber barons. And that was the climate at the time. Like, it's so easy to sit back from this time and just be like, just judge, judge, judge. And it's actually kind of fun, too. It's a great pastime. But you also have to remember at the time that was the business climate. That's just what it was. And if you weren't willing to do that, well, then you were not going to make it in business, which is fine. Like, maybe you'd say, this is too cut throat for me, I'm just going to sell out to these guys, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the ones who are left standing are the ones that history still remembers, for better or for worse. Yeah, and it's worth pointing out. And as we'll do it, I think we're going over four of these guys, but some. Had money born into it. Some started out very poor. And Cornelius Vanderbilt, even though that sounds like such a rich hoity toity name now, he was born very poor. He was born in 1794 in a farming family on Statin Island, and quit school when he was eleven. And that's when he started working on the boat docks. And he was literally a self made man, starting with that first little ferry boat that you mentioned at age 14. He was a big dude, and he was very savvy, but also very ruthless. And this is something that you'll see with a lot of these men, was a competition and a competitive edge and nature. That was sort of the underlying thing with all of them. I think I watched There Will Be Blood recently for movie Crush, and Daniel Plainview was very much based on some of these robber barons. Yeah. And he has that great classic line from that movie when he goes, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. And that just crystallizes that character. And I think a lot of these guys, it wasn't enough to just get rich. They wanted to devastate the competition. Right. So it makes you wonder, like, is that just a normal there's just at any given time, there's a handful or a multiplicity of people who are like that. It's just that these guys happen to be living in a time where they had the freedom and ability to exercise that to their greatest ability. Or was it that these guys shaped the business world because they all happen to be alive at the same time? I don't know. I wonder. It's interesting, though, it's that competition, and again, with the plane view, not just a competition to succeed, but a competition to see that others don't. Right. So did you talk about the railroad yet? I didn't catch it, no. So he started off in the steamboats, but if you know Vanderbilt, you know he was a railroad guy. And if you look at the list of robber barons, I'd say easily like a third of them were railroad men. Yeah, because there was so much money to be made from the railroads. It was just like printing your own money. And one of the reasons why was because there's so much stuff being shipped over the railroads that if you own the railroad, you got a cut of every single industry, because every single industry basically had to use your form of transportation. That's why they all got into it. Plus, it was wide open. Like there was so much open space and so much room for expansion that it was a good time to get rich off of the railroad, for sure. So his first railroad ride was at 39 years old. He wasn't like in his twenty s and early 30s getting into the railroad business. He wasn't even on a train until he was almost 40. And that train crashed, an axle broke and went down an embankment. And he punctured, lung, broke some bones, and I guess was lying there wheezing out of a hole in his lungs, saying, this is the future. That was so great. And he got into railroads. It's crazy, like a year later. Yeah, he did. And one of the things that he had a really great talent for was identifying, like, loser railroads, seemingly loser railroads, and figuring out ways that they actually had been overlooked. And a really good example of that is the Harlem Railroad, which is just a short little line that other larger railroads used to connect to New York City. But Vanderbilt recognized that it was the only line that went all the way into the heart of Manhattan. And so he bought that up. And he also, at the same time, not only got control of that little railroad, this is a really early chance for him to show how good he was at driving up stock prices. So when he came along and bought the Harlem Railroad or started buying shares of the Harlem Railroad, it was worth, in today's money, $168 a share. Not too shabby, but from what I could tell at the time, not very great at all. By the time he was done cornering this stock, he had driven the shares up to $5,998 in just a few years. And so in doing so, not only did he make a ton of money for himself, he also developed this reputation that made owners of other railroads say, I own a bunch of shares in my railroad. You want to come buy mine and drive my stock price up and then buy me out? Sure. He didn't even have to plunder other companies. They came to him and just said, Here, buddy, by us, please. They were Blue Star Airlines. What is that? Remember that from there will be blood. There were no airlines and There will Be blood. Remember Wall Street? That was the one that Martin Sheen worked for. The Gecko came in and bought out. And I think he shuttered them, though. That was the difference. Yeah, he was a corporate rater. And actually, that era, the 80s junk bond era, is frequently cited, or it was at the time, as the second Gilded Age. This is not the first time we're living in what's known as the second Gilded Age. So to put a bow on Vanderbilt, he consolidated, like you said, all these railways between New York and Chicago. He manipulated stock. He fixed prices. Like you said earlier, the government wasn't looking, so you kind of do what you wanted. And he became a very wealthy man, and like a lot of these guys late in his life, turned into a philanthropist. Built Grand Central Station. It was called the Grand Central Depot at the time, which, during the recession, provided tons and tons of jobs for people. And then the Central University of Nashville was eventually renamed to Vanderbilt University because all he did was give him a million bucks. Isn't that crazy? Is that right? I guess back then, it's a lot of money. It's significant. Sure. I feel like we could get Stuff you should Know listeners to pitch in, to get a university named after us. Let's try that. Actually like stuff you should know. You could do it. We can organize a struggling university. How about that? Hey, one more thing about Vanderbilt. So he left about $100 million, mostly to his eldest son, William. In six years, William doubled that, mostly by investing in railroads. That's how much money you can make in railroads. And William was also well known for throwing probably the most lavish party in the history of New York City. They spent $1.8 million in today's dollars on champagne alone. Yeah, that was when he finished his mansion on Fifth Ave. And I looked it up to see if any of these robber baron mansions were still around today. But I know this one was demolished in 1926. So if you want to get a really good idea of just how rich these people were, go to Newport, Rhode Island, and visit Millionaire's Row, because there's a huge overlooking this cliff, there's a long row of the most astounding mansions you've ever seen, built during the Gilded. One of the better walks you can take in life. It really is the ocean on one side and then these mansions on the other. It's really cool. And each mansion is so different from the others. Just touring them is amazing. You could just be utterly disgusted by the concept of billionaires or robber barons or whatever. And you can still enjoy taking this tour of these mansions. They're just works of art. I agree. It's really worth a visit. Plus, Newport is just one of the more charming towns in the country. I love Newport. Or you could take a hate walk and just look at those mansions and think about what Wrecking Ball would look like. Shake your fist at the dumb waiters and all that. But then you turn around and look at the ocean and think, okay, all right. It's really cool. It's definitely cool to visit them. For sure. And by the way, a little piece of trivia. If you enter Central Park at the 105th street entrance, that big, beautiful iron gate was from that mansion, the Vanderbilt mansion. They donated a lot of the stuff before they demolished it. Is that right? Yeah. So I mentioned organization, and that's actually named after the next robber baron we're going to talk about. Okay. Do we break beforehand? No, I think we break after JP. How about that? Are you okay with that? Sure. Okay, so then we're going to hang in there, everybody. Don't fast forward yet. We're going to stick around and talk about JP. Morgan right now. Yeah. He was born with money. He did not come from meager. Means and work himself up by his bootstraps. He was the son of a very successful banker and merchant and used those connections to get a plumb job at Wall Street when he was 20 years old. And then when he was in his 30s, he partnered with a guy named Anthony Drexel, who was a banker from Philly and created Drexel morgan and Company. And it became one of the biggest investment banks at the time in the world. Yes. And this was when he was in his early 30s, like you said. Right. So JPMorgan was known as the guy who financed all the other robber barons, and he had his fingers in basically every pot that was going on. He also knew that you could make money off of the railroads because you're taking a cut of all the other industries. So he definitely got involved in them. But his whole thing was what's called horizontal integration, where you basically come along, you say, this industry should be doing way better than it is. I think there's too many competitors and they're all holding one another down. I'm going to slowly start buying them up. And here's the thing. This is how you get control of the full industry during the Gilded Age. You go to a couple, you start buying them up, and then you put all those together and you form a bigger company. That's way, Leaner has much better economies of scale, and you can compete better against all the other guys. So you start buying some of the other guys up because they're facing going out of business now. And then you've got left the real holdouts, the ones that are never going to sell you because they hate your stupid face and they'll never give a penny to you, make sure that you'll never set foot in their offices ever again. And what you do then is you start selling for less than cost you're a big company. So you can totally stand that for a much longer time than these hold out competitors, and they face either financial ruin or you eventually put them out of business. And either way, you no longer have that competition. You literally control an entire industry consolidated into one beefy mega company. And all of a sudden you have what's called Morganization, which is I don't know if it was pioneered by JPMorgan, but he definitely perfected it enough that they named the process after him. Yeah, and that's a good example of what I was talking about earlier. It's not enough to succeed and be successful, but to make sure no one else can be. So it would be the kind of thing and that one company you were talking about that may be kind of pretty small even, but they might have an iron grip on one very tiny region of the United States. And you could just let them have their business, or you could do what you're talking about and make sure that you squash them by any means necessary and force them to sell. I think that's where capitalism for a lot of people has gotten its bad name, is like, yeah, work hard, succeed, do well, but not at the expense of every other person trying to do well. Right. Because it interferes with something this country is based on, which is called the quality of opportunity, which is the idea that at least under the eyes of the law, every single person in America has an equal shot at making it, at making something of themselves, of having, like, a good life. And when somebody is cheating or engaging in monopolies or using underhanded tactics to run out the competition so that there is no competition any longer, that is problematic. That flies in the face of the idea of equality of opportunity. That's right. And if you listen to our Monopoly game episode, you might remember that JPMorgan was the basis of Monopoly Man. Uncle Peter, did you say that? Yeah, we talked about that. Good, okay. That makes me feel good. Yeah. He was modeled after old JP. Morgan himself, and he was actually one of the first people to be targeted for antitrust in. Teddy Roosevelt came after him under the Sherman Antitrust Act and said hey, this Northern Securities Corporation is really monopoly. And Supreme Court said, yeah, it is busted up. Yeah. And so today when we think of trust, we think of like a legal entity that can hold assets. At the time, the word trust meant basically an industry that had been organized where all of the competitors had been folded into one large company and the market was cornered by this one mega company, general Electric, US. Steel. Both of those were Morganize companies. And apparently US. Steel was the first $1 billion company that ever existed because of that level of consolidation. But then, yeah, when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, that was a clear sign that this is not going to stand much longer. I think. Roosevelt it was Roosevelt, you said, right? Yeah. Teddy who busted that up, and he ran on that and actually went against he was a Republican, I believe, and he went against the advice of the elder statesman in the Republican Party, established himself as a genuine president of the people and helped set himself up for re election just from that one antitrust act. So that's JP. Now do we take a break? Oh, one more thing. Chuck. Yeah. I'm not towing with you, I swear. So one of the ways that Morgan one of the reasons he's reviled still and he did some philanthropy, probably more than he gets credit for, for sure. But one of the reasons he's reviled is because one of the ways he made it so that he could compete with other companies and sell for lower than cost was by slashing wages, slashing the workforce, and increasing productivity of the existing workers. And then just making sure that working conditions he didn't spend a cent on improving working conditions to make them safe. And that is really not because he amassed a fortune, some people criticize him for that. But it's tactics like that, becoming a billionaire basically on the backs of people who he wouldn't have spent a cent to make sure he could stay alive working in his factories. That is the quintessential problem people have always had with Robert Baron. That kind of mentality. That's right now. I'm done. Alright, we'll come back right after this and finish up with two more Robert Barons. Hello, everybody. We're back to talk about Andrew Carnegie. You've ever been to Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon University? I've been to both. You've been to the university with you? That's right. We did a little job there one time that was fun. I've been to Carnegie Hall. I assured a show there. I didn't usher, I passed out the playbills. Which meant I got to see the show for free. And I saw what show? Oh, man. It was one of those special nights. I got to see Beethoven's night with the full orchestra and German choir at Carnegie Hall. It was amazing. Wow. Something else that's pretty neat. And all I needed was a bow tie. Is that the one that no, maybe I named it wrong. It's the die Hard song. Yeah, the die hard song. I got you. I went and saw Die Hard in concert. It was great. It's hilarious. So Carnegie, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland, and they came to Pittsburgh. He was very poor. He's about 13 years old. And he worked in a cotton factory. And this will come into play later. He kind of self taught himself from books that he borrowed from a wealthy benefactor from his private library, which will come to play later. His favorite one was Flowers in the Attic. Wow. I would have thought Great Expectations, but that's okay. He like Vanderbilt, is definitely a self made man, for sure. And I guess he had his fingers in a lot of different pots. Kind of like JPMorgan at first. And then he turned his attention to steel. Because, again, remember, steel is like basically the foundation for this American economy just blowing up. And he was a Pittsburgh sure, so his name became synonymous with steel. And I guess at first, up until about 1892, he had a reputation as being a friend of the worker. And that the workers at Carnegie Steel in Homestead, just across the river from Pittsburgh, they felt like Carnegie would take care of them. And they found out the hard way that that was not the case when they went on strike in 1892 during what came to be known as the Homestead strike, which would result in the death of ten people, which is not how they plan things to go. And apparently the reason why that happened is because the Pinkertons were called in as strike breakers. Yeah, I might want to eventually do an episode on this, but that's sort of the overview. You bring in the Pinkertons and then they battle with literally with guns. Pinkerton died, I think, like eight or nine of the ten or twelve people that died with the Pinkertons. No, I think it was just one I think were the strikers. Yeah, okay, well, we should definitely do a full episode then because for sure I want to get this right, but what I read was that the strikers so the Pinkerton showed up in barges and they were basically hired on as a private army to protect scab workers and bust the strike up. But they arrived in barges and after the initial violence, the striking workers and some of their families surrounded these barges and demanded that the Pinkertons come off the boats. So the Pinkertons said, okay, we'll come off if you guarantee our safety. And they said, fine. And the Pinkertons came off and they got beaten by all of the strikers. They just completely went back on their word and then set their barges on fire, I guess the Pinkerton escaped to the factory with their life and the National Guard was called in to quell the violence. Yeah, well, National Guard was called in not only to quell the violence but also called in to act in the interest of Carnegie. So he kind of commandeered his own little personal army to help take care of things. Right? Starting with the Pinkertons and then with the National Guard. And it's like this kind of collusion that is also another huge criticism. Like we were saying, the government is known for being like laser fair as far as regulation is concerned. But they'll totally send in the National Guard not just to quell violence but to make sure that the strike breakers don't attack the scab labor to keep the factory going. And that kind of like government capital collusion at the expense of the workers. There's a long standing tradition of that being almost universally reviled in America over enough of an arc of time. If that keeps up more and more just everyday Americans start to notice and start to resent it. And that apparently is a really good force for social change because Americans don't like that kind of thing after a long enough period of time. Yeah, and I think Carnegie tried to distance himself from that strike by saying that he was sort of out of the loop. He was in Scotland the whole time. But they have since found correspondence that shows that he was very much involved in that. And there's some speculation that he may have had some genuine moments of regret and guilt over that because he was a big time philanthropist. Later in life, I think he said in his book The Gospel of wealth the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. And we mentioned the libraries coming back into play. He built more than 2500 libraries. And that's really one of his big legacies. Along with the arts, the Carnegie Corporation and the Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie Mellon University, carnegie Museum. But the libraries really have made a pretty big difference in this country. They really have, for sure. And he was one of just the all time great philanthropists in American history, for sure. But he still pales in comparison to the alltime top record holder, philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, who is also Robert Baron. But he also is far and away America's most prolific and generous benefactor. For sure. He was also one of the most visionary philanthropists of all time, too. Yeah. And some people say that he was, if you just account for money and inflation, the richest man ever to live. I'm not sure how they calculate that because his 900 million dollar peak in 119 thousand twelve is about 23 billion today. So I saw how are you ready? I'm sure, yeah, go ahead. If you do his wealth relative to the total economic output, even larger figure than gross domestic product. I had a feeling it was something like that. His wealth represented 2% of the total economic output of the United States at the time. To have that value today, you would have to be worth about 350,000,000,000. Okay. And I think Jeff Bezos is worth 140 or something like that. Yeah. And I think we didn't even mention was it Carnegie that had at one point, like one dollars of every $20 in circulation was his? Yeah, that's right. That was Carnegie for sure. Yeah. I mean, these numbers are staggering, for sure. For people like Rockefeller and Carnegie, it's unbelievable. But the thing is, John D. Rockefeller was a ruthless businessman who put a lot of people out of business, brought a lot of misery and hardship on just small, everyday producers of oil, which we'll see. But again, it's really difficult to overstate the impact that his philanthropy has had on the United States. He peaked at 900 million, like you said, when he died. He had given away everything but 26 million of that. And he probably felt kind of bad that he had $26 million left because he was a very religious man. And apparently he learned very early on that it was every man's religious duty to make as much money as you possibly can and then to give away as much money as you possibly can, too. And he apparently lived that even before he was wealthy, when he was still just an average worker. He would give away something like 10% of all of his paychecks. So he was a philanthropist his whole life. For sure. He was still a robber baron too, though. Yeah. And his whole, of course, oil was his business. Standard Oil. It was just a goliath. And there were a bunch of big sort of like the railroads. It was oil and the railroads were industries where you could have a bunch of people that had these huge corporations, but Standard Oil was far and away bigger than any of them. By the early 1009 hundreds, they controlled more than 90% of the oil market. Can you imagine? 90%. And the way that he cornered the market was he did that Standard organization kind of thing where he went around and bought it first and then started to turn up the heat on the competition, on the holdouts. But one of the ways that he turned up that heat was he colluded with the railroad. The different railroads in the area who were shipping all this oil to say not only were they going to give him a Rebate, so he got money back where they wouldn't give money back to other oil shippers just because of volume. That makes sense. But they also had to get his business. And he had so much business that they would do this. The railroads had to pack an added tax on all of his competitors. So they paid an extra $20 to barrel to ship, not just paid more than he did because of his Rebates, they paid more in addition to that, just for not being John D. Rockefeller. And then on top of that, to keep him from taking that Rebate and going around to other railroads and getting a cheaper Rebate and abandoning that railroad, they actually gave him a kickback of that added tax. So his competitors were getting taxed by the railroads, and he was actually getting some of that tax himself, too. You just can't possibly compete with that. And it put a lot of smaller oil producers and shippers and refiners out of business. It's amazing. It is. Let me see. He gave 75 million away to the University of Chicago. Well, it kind of founded the University of Chicago with that money. Also spellman Too, which was established to educate freed slaves. He bankrolled Spelman for its founding as well. And in one of our best and most favorite episodes, you might remember, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm in the south. Yes, totally remember that. That is one of our better episodes, for sure. So those are just four of the sort of most famous and some might say notorious robber barons. Big long list. You could throw Henry Ford in there. John Jacob Astor. Charles Schwab. Andrew Mellon. Jay Gould. Yeah, I was thinking about Jay Paul Getty, but he was later on, he wouldn't have qualified. So some of these guys had some terrible quotes, too, that also just made them despised through history. Carnegie said that it's not the man who does the work who gets rich, it's the man who gets other men to do the work. Which is not a very tasteful thing to say when you're ultra wealthy and breaking strikes with guns. That Jay Gould guy I mentioned, he said that he could hire one half of the workers in America to shoot the other half to death if he wanted to. Which is another nice thing to say. Apparently, John D. Rockefeller once said competition is a sin. So these guys had some terrible PR. And because of that, a lot of people have said, like, well, I wonder if some of the ultrawealthy industrialists or innovators or people who are basically the billionaires who are leading the world today, are they just like Robert Barrons with better PR and better marketing? Maybe. And apparently, supposedly, it's not necessarily the case. And here's why. Remember I was saying that, like, Robert barons were kind of being reformed by historians these days, especially conservative historians? Well, they point to some really indisputable things. Like, these guys were ruthless and they engaged in horrific anticompetitive kind of anticapitalist tactics to get those wealth. And they did it on the backs of workers that they took advantage of and didn't pay very well and killed in their workplaces, basically. But the reason that America is still powerful today is because of the work that these guys did, of the industries that they created. Public schooling came about and became widespread to prepare people for the jobs that these guys created. And you can't look away from the fact that some of them were the greatest philanthropists that the country has ever produced, too. That flies in the face with kind of the exception of Bill Gates. It flies in the face of the people who are around today that not only are they not great philanthropists necessarily, I'm looking at Steve Jobs, who isn't around anymore, but definitely was not a good philanthropist in his life. He is now, his family is, but he wasn't when he was alive. That's a big mark against people who have control of significant portions of the wealth in America today. But also, even more than that, those guys today, they're presiding over a decline, a decline in wages, decline in living conditions. Whereas these guys, these captains of industry and the robber barons of the 19th century, they were presiding over a rise like an improvement in the way that America lived and the standard of living kind of the polar opposite, even though the inequality is roughly the same. Very interesting. I think so, too. I also wonder, though, too, if this inequality will usher in a second Progressive era, which it seems like it has all of the markings to do that, maybe. So we need to do a Progressive era episode too sometime. Okay, deal. All right, well, since you said deal, Chuck, I think that's time for listener mail. Yeah, I think I alluded to this in another one about the word marijuana. Didn't I talk about that? Totally. But I didn't read the mail. Right. Not that I remember. No. All right. This is from Jack Glick. Hey, guys. Love the show. Been listening for five years or so, and I make sure not to miss any. New episodes. Listening to the one on macha when you started to talk about marijuana decided to get in touch. I am the lead analyst on cannabis taxation for the Canadian federal government, and we long ago made a decision to refer to the plant by its proper name cannabis. Marijuana has a number of historically racist associations, and I know you guys are always wary of using appropriate terms for things. I had a good laugh at the question over whether whom was still okay to say in the ultrasound episode. Thought you might like to know how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is, and I'd like to encourage you to use the word cannabis when referring to it in the future. All the best. Keep it up. That is from Jack Glick. That is a great name, Jack. Great job. Great name. Great email from a great guy, I assume sounds like a great guy. If you want to show off what a great person you are, you can email us yourself like Jack Glick did. What a great name. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. More podcasts to my heart radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
a7cd3c72-361e-11ea-938d-935774cdde39 | Short Stuff: Exclamation Points! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-exclamation-points | We all use them! But did we always? NO!! Learn all about everyone's favorite punctuation mark today! | We all use them! But did we always? NO!! Learn all about everyone's favorite punctuation mark today! | Wed, 04 Mar 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=64, tm_isdst=0) | 13218842 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. This is Short Stuff with an exclamation point. I thought this was super interesting. I feel like we've talked about us before. Yeah. Do you remember on our little 1 minute explanation videos that have been scrubbed, I guess from the Internet? Because I don't know where those things are. I don't know if I remember those. Yeah, we'd be like, we explain something to one another in 1 minute stand up videos. Yeah, I sort of do. We've done so many dumb videos over the years. I think the only thing that was worth anything was don't be dumb, you're sweet. But also Internet roundup was pretty great. And again, to stay in history was wonderful. Wonderful. Anyway, I think we talked about this, but it is super interesting and I love it. Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's a lot of tendrils we're talking about the exclamation point and there are just lots of weird and interesting facts about this. No one knows where it came from exactly. It was introduced in English as far back as the 14th century was called the Point of Admiration. That's pretty sweet. I like that. And the theory of how it came about was that it was used for the Latin exclamation of joy, which is capital I. Capital O and the I above that. O looks like the exclamation point. Yeah, like they think that somebody was using that and started just, I guess, saving space. I don't know. But instead of putting I, then O is I above O. And yeah, that looks a lot like an exclamation point. Yeah. They also think the question mark came from that too. Q O quo to question somebody that they just put the Q above the oh and that's where that came from. It's pretty good explanation if you ask me. Yeah, and so if you want to talk about the actual rules of grammar because it's different than how we use it today in some ways, you can also still use it this way. But it's obviously an exclamation to exclaim something in a sentence or an interjection. Right. So if you're like, I stub my toe, that would be an appropriate place to use an exclamation point without people making fun of you or saying like, yeah, there you go. If you say that without an exclamation point, you just look kind of like a jerk cowboy who's dead inside. Right, exactly. So people kind of long understood that these are the two instances that you could use an exclamation point and that was that everyone just knew. Like you just don't use it unless you are, say, bad at writing. Like if you come across a book written in like, the 20th century and there's a lot of exclamation points, that book was roundly laughed at. Because one thing that you'll find if you start to dig into the history of exclamation points is we used to use them way less than you see today. They were used in the 19th century. I think yellow muckraker journalists use them a lot to kind of get people on the edge of their seat or whatever. It's kind of a poke. It's an emotional poke. And so it can get kind of worn out very quickly. And it was so people used them sparingly starting around the 20th century. Yeah. And here's another super cool little fact. I have an old typewriter in my room, and I've never noticed, but there is not an exclamation point because up until about 1970, they didn't have its own key as a punctuation mark. Sure. You had to retrofit it. Yeah. I didn't know how to make one. And this is pretty interesting, isn't it? Yeah. So what you do is you type a period step one, you backspace step two, and then you type an Apostrophe on top of it. That would be the third and final step. Yeah. Not bad. It's a good little solve, but your exclamation point looks a little, like, lazy or crooked. Yeah, agreed. I guess it gets the point across. I mean, if you wanted to try and get tricky, you could roll the thing down a little bit and try and type in L, I suppose. Sure. But that's your really gambling there. Yeah, but think about the trouble that people went to to type an exclamation point back then. Like you really needed to mean it. That's true. I wanted exactly. So back in the day, apparently, they didn't call them exclamation points as recently as the 50s truck. They called them bangs. And that's a longstanding tradition, I think, in the 19th century printers where they actually spelled out each letter of every word in the newspaper. They called them bangs back then. Pretty cool. It is pretty cool. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about how things have changed. Exclamation. Okay, Chuck, we're back. It's kind of funny. If you listen to this episode and just imagine an exclamation point at the end of every one of our sentences, I'll bet it'd be a little more enjoyable than normal. Yeah. I mean, surely we'll call it something exclamation point and use an exclamation. I don't know. We could also zig instead of zagging. That's true. Go for the subtle joke. So if you are aware of the world today in the west, at least you are aware that exclamation points are everywhere. They're dripping from the ceilings, the walls. They're in your cereal everywhere. There's exclamation points. And this is a fairly new thing. And for a little while, especially when it really started to take hold and say, like, the 2000 odds, people made fun of these. I remember distinctly writing a blog post saying, like, this is ruining the world, basically. I was. Now, and I warned against this in my blog post. Now, you can't not use an exclamation point. Or else you seem like you're being mean. That was the ultimate problem that I foresaw way back in the day. Yeah. So that is what has changed. Everything is ECommunication. And there's a linguist named Gretchen McCullough who really very succinctly ties a bow on exactly what this is. And that is this. It is a sincerity marker. Right. Not an intensity marker now. Yeah. Which makes a tremendous amount of sense. Yeah, it can be both. You can still obviously say, Get out of my way, exclamation point. Sure. But if you're communicating with someone via text, via email, and you say, thanks a lot for helping if you'd say, thanks a lot for helping with just a period, it comes across as not too friendly. It just does now. It does. And it's sad because there's a very cool way of putting it that's not excited or anything like that. I feel like we've also gotten a lot more insecure at the same time we've started electronic communication. And so that those two have kind of cohabited or coexisted or co evolved. And we now require that exclamation point to say, I mean this, like, I'm being serious. Yeah. Because when we communicate electronically, email, chat, text, what have you, we're missing, like, all of the verbal, the audio and the visual cues that come through when you're talking to somebody or you can hear someone talking or see them talking. So we have to kind of adorn our communication now with these other cues to let people know, like, I'm not being sarcastic. Which makes people who use exclamation point sarcastically, they are basically undermining the very fabric of the new society that we're building. Like, we're holding on by our fingernails on this new system. Right. Please don't pull the rug out from under it. Yeah. Give it another 50 years, maybe before you really start doing that. But it is an interesting thing with the sarcasm or genuine quality. And that's the differentiator. Like, if someone gives you a lot of help, you could say, thank you so much, exclamation point. If someone doesn't really help you that much, you could also say, thank you so much. Right. And, like, you can hear my voice and clearly know what's going on. But in an email or a text, that period is a signifier. I think it's a message. Yeah, it is. So exactly how you take it, I think, largely depends on the type of person you are. But I think what Gretchen McAuliffe said was, it's a sincerity marker. Sincerity marker. Beautiful. Over an intensity marker. The other thing, too, is that they have found through research that women use them more than men, if you're communicating online to show friendliness. And they've also found that young women and people of color, young people of color especially, are linguistic innovators that are often vilified in the early processes. And one thing they mentioned in this House Stuff Works article is like, valley girl speech, whereas people say like all the time. Now some people point it out and make fun of it, and I guarantee you those people use it all the time, too. But that stuff was really derided in the 80s, but now it's kind of widespread in a lot of ways. Yeah. Remember. I think it was Moon unit. Frank Zappa's daughter. Yes. Okay. Remember she had that song Valley Girl, that hit making fun of valley girls, and like, the whole world was making fun of valley girls, and now everyone talks like a valley girl. To a certain degree. That is true, I think. So the idea behind this, according to linguists, is that starting about in 2000, odds again, 2005, six, seven, around the time when texting really became a big thing in America, younger women started using exclamation points a lot, and it just became an innovation that spilled over into the rest of culture. Yeah. And there are a couple of other theories that it says a lot in a short amount of time. And people are communicating so quickly these days and shorter bursts that it kind of plays a valuable role. Which means it does. Because if you add an exclamation point. It keeps you from having to say. Like. And I couldn't believe it. Or I really meant it. Was very surprised. Yeah, it says it all right there. Yeah, for sure. The other interesting thing, too, is that they've done studies and they have shown that if you use exclamation points in the business setting, that it is more likely that you are not a supervisor or higher or perceived as such. Right. And that is true. Man, when I think about, like, our bosses, they don't use a lot of exclamation points. That's for the kids. Yeah, nearly an exclamation point among them. There is one person that I won't name on the air in our company that we exchange emails with that does the, like two or three exclamation points. I haven't noticed. I have to pay attention. Don't tell me. Okay, okay. I'm going to see if I can figure it out. I'll email you in the next few days about it. I always draw the line with one, and I tried to use them as very much as sincerity markers to display that I'm either genuine about something or sincere about something. I don't do, too. You don't use them much at all, I've noticed. I use them, but I've very frequently gone back and read an email before I sent it and removed the exclamation point, replaced it with a period, not because I was coming, I didn't mean to tone down my sincerity or anything like that, but because I don't want to overuse them so that it does mean something or they does come through clearly when I do use them. Right. And tying into this, the other kind of interesting thing, how these sort of it's not really grammar, but how these things evolve over the years is the all caps thing. It now means like, you're yelling at somebody. Right. And it's always funny to see in some sort of thread or form where there are maybe people of a certain age accidentally get that cap slot going and it just looks like this angry old person is just yelling at everybody. That's right. It is. It's funny. They don't mean it. They just didn't know how to turn it off. Yes. And if you have all caps and multiple explanations, you're either super excited or really ticked off. Yeah. So, Chuck, I have to ask you something because I don't use exclamation points. From an outsider perspective, does it seem like I'm being tepid or cold or jerk or mean? No. You and I communicate as short a hand as possible at this point. Yeah, but you're Cc'd on just about every email at work. To other people. Yeah. So, to other people, how does it look? I think managerial and refined. Oh, that's exactly what I'm going for. Nice work. I have a computer monocle that I wear when I send emails, it comes through. That's what I'm trying to get across. Yeah, you're doing fine. Don't worry. Thanks, manrel. Serviceable and workmanly. Yes. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. So that means that short stuff is away. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
c32e14b0-5460-11e8-b38c-2f1f1b12faa4 | SYSK Selects: How Does a Diving Bell Work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-does-a-diving-bell-work | About 2,400 years ago Aristotle mentions the use of diving bells, apparatuses that convey divers to the bottom of the sea -- or at least below the surface of the water -- and allows them to breathe -- at least until the air runs out. Learn about the physics of this clever and ancient invention and how it's been used to sabotage enemy boats and build the Brooklyn Bridge. | About 2,400 years ago Aristotle mentions the use of diving bells, apparatuses that convey divers to the bottom of the sea -- or at least below the surface of the water -- and allows them to breathe -- at least until the air runs out. Learn about the physics of this clever and ancient invention and how it's been used to sabotage enemy boats and build the Brooklyn Bridge. | Sat, 04 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=124, tm_isdst=0) | 29934330 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure. But all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all, rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes someone finds love on Eharmony. The Neogen device developed by Rst Syndnexis is a Wellestablished advanced quantumbased medical device using electric cell signaling technology. Treatment is noninvasive, safe, effective, and used in managing pain associated with neuropathy and other painful conditions. It helps improve circulation, offers better rehabilitation through pain relief, and activates the recovery processes, giving better patient outcomes. Visit Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Hope you have a good Saturday this week. I selected for the select episode a great one from August 8, 2012. How does a diving bell work? And I think if you've listened to the show before, you know I love antiquated equipment and steampunky things and all of that together is a diving bell. So I just picked this one out because I remember it being a good one. So please do enjoy. How does a diving bell work right now? Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me, which means it's time for stuff you should know. That's right? Man, I got all confused right there. You were about to say, listen to me. Yeah. It's a little close for comfort. Our shortest show ever. Yeah. How introductions work. How are you doing? I'm well, sir. How are you? I'm good. A little warm in here today, isn't it? I feel like this tomb like room that we're in is always sort of warm and off putting. Well, there's like 18 Ikea lamps in here, and I guess it feels like it's warmer than usual. They generate some heat. That's how they power Switzerland with Sweden with heatland. Sweden. Sweden. Yeah. Sorry, swedish. I know. People are like, good Lord, chuck. Yes. You got a map as a desk. They're like, skipping dining bills. Yeah. You have a tan map, don't you? So, Chuck yes. I want to dive into a subject that I believe you know something about. Okay. It's called diving bells. Yes, that's the subject. And I know you know about it because this article that we're basing this off of is a Chuck Bryant jam. Yeah, I forgot all about this. And I got about halfway through it, and I was like, that sounds like something I'd say. Oh, really? You didn't realize that you've written it? No, totally forgot. And then it wasn't halfway through, but it was probably somewhere in the intro. What was it you said? That silly, clever intro was really not clever. Oh, I don't know. I feel like I used to start all of my articles like I was writing a middle school term paper where they're talking about how there's not very many images of our early attempts to scuba dive because of the lack of availability of underwater filming techniques at the time. Yeah, it sounds like Filler. Very, very, very. Remember in summer school with Chainsaw and Dave? Yeah. The Mark Harmon movie. Yeah. They have to write like a 300 word essay or something like that. And somebody they admired, and I think it was Toby Hooper or it was the special effects guy, but they said he was very member of those days, counting the words. Yeah. That's not what this is. No. This is a great article on diving bells. It's kind of interesting. The precursor to scuba diving, if any folks out there, scuba enthusiasts, there's a trail that was blazed many years before littered with dead bodies and big iron casks. Yeah, not just dead bodies, but crippled bodies too. Like a lot of bad stuff can happen to you and a lot of bad stuff did happen to people before we really understood the physics of pressure. Yeah. I mean, people still lose their lives, obviously, in the pursuit of just forwarding technology, but not like they used to. Yes. People you're like, we really owe a debt to the people who figured out everything that we have and lost their lives doing it. Well. What's spectacularly amazing to me is that not everyone died trying to use diving bells. And we're talking like 2500 years ago. Yeah. It wasn't in the early 1920s, right? Yeah. Apparently by the concept of diving, belts were so, I guess, entrenched in societies around the world, civilizations around the world that they were just routinely used for all sorts of different stuff. Yeah. Aristotle wrote about it. Yeah. Back in the fourth century BC. Right? Yeah. It's a long time ago. So he was the first, I take it, to mention diving bells. Would you describe them? Right, yes. Should we read that quote? I think it's a good quote, but you have to read it in an Aristotle voice. Aristotlean. But I really have no idea what ancient Greek sounded like. Well, the key is that no one does. Okay. So you can just make it up. They enable divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the vata. Yeah, I just added a German at the end. I was going to say there was an 85% chance that the Greeks were going to sound like Sean Connery coming out of you no, it wasn't Sean Connery. It was close. Okay. So yeah. So Aristotle is talking about this, and the very fact that he's talking about diving bells proves at least that the idea was in place at the time. There's some legends that Alexander the Great, who was actually a student of Aristotle, used a diving bell. Yeah. There's pictures, drawings of Alexander the Great, like, laying down or sitting down beneath the water in some sort of a diving bell or like a barrel or magic bubble of some sort. Yeah, but we don't know if that means he just talked about it a lot and draw pictures of me doing this or if he actually tried it. We're just not sure. Well, supposedly he used it one when he was eleven, but then again as an older man during the siege of Tire in 332 BC. And I looked at it and it looked like it seems pretty reasonable, like apparently there is some underwater obstructions around Tire and he had some underwater divers removing them. So he used a diving bell to go check on their work. Not the most fantastical tale anyone could tell if they were just making stuff up about him using a diving bell. Yeah, that's true. So I kind of buy that one. Yeah. I could buy it. And of course, DaVinci sketched them out because he invented everything. Even if he didn't properly invent it, he at least sketched out ideas, right? Yeah. He had a lot of great ideas that have come to life now. That's true. The Star Trek phaser. Really? No. Okay. But Aristotle, he kind of hints at the basic physics behind the diving bell. He says that you have a capsule that you're forcing straight down into a water. Yeah. The water and the air bubble, whatever air was inside is pressed upwards so long as the vessel is concave. Right? Yeah. And so long as it is straight down. Like you said, you don't want this thing because if you've ever played in the bathtub, and I know you do, if you take a cup and convert it and just push it straight down, there's going to be water. And then if you want to make it poop, you tilted on its side and the air comes out in little bubbles. That's true. Does it poop or shoot a duck? It shoots a duck. Okay. But I think every kid has done stuff like that. And that's essentially what all a diving bell is. It's just really heavy. Yeah. Because when you have a cup above water, upside down, it has air in it. When it contacts the water, the air can't escape any longer because of the water surface tension. And then when you push it up, the water compresses the air. That's right. So that's all you have, like you said, at the top of a diamond belt, inside is compressed air. And human beings can breathe that. Yes. It doesn't have to be concave, though, does it? I don't think so. Can they make them square later? Well, I think there needs to be some sort of point that the air can be pressed up into, but maybe not. Okay. I've seen here they're concave, so maybe that's the best design for a diving bell, but yeah, not everybody's used concave designs. Yeah, but I mean, many were shaped like bells, some were barrels, like whisky barrels, some were wooden, many were iron. They were trying all sorts of things, basically, just to see if it worked. Right. And they figured out the heavier the better, because this thing had to be able to go down to the bottom of the sea, whatever depth that was, and not tip over. Yeah, it couldn't tip over. And it had to be balanced, too, so you had to have ballasts. If you weren't using an iron diving ball, you had to put weights on it and they had to be balanced or else it would tip over. It was a big deal. Yeah. And I think the key here is this is breathable air. Right. It depends on how deep you are and how big your bell is, obviously. But I think one example I gave in here was if you have a ten foot tall bell down 325ft, that's only about eleven inches of air. Right. That's not enough. No, I don't think they were going that deep back then. No. At least they were not smart to do so. No. Those are the ones that died. That's right. So one of the other problems that these people face, aside from dying because they went too deep and ended up with just eleven inches of air. Now, we should point out that before we go any further, physically speaking, by volume, that's eleven inches of air, but that's still the same amount of air that filled up the diving bell above water. Just compressed. Right. It's compressed. So you have compressed there. So all those oxygen molecules are still there. They're just in compressed form. Yeah, that's a good point. The problem is, if you're in there, you're compressed too. Right. And when you're in that state of compression, the oxygen and the nitrogen in your bloodstream gets compressed as well. That's right. And they dissolve, which isn't a problem with the oxygen, because the tissues, the surrounding tissues absorb that oxygen. They love it. It's like yummy to them. But the nitrogen remains dissolved in the blood until you decompress. Then you have a problem. Yes. Then you have a radiohead album. Do they have one called the Benz? Yeah. I didn't know that. It's a great one. It was the one that preceded OK computer, sort of. Did they make a bad album ever? No, it's a good point. Yeah. That's what the bins is. And when the nitrogen tries to escape, it forms little bubbles that block blood vessels. And that's why you can have a stroke or a heart attack if you ascend too quickly, and it can go to your joints and cause excruciating pain, I imagine. Crippling. Remember I mentioned being crippled before? Yeah. You've suffered the bins. No, earlier you said that she's littered with dead bodies, and I said, and crippled bodies. I feel like we talked about my life long crippling. Well, momentarily. I thought you meant I've never had the ben. Okay. I thought I remembered many moons ago, you mentioning scuba diving. Something about the bins. I've never had the ben. Okay. Yeah, poor scuba cat. Yeah, he got in the bins. I don't know. I wonder if scuba cats still around. I don't know. He was kind of old already, wasn't he? I don't remember. Well, that was a winner. One of our best. Yes. When you come up too quickly, the nitrogen in your blood undisolves, forms bubbles, blocks your blood vessels, blocks your joints, causes tremendous pain, strokes, death, all that stuff. So when you're an ancient bell diver, I guess, is what you call is that right? A bell diver? Yeah, seems right. And you were down for very long, too deep and you came up too quickly. You're in a lot of trouble. That's right. And they may not have even understood the bins at that point. I imagine they didn't. Right. They were like, he's just got the diving bell sickness right again. Yeah. It was because he sinned, or something like that. He upset Zeus. So things went on like this for quite a while, through the Renaissance into the 16th century. People were using these diving bells. It was all well and good. They were having a blast down there having parties. And then at some point, people were like, you know what? I bet we could make this better. Right? Yeah. These guys keep running out of air down there and dying. Or they run out of air and they have to come up too quick and they get the bend. So how can we improve this? Or they're only 14ft down sitting in a bell, and what's the point? Which is magnificent, but the ship that we need to get to is 100ft down. Yeah, exactly. They wanted to have applications they could use, like to build things or repair things or get pirates booty. Exactly. And speaking of pirates checks, barrow does this with a canoe in the first Pirates of the Caribbean. Yes. Does he really? Yeah, he turns the canoe upside down and walks along the ocean bottom. And I don't remember how he pulls the canoe down. Technically speaking, it's possible if he pulled it straight down. I think the magic of Disney, but I don't think it's physically possible, what he did. Just want to make sure that anybody who really liked that part, I pooh poo it. Okay. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. A summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, hosts Selena Ercart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. So in the late sixteen hundred s, it was a Frenchman named Dennis Papin, and he was one of the first dudes that said, you know what? I think we can get some fresh air into there. And very smartly and simply he used hoses and bellows that the bellows were outside, obviously up on the boat, and they had dudes manning the bellows and pumping fresh air in there. Yeah. And it wasn't even like, difficult. You didn't even have to navigate where to put the hole in the top of the diving belt. The hose literally just goes under the bottom and up inside, and then the air just presses up super easy. Yeah. So you've got fresh air now. Yeah. They can stay down there longer. All that's all, basically. But it's still not pressurized. The air they're pumping in isn't pressurized. That's true. So they couldn't go any deeper. They could just stay down there and do whatever the heck they were doing sitting in these cast iron bells. Right. So we invent diving bells in at least the fifth century BC. We have to wait until the 17th century Ad before we make a real innovation to them. Now we have a whole other obstacle pressurizing these things. How long do we have to wait to overcome that one? A year. That's true. Yeah. And it took an Englishman to do so. Edmund Halley, he basically attached these wooden barrels. He's weighted wooden barrels to the diving bell, and they could be brought up and down, and they contained air. At the bottom of each of these is a hole that allowed water to come in, forcing the air up. And at the top was a hose that ran from that barrel to the bottom of the diving bell, and there was a faucet. So basically, it was sort of like having air tanks down there. Whenever they wanted more pressure, if they were trying to equalize things, they would just turn their little faucet and allow air in. Once the barrel was empty, they would pull the barrels up, I guess refill them with air, which probably meant just opening the top and then closing it again, and then lower it back down there, and all of a sudden, you could control the pressure. And that was the same Halle who named a comment after himself. Was it really? It was, no way. Way. That guy was all over the place. Renaissance man. Yeah, that's where that word comes from. He was a post renaissance renaissance man. That's true. So now we have pressurized diving bells, right? Yeah. And basically, it's equal to that of the surrounding water. So that means you can go deeper and stay down longer. You run out. Like if the water starts to creep up, you just add more pressurized air and it pushes the water back down, like it keeps the water at bay because it's at the same pressure. So to the water, whatever is inside the diving bell might as well just be more water. Yeah. It doesn't have this crazy urge to fill the diving bell up any longer because there's something there that just kind of goes along and happy way to the Mariana Trench. That's right. And I bet there was some 17th century David Blaine that very shortly afterwards was like, I can stay down here for two months. Right. And people like, who cares? Well, the horrible thing was when you added pressurized air again, you're pressurizing not just the diving belt, but the people. Yeah. So to become pressurized to go down on a diving belt was a pretty horrific thing to endure in and of itself. Yeah, I guess. So. When they built the Brooklyn Bridge, the two towers, the main ports yeah. Those are down almost to the bedrock. They were going to go on the bedrock, and then they found out, like, there's some pretty stable aggregate, 30ft above bedrock. So they just planted them on those. Yeah. But to construct those, they had to drop these huge caissons, which are basically like giant structural diving bells, and they pressurized them, and it kept the water of the river out. So clearly the river is just floating around. This stuff weird. But there's men working in these things, and they'd have to pressurize before going in them. And it was just like your drums would burst once in a while as they were being pressured because it wasn't gently. It was like I guess it was better than just walking right into the caisson, but it was still pretty rough. And then they go and work in there for a couple of hours and then come out and hopefully not get decompression sickness. Depends. But actually, the project manager, the son of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, washington Roebles, the son, he suffered a lifelong crippling from decompressing sickness after going and inspecting some of the work in one of the cases and coming out too quickly. Well, I know a lot of people died, and I enjoy walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, as many New Yorkers do. And you should think about that next time you're doing so. Yeah, people gave up their lives so you could say snarky things and Instagram photos of yourself and all the other things that you do. There's a really great Ken Burns documentary on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. I haven't seen that one. It's good. It's like a straight up PBS one. No frills. Well, he's not about frills. Right. He just moves pictures around and pans in and out. This may be his least friendly. Okay. Yeah. I'm not knocking kinburns. I like a good kinburns. Well, you'll probably like this one, then. So, 100 years after being able to control the pressure with bellows and the barrels I'm sorry, in English and other Englishmen, a scientist named John Smeaton invented an actual diving air pump in 1788. And it was on the surface, obviously, and took, like, four guys to operate it. And it was basically like Dennis Papin's original plan, but it was just mechanized. So they were able to build, like, big ones, like people as many as, like twelve people could go down and do things and, like, have a party if they wanted to. They made windows eventually. Yeah. They put electricity in them. Yeah. That's a little scary for that time period. I don't know if I would have trusted that. Yeah, I wouldn't have. Early 1800s. Right. We just discovered electricity. Now let's put it under water. And they use them for, like you said, building bridges and repairing docks. Early saboteurs would sneak up underwater to cut the anchor lines of enemy ships. Really? This is a very handy use of diving bell. So you dug up a cool story about was that this year? Yeah, just this May 26 yes. A guy named Harrison Ouchini, a 29 year old Nigerian boat cook, was on a tugboat, a Chevron tug boat in the Atlantic, and it capsized. And he was eventually, through all this, capsizing and tumbling around and water flowing in and sinking a hundred feet and sinking, of course, ended up in a bathroom trapped with air, sort of like the same concept of a diving bell. And people wondered, he'd survived after 60 hours. That's a good deal, 60 hours. But physicists were like, well, how did this happen? You probably shouldn't have been able to live that long down there. Right. The press reported that he had something like 4ft of air or something like that. And yeah, the chamber that he was in was only about 4ft high. So 60 hours of air shouldn't have worked. It shouldn't have kept them alive. Because think about it like you're breathing. Even if it is pressurized air, you're breathing air, you're also exhaling carbon dioxide. And when the ratio of carbon dioxide or the percentage of it gets above 5%, things start to go horribly awry. And you die shortly after that. Yes. I didn't realize that lack of oxygen isn't what kills people. It's too much CO2. Yeah, that's pretty interesting thing. Yeah, it can happen when you're on a ventilator. That's apparently a big risk when you innovate. Somebody is CO2 build up. Wow. Can kill them. So, anyway, why didn't this guy die? Well, it turns out with pressurized air, especially when it's pressurized against cold water, CO2 is readily absorbed by that water around it. So when he was exhausting, the oxygen was remaining, but the CO2 was basically being wicked away. And since that CO2, or the air bubble that he was in, was pressurized, he was 100ft underwater, which actually helped him. Right. He had a lot of oxygen. A bunch of oxygen was just pushed into this little area. But the CO2 is being wicked away, and that's how he managed to survive. Yeah, it said for every 10 meters you descend, 1 ATM of pressure is added, and it makes it more dense, according to some lawmaker named Boyle. According to Boyle's law. And so since he was 30 meters below, it became more dense by times four. And so that meant that he didn't need as much air as you would think for someone that's underwater. Right. So how much did he need? You need 10 day of air. So he only needed 6 m\u00b3 in the end because of the temperature of the water and how deep he was. Right. Also, I mean, don't remember that's a lot of air compressed into the same amount of area. All those molecules are still present. They're just in a smaller amount of area. They also think, though, that it was connected to another air pocket, which probably helped. Even still, the guy survived in an impromptu inadvertent diving bell 100ft below the surface for 60 hours, dude in the dark under the ocean with his head next to a toilet, and they said that he could hear the sea life scavenging on his dead crew mates. Wow. That's horrific. That happened this may not in, like, 1812 in May. Yeah. So there you go. By the way, we'll insert this right now because it's a good place for it. Okay. You were out of town. Did you hear about the whole sharknado thing? Yeah. You predicted sharknado? I invented it. Yeah. That's pretty impressive, chuck, for those of you that don't know sharknado was a very cheesy movie on a network that aired a couple of weeks ago. It blew up. Blew up. Didn't get as many viewers from the blow up as they would have hoped, but I watched it. It was very funny and fun. Was it dumb? Oh, yeah, it was terrible. But in that way was it one of the guys from 902 I know on it? Yeah. Ian's earring was in it. And Tara Reid. Oh, yeah. She's looking rough. You mean I were out of the country and we heard about this. About Sharknado. Yeah. So, thankfully, one of our listeners alerted me to the fact that I invented Sharknado because can it really rain frogs? Episode. I say this no. I mean, I think they're light because that's the whole point. Even an updraft from a water spout of 200 miles an hour isn't going to be picking up great white sharks. Right. That's a movie for you. Raining sharks. Yeah. So thanks to fan Todd Waters for bringing that to my attention. That's impressive. You very clearly I even said a movie. Yeah. You invented Sharknado, and this thing was released a good year ago, right? It was, I think, may of 2012. That was almost a year before Harrison Aukini survived in a diving bell. All sorts of stuff coming together, doing the bullds, feeling the flow. I don't know if I can sue anybody, but I'm looking into it. You should always ask before you sue. Yeah, sure. Give me some cabbage. How about some cheese? Some bread? Little sharknado cheese. I think we should bring back bread for money. Okay. Bring it a little bread. Yeah. All right. They sent me bread, though. That would suck. With, like, a note that just says, wah wah wah. Yeah. Shaped like a shark. Yeah. Maybe we should bring back bread into the regular vernacular, and then you ask them. Okay. That's our plan. All right. So sorry about that sidebar. I just want to give myself credit where it's due. You should be very proud of that. Thanks. Hey, I know when a good movie idea comes along. I'm all over it. You and I and Zerring. Yes. If you want to learn more about diving bells, you should type those two words into the search bar@howtofworks.com, and it will bring up this delightful little article written by a young exuberant, Chuck Bryant. And since I said exuberant, it's time for a message break. Sufficient. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and Zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics America. The. Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun's shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, my Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's Right hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great, and it's a fun show, and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. And now it's time for Listener mailchuck. Whether you like it or not. I hope you're ready. We heard from another teacher we like to read these. Hey, guys. The reason I'm writing is to tell you how much stuff you should Know has helped me during my first year of teaching. I am 24. Just finished my first year as a high school social studies teacher. All right. This year I taught law and justice and AP psychology. Law and justice. That's awesome. And AP Psychology? Yeah. Well rounded. Since I listened to a huge bulk of your shows when I was preparing various lessons, I use the information that I had on different podcasts I'd heard on different podcasts. Then I thought, you know what? I should just play it. I'll get even lazier and just play the show. Yeah, the podcasts were a big hit with the kids. They got a break from hearing my voice and I got a break from talking. Stuff You Should Know is also great for teachers because the articles you guys use for the podcast are well researched and written. Thank you. Thank you. I don't have to worry that you guys are just making up information. And if you are, don't tell me. Student said the winner of their all time favorite in class was How Barbie Works. That's probably my favorite, too. It's a good one. Pat and disco. I created a pretty awesome PowerPoint to accompany it, and I attached it and I looked at it. It was really neat, actually. We discussed how Barbie and other toys can influence gender identity and body image in developing children. Overall, some of the podcasts have streamed japanese internment camps dueling right to privacy. When you die in psychology. I hit on concussions monkey's in syndrome. Oh, yeah. Hypnosis, lobotomies and PTSD. Remember lobotomy? That was one of the Alpha best. We should have called it lobotomy's heart. We love my Lobotomy on NPR. Do you remember? Oh, yeah, that dude. Yes, that guy. Here's our hero. Howard something. Yeah, Howard. Just to tell you guys again, thanks a lot for making my job easier. Because you use classroom appropriate language and report factual research based on evidence and information, you're an amazing classroom resource. Resource. Did you say that or did she misspell it? I did. Okay, keep them coming. Carly brown. Thanks a lot. Carly Brown. We appreciate that. Or, Ms. Brown, as your students probably tell you. That's right. Thank you, Ms. Brown, for letting us know that. We like to know that we're helping shape young minds for the better. That's right. And we do use classroom appropriate language, don't we? I never termed at that. All right, well, let's see. Checkers. What should we say? Anything you want to hear about if you have invented something? Because I invented the snowboard, too, remember? No, I don't remember that. I have a crayon drawing from when I was six of the ski board. Oh, yeah. There's a guy going down a ski slope on a little skateboard with skis on it. Wow. So I've invented two things the sharknado and the snowboard. Yeah. So if you have inadvertently invented something, that's a great one, and we'd love to hear about it. Yeah, you can tweet that to us at syskpodcast. You can post it on our Facebook page@facebook.com, stuffychnow. You can send us an email that Chuck and I will both get to Stuffpodcast@howstoughfworks.com. And you can check out our home on the Web. It's a little website known as Stuff You Should Know. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen. Today you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands? Find Halo elevate at Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
How Clowns Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-clowns-work | Jesters of some sort have been around since ancient Egypt and China. Our modern clown was invented around 1800 and ever since they have been getting steadily creepier. | Jesters of some sort have been around since ancient Egypt and China. Our modern clown was invented around 1800 and ever since they have been getting steadily creepier. | Tue, 21 Apr 2015 15:35:59 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=15, tm_min=35, tm_sec=59, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=111, tm_isdst=0) | 44536125 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jojo. There's Chuckles. This is stuff you should know. The podcast. And there's Jerry. She has a regular name. Hey. Hey. That was pretty good. Thanks. This could also be like how late night talk show hosts work, too. Yes. Krusty the Clown was on my mind during a lot of this. I thought that was your Seth Meyer. No. Did he say that? No, it was just completely ludicrous joke. I haven't watched this show yet. I haven't either. I like the guy, though. Good guy. I don't watch anything but Conan. Yeah. I don't even watch Conan. Really? Yeah. I do want Hodgeman's on I record it and then watch it the next day. Yes. I don't stay up to whatever time I was going to say. Jeez, I guess you don't go to Early Bird for dinner anymore either. You have to watch Conan. Hey, Early Bird. Speaking of Conan Big, shout out to Brian Kylie, Rob Kuttner and Dan Cronin and Seth Meyers. No, they are writers for Conan, and they treated me to lunch. That was very nice. At Warner Brothers. Thanks for inviting me. God. And Conan, if you think we get neat fan gifts, you ought to see the stuff Conan gets. Oh, man. Like what? Well, I met the masturbating bear guy who I won't reveal his name, but he's the guy that's done it all these years, and someone sent him, like a four foot tall tree trunk, hand carved bear. M bear? Really? Yeah, it was beautiful. I got pictures of all this. And then Conan has a life sized Lego Conan that someone sent them. That's pretty neat. And a life size. That's like $100,000 worth of Lego. Probably is. And then a life sized Conan made of pencils. That was really neat looking. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So they just had this stuff. I was like, Man, I like our little Photoshop stuff, but Cooper needs to step it up. Nice slice size Lego. Joshua chuck. It would be kind of cool. Anyway, I just want to say thanks to those guys. They're awesome. Yes. And they're supporters of us. Thanks. Guess. Yes, supporters of you, at least. And they're clowns. That was a great segue, dude. Great. Is that why you thanked them in this episode? Sure. Because they're clowns. That's good. You're scared of clowns. I'm not scared of clowns. Not at all. I mean, the scary clowns that are supposed to be scary and horror movies are creepy, of course. Right. But I don't have any kind of phobia. What's it called? The official phobia. Cholera phobia. Right. Which also includes it's unofficial, by the way. It also includes things like costumed characters, like Mickey Mouse and stuff like that. It's not just clowns. Right? Right. So it's the DSM, which is the infallible bible of psychology and psychiatry, has an entry for fear of clowns lumped together with other childhood fear of costume characters. Right. That one I can identify with. I think I ran away from, like, snow white or something at Disney world when I was a kid. There's just always been something about somebody being dressed up in costume that I found unnerving. I scare a lot of kids. I'm not overtly afraid of clowns, sure. But just costume people. And I get that what are you hiding? Kind of thing, which I think is informs the basis of claurophobia. Yeah. In a lot of the show, it turns out, is going to be about that because it's one of the most interesting parts of clowning. But one guy later on in this article put it, it makes sense. Like, some clowns are just not great at it. And we're like, yeah, like lunge at a kid or something. And he says they seem like they're on the attack. Yeah. And he said a big part of teaching clowning is to teach personal space and, like, how to not come at a kid because they think you look weird and change. And if you come at them, like too fast, then it might scare them. And especially these days, too. Like, clowns today are still following a tradition from the early to mid 20th century. Yeah, kids today aren't really hip with the mid 20th century. They're not into, like, mid century modern, like art or design or anything like that. And so clowns are about as creepy to them as, like an old wooden toy. Right. It's just awful little. It's an uncanny experience. I don't get it. And as a result, there's a 2008 study to the UK. That the BBC reported on that found that most of the children in the study, I think it was like 250 population sample feared and or disliked clowns. Most of the kids in the study. That's a lot of sad clowns. Yes. And a lot of scared kids. So I think the point is just keep clowns and kids away from one another. All right, you ready to go back in time? Yes. Hop in the old way back machine. It's London. And it's a man named Joseph Grimaldi. And he, for all intents and purposes, has just invented the modern what we now think known as the clown. Yeah. Very purposefully too. Got the white makeup. They still call clowns Joey's because that was his character name. That's a nickname for clowns. Oh, he was huge. Like, not only did he invent clowns, and today still they tip their clown hat at Grimaldi. For inventing the clown. In his day, he was huge. There is a legend that supposedly an eight of the population of London had seen him on stage. Yeah, there's a lot of people. And still today on London's east end, there is a church that has an annual mass in his honor, and everyone comes in full clown makeup and costume to church. For grimaldi. He was a big deal. Sure. He was very famous for the time. He was a very well known person. And he had a contemporary two at about the same time in France named Debro. Yeah. And both of them, oddly, they had really kind of sad backstories. Yeah. Which we'll get to that. That's sort of lends itself I don't mean to get ahead of ourselves that lends itself to the dark underbelly of clowning and why it might have this reputation. Right. But what clowning really sprung from was from the beginning of time, almost, there were gestures, essentially oh, yeah. At least all types of all over the world, in all cultures. Yeah. It seems to be universal. There were at least as far back as the 3500 BCE. In Egypt. In China, there were already jesters, pranksters, clowns tricksters, something of that ilk mischief makers. Yeah. In totally disparate societies that never met one another. Like in Native America. Different Native American societies had some version of the clown or the jester. Yeah. During a Navajo ritual, chance clowns would come in to disrupt performances, bump into the dancers. Pueblo clowns, they would have a sacred offering and they would come bouncing in and kind of mock what was going on and maybe do a lewd sex act right in the middle of this very serious ceremony to the gods. Yeah. Or the spirits. That's a big deal. Sure. That's an unusual role for someone to play. Sometimes they were considered shamans. Like they were imbued with some sort of power as well. Yeah. They were held in high esteem. Same thing went on in Japan with the Taikomochi means Drumbear. Drumbearer. They were in the red light districts, and apparently in the late 1600s, their deal was when the party starts to wane, they were to bounce in and get the party started again. Hey. Yeah. And they were actually the original Geisha. They were men, and they were later replaced by women. But the Taikomochi were the original versions of the Geisha. And the Taikomochi in the red light district actually ended up there because this period of peace settled over Japan because prior to that, they were court jesters and also, like, military advisors. Yeah. So once they weren't needed for that, they ended up in the red light district. Let's get this party started. Getting the party started. Yeah. Nice. So in India, the official gestures there were a member of the Bram, which was the highest social class, right? Yeah. That's the class that a Poo is a member of. Really? Did he say that? That's what his mom said. When he thinks she thinks that who's married to Marge, she goes, surely your children are aware of your Brahman heritage embarkers so long as there's no follow up questions. Absolutely. Fully. Man, that's a good one. Your knowledge is way deeper than mine. For The Simpsons. Too much. I think I stopped watching before. You did too. But you still watch, right? Yeah, I fell off again on again, off again. All right, so we're in India in the bram. One of the things you'll notice over and over here with jesters is what they really are are satirists, and their job is to and they were the only ones that could do this, really, was to poke fun at the leaders. They would never bounce in and talk about how great the king is. They would bounce in and talk about how fat the king is. Right. And make jokes about how many meals have you had today. Well, yeah. So their role was to, say, poke holes into the king's stupid ideas, whereas the rest of the court would be like, oh, great idea. You should paint the great wall of China. Right. Whereas the gesture would be like, yeah, that's a great idea. Where you're going to get all that paint from, you dummy? Well, speaking of China, I think they had some of the best names. They have a great tradition of clowning. They had legends named twisty, Pole, Baldi, Chungyu. That's the name of the podcast. That's a good one. And this one I don't get moving bucket. I don't get that one either. It probably makes sense in Chinese, right? Another one I came across was newly polished mirror. Really was the name of a clown. That's no baldi chunu, though. Interesting. Juno and then in Poland, there was a legendary jester named Stanzic. And I looked up this guy. He was alleged beyond clowning. He was like the political satirist of his day. He worked for three different kings and was very intelligent. Political philosopher in Satiris. That is still, like, revered in Poland, right. As a necessary thing. Yeah. Supposedly one of his most famous stories was the king of Poland that he was working for had a bear imported from, I think, Russia or something, maybe Prussia, and let it loose so he could hunt it. And the bear king met with the king and the court and the queen and almost killed everybody. And the king later criticized Stanchik for running off. And Sanchez said, well, it was smarter than letting a caged bear loose, something along those lines. And the king was like, touche. And everyone laughed. And then the bear ate the king. In ancient Rome. Chuckers yeah. They used to call the court justice stupidest. Stupidest, yeah, that makes sense. Grimaldi himself came out of the rich tradition in Italy called the comedia delarte tradition. And this is in the 14th century, and some people say these were like the first professional actors in the world were coming out of Italy at the time in this program. Right. So at the time, basically, if you were a clown or jester or something, you are probably a member of a court. If you're a member of a native American tribe or in most parts of Africa and you're a jester, you belong to the community rather than the specific leader. But in Europe and China, and Egypt and all over, wherever there was royalty, there was usually a jester of some sort. Right? Yes. But one of the ways that jesters spread, especially, say, in Europe, was from adjuster being forced to hit the road for stepping over the line, really getting kicked out. Well, and that's one way that it kind of spread. Clowning originally spread to the masses, which you may run across the court. Jesters down on his luck, traveling along the road because he got kicked out of court. He's like, I got all this great material. Exactly. But he's still a jester. He's going to make you laugh. Wow. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's interesting. I think the kings tolerate it to a certain degree, but if they're having a bad day, they're just like, you're out of here. Exactly. Yeah. And there's at least some debate over how much of the idea that a jester was the only one who could speak his mind toward the king. Not that the idea was that more people in the court could speak their mind, but that the jester couldn't even speak their mind in some cases. Right. There were some documented versions, like the one in Persia, kareem Charay, who told the king the shah nazarethan apparently said, is there a shortage of food? And Kareem for he said, yes, I see that your majesty is eating only five times a day. And then you made this little bow tie spin, but you got the point across that is a shortage of food, and you're not helping anything. You're closer up here in your ivory tower, and you need to open up your eyes, your majesty, I'd like to see some of bald beach unused material. I would love to see that, too. I bet he killed oh, betty did as well. Chuck so we'll get to what clowning is specifically right after this. All right. Clowning, my friend, is a lot of things, but what it is in all cases is exaggeration. Movements are exaggerated. Your appearance is exaggerated. That's why they wear big goofy suits and big goofy shoes. The makeup to make up. Of course. A lot of people look at a clown and say, you're disguising something. The point of clown makeup is quite the opposite. It's meant to exaggerate the emotions that are already there. Yeah, like the big, huge smile or frown. It's a big frown. And I read one pro clowns description of what clowning means, and he said, clowns aren't actors. We're not supposed to pretend what clowns do is exaggerate the emotions that we already have in sight. So if you're a really good clown, you're going to play up the anger at being rebuffed when you're trying to get a laugh from somebody, or you're going to play up your stage fright at performing in front of some people. Sure. Like, when you see a clown, like, acting a certain way, you're supposed to understand that they're actually feeling that right. Then it's just being broadcast on a clown scale. Yeah. And part of that is for comedic effect. And part of it is quite literally because in a circus, you have a lot of people and you may be sitting very far away from you. Right. So these big movements and the slapstick, which actually I never knew this slapstick was an actual physical tool. Never heard of that. Yeah, it looks like a paddle with another paddle hinge to it. Right. And back in the old days of the Commedia del Art in Italy, they would strike someone with this paddle. And then, of course, the other paddle on the hinge would smack really hard on the wood so they could hit someone not too hard, but make a sound, huge sound, like they had been hit really hard. And that's where slapstick comes from. That's the word slapstick. Pretty neat. And we keep mentioning comedia del art. That's where Grimaldi came out of. Yes. And this is the original place where the clown really first made it on the stage. Because, remember, when Commedia Delart was establishing itself, for the most part, clowns were relegated to court gestureship. Right? Yeah. And then mines later were relegated to parks, I guess. Right. So Comedia Delartt was this player production, and in the middle of it, or in different points, there'd be, like a break or an intermission or something like that. And that would come like the jugglers and the baton twirlers. And there were also little skits and sketches and plays themselves that were intended for comic relief. And one of those is called the Harlequin Aid. And Harlequin, you recognize harlequin is one of the Jokers, the Jesters, that kind of thing. Yeah. There's actually a character in the Harlequin Aid that was a clown. And Grimaldi originally played that character. And that character was kind of a bumpkin, a rustic rube. And as a matter of fact, the word clown supposedly comes from a 16th century German word for a country bumpkin. So that was the original character. Well, Grimali came along in about 1800 and starting playing this in the pantomime. Right. Which was that break in the Committee del Art for comic Relief. Exactly. And then the Harlequin Aid was a little mini play that was a Panama in the comedy Dillard. Right? Yeah. And then the clown was a character in the Harlequinade, and Grimaldi played it, but he said, you know what? I'm not feeling this country bumpkin thing. I think this guy is actually highly sophisticated, very smart, hilarious and body. And he started to play the character like that. And all of a sudden, the clown went from a minor supporting character to the reason that people were coming to the Comedian del Art productions. The Panama. Yeah. So they were stealing the thunder of the legit actors. Exactly. And from that moment, the clown went from specifically a rustic country boob to the clown that we start to understand today with face pain and colored hair and everything. Did you just laugh because I said boob? No, I just rustic Country Boobs sounded like the name of my memoir or something. It just struck me as a nice title. I just want a small royalty when you publish those. Okay. Except I would be rustic city boob. Yeah. Sort of play on that whole thing. Yeah, it's even better. Rustic City Boob. Yeah, man sharknado. And now the title for your memoirs, you're on fire. So clowning one thing that you'll also notice that clowns do a lot, and there's not every clown, but a lot of clowning involves play violence. Like slapstick. Yeah. Like the Three Stooges. They're hitting each other a lot. They're knocking each other down. A big clown thing to do is to disrupt the legit act like, we're clowns, and we're going to do this neat thing where we all hold this ladder in climate, and then another clown will come in and bust the ladder down, and everyone will fall. Right. And it's all part of the act. But a lot of the Navajo clowns yeah, same thing, basically, to disrupt the act that's happening through violence. Or they may just be jerks and, like, smell my flower. Oops. You get a squirt in the face. So if you're paying attention to a group of clowns in their routine, you'll actually notice that there's usually a very clear line of command. Yeah, there's a hierarchy, for sure. There actually is. It depends on you can tell who's in charge before the show even starts based on their makeup. Actually, it's delineated by that. So first you've got the white faced clown, which grimaldi was one. So is Bozo the clown, who we'll talk about later. But the white faced clown is the one who's in charge. And going back to the Three Stooges, they actually get across the hierarchy of clowns pretty clearly. The white faced clown is mo. Absolutely. He's still a clown, but he's Boston the other ones around. He's signing jobs. He's the head boob. Yeah. And he might be the most hostile out of all of them. And then after that, and again, the white face clown has completely white paint all over his face and head and neck. Yeah. For her French counterpart you're talking about, the clown that he created was a whiteface clown. The perot. P-I-E-R-R-O-T. Pirot. Sounds good, Chuck. And that's a kind of clown, as well. But the pirau is a white face clown. Right. So the white face clown is in charge. He or she is at the top of the heap. Top of the heap. After that, you have the August clown. The August clown is the one that usually they have that sloppy, oversized outfit, huge suspenders hanging even bigger pants up. The makeup is probably, like, flesh toned. Yeah. But the eyes will be super arched, and the smile will be really big. And red. Probably a big red nose, although I think the white face clown can have that, too. But if you have a white face and an August clown next to each other, the August clown's red ball nose is probably going to be a little bit bigger. And the August clown is definitely the one who takes orders from the white face clown, but also a little more hilarious, maybe. Right. So, like, the August clown would be maybe Larry. Larry probably Curly, though, because he's kind of a boob. Yeah. He's not a rusted country boob. Yeah. But he's just kind of fun and lovable, and he's still taking orders. What about Shemp? Shemp completely breaks this whole analogy apart. Yeah. So with the Augusta clown, it was invented by a man named Lou Jacobs, and there was a team Albert, Fred, Alini, and Lu Jacobs, a clown team. And Freddini was also part of the Freddini brothers, and he was the one who invented the red nose, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, it is. Yes. But then we have the tramp or the hobo. Right? That's the next kind. Yeah. And that one was invented by a dude named Emmett Kelly, and he actually invented the sad hobo clown, which you can immediately bring to mind, I would imagine, hearing sad hobo clown, the downcast frown face, the stubble like 05:00 shadow. Yeah. The tattered tweed jacket like patches, and the bendle bag on the stick. So Emma Kelly comes up with the sad hobo clown, and that's become a fixture of clowning. And that tramp hobo or bag lady clown is the one that's the lowest rung on the ladder, but the highest on the totem pole. Yeah. It kind of occurred to me when I was reading this that they're sort of are they making fun of the homeless? In a way. I think that's probably a sticky thing that clowns don't like to address, but very much so. That's clearly what they're aping is my clothes are tattered. I don't have a place to lay my head on. I'm a sad hobo. And you have to understand, like, Emmett Kelly came up with this in the 30s or 40s, maybe, at a time when it was okay to make fun of people who are down on their luck like that. I don't know why, but yes, I thought the same thing, too. I was like, wow, this is like making a clown version of homeless people. Yes. I think what they would say my guess is that they would say you should have a lot of sympathy for the hobo clown. Oh, yeah. And we're trying to elicit sympathy, not necessarily laughs at my expense. Yeah. Even though they do that. But they're the ones who are, like, sweeping the mess that the other ones made up when the spotlight goes out, trying on the inside and outside to sweeping the circus dead. Those are the three big ones. There's also a character clown, which makes up a fourth class of clown. Rodeo clowns fall into that, although they're technically more like the working clown. They're like a sheepdog clown. But a character clown would be like a keystone cop, right. Or an astronaut clown. Basically, if you can come up with the profession that uses a costume and then make a clown version of it, that's a character clown. Yeah. So those are the doctor clown. Oh, yeah. What was that? Video hospital clowning on found footage festival? Yeah. This video Josh found is a guy that made a series of clown instructional videos, a medical clown, at which they do valuable service by going to children's hospitals and things and scary, making kids feel better. But this guy did some instructional videos on how to do this and what to do and what not. What not to do is very important. Like things like funny, don't touch a covered part because you never know if they just had their leg amputated was one piece of advice. Oh, it's so funny. Yeah. So go. Actually, if you're listening to this on our website, on the podcast page for this episode, it should be in the links. Yeah, we'll definitely put that in there. If not, and you don't feel like going to our website, just look up hospital clowning found footage festival, and it will come up. It's wonderful. It is delightful. We talked about it on our Internet roundup video show as well. We did. So the big question here is, why is this funny? Why do we need this? Why do people indulge clowns or not indulge? Why do they like clowns? It's a better way to put it. Why do we let clowns get away with making fun of the homeless? I think a good reason that's pointed out in the article on how stuff works is that we have a very rigid, complex society that we live in, and there are rules in their social order, and we have to maintain our good behavior. And so clowning is a safety valve, is how this author put it, to we can live vicariously through the clown who breaks down those social norms and says, I'll do whatever I want. I'll make fun of the king, or I'll squirt this little kid in the face with water. Everybody hates that kid. You know Debra, the French clown. He'd beat a kid to death with his cane in the street for making fun of him. That's taking it too far. Well, he did, and I looked this up. He went to trial and was acquitted. But apparently it was like the trial of the century because everyone wanted to hear him speak. Oh, he was a silent clown. He was a silent clown. The parrot was yeah, he had a kid that was making fun of him, and he killed him. He didn't mean to. He meant to hit him. He only meant to kill him. He said it was a single blow, and I imagine he was just like, oh, boy, not again. Yeah. Or he would mind, whatever that is. So I want to address what you said. The role of clowns are, and this is going to be, like, the most sour, push thing you've heard today. Okay. But it really makes sense in a way. So, yes, the role of the clown is to vent the general population's frustrations that abuse heaped on us by the ruling class or the conventions of society or what have you, and the clown allows us to feel better about things because this is being made fun of, it's being addressed. But you can also make the case that, in that sense, the clown satire, anything that provides that function in society, actually just keeps the status quo in place, because rather than any real change coming about from those simmering frustrations that aren't allowed to vent yes. Just to release that. Once they're released, then we can just move along. But nothing's actually really changed. It's just been satirized. And so we're satisfied to a certain degree. Interesting. I know it's a really kind of view of clowns in general, but it really does keep the status quo in place, and a really effective ruler will allow him or herself to have just enough fun poked at so that he or she appears to have been brought down a peg. Right. But really, the power is totally unchecked by that. Yeah. Interesting. We should do one on satire. That's a pretty rich subject. It is. I think the function of a satirist is important, but you do raise a good point. Like, at the end of the day, does change come about because of it, or is it just well, at least we all got to laugh at this, which serves a function. It does serve a function. It serves to placate. Yeah. Interesting. Thanks, man. That's all mine. Josh Wright. Copyright 2015 so we should probably take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little more about, you guessed it clowns. All right, we're back. And by the way yeah? If you have heard some weird sounds in the background of this one, it's because some jerk in this building is using a drill. You are not insane. And they're not supposed to be doing that right now, but hopefully it's not too distracting. It's sort of here and there. Just wanted to mention that. Yeah, you're not hearing the home. So careers in clowning, my friend. Yes. You mentioned hospital clowning. That's definitely a way to go. Sure. The University of Haifa in Israel has, I think, a bachelor's degree in medical clowning, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You learn to go into hospitals and raise the spirits, usually of kids, but I think it applies to just about anybody in the hospital who wants to have their spirits picked up and react well to clowns. I think kids, mainly medical clown, I know. I only get out of my hospital room. Yeah. An adult is going in for like a bypass surgery clown in the room. No, that's just my thing. That just makes a clown want to try harder. That's true. Just no bad touch. Don't touch any covered parts. So membership is waning these days, and the World Clown Association, they don't keep exact stats, but they anecdotally say that it's dropped by about a third in recent years. But like I said, you can be a pro clown. You can go to Ringling Brothers as a clown college in Sarasota. Dude, it is brutal. As far as competition goes. What? To get in? Yes, I'm sure. So in 2013, they had 531 applicants from around the world and they let in two clowns. They selected 14 to come to camp. They hired eleven. Yeah. That's pretty competitive. And there's only 26 total clowns that work for all of Ringland Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. Really? They shuffle them around the three circuses that are going on at any given point in time. Interesting. But it pays pretty well. They inject them with formaldehyde and put them in a cryogenic chamber, you will never die. Ship them to a different part of the country, regenerate them, put on their red nose and it's all good. Show time. Cirque du Soleil. You can do a lot worse than that, my friend, if you want to go that route. It's a different kind of clowning, but it's, I think, a little more of the old Italian and European style. It depends. They go for both. Oh, really? Yeah, they go for character, comedy and then I think like physical slapsticks. Straight up yacht. Yeah. Okay. But you can make up to year at Cirque du Soleil. I think that's like, for all performers. Yeah. At Wrinkling Brothers, apparently for clowns, they can make up to year. K means 1000. That's right. And by that I mean dollars. If you're into French clowning, you can go to Paris and study at the Ecolay International Day Theatre. Jacques Laco. Jacques Lacocke Theater. Jacques Lacocke. Is that how it's pronounced? Yeah. You sure it's not laco? No, it's definitely Lacocke. Okay. But you remember Lacocke sportif, like tennis ware from the called it Laco. No, it's Lacocke. Okay. I mean, either that or I've been saying things wrong for 30 years, which is entirely possible. But I'm almost positive because think about it, it's a clown Jacques Lacocke. I mean, it's very funny. I know, it's hilarious. Yeah, it's way funnier than Jacques Laco. So if it is Jacques Laco, this guy should have thought his name out a little better. That's a good point. So Jacques Lacocke was a big innovator in clowning and he had a school that this is still based on Paris, but he had a school back in the day where his big thing was called the negativity or negativa, which is basically like he doesn't say what you're doing is right or wrong. He's not there to teach you a set of skills. He's to teach you to do what you do best. Right. And to embrace your own style. Right. It's pretty neat. I found that just about anywhere I saw, like, how to clown or anything like that during research. One of the main things was figure out your style of clown and it's based on who you are, and then just figure out how to bring that out as big as possible. Right. But that it was all about you and figuring out your own jam. They also suggest that you should probably have at least one talent, like stilt, walking, juggling, balloon animals is a big one too. Like a cycling. Sure, something like that. Water Squirting but they pointed out that you should be able to be funny with no props whatsoever. And then you start incorporating props. Well, it's probably good to practice them along the way. Get up that rubber chicken, though, right, and really work on your credit. Put it in the drawer for a little while and be funny without the rubber chicken. Then when you add the rubber chicken, oh, boy, you're really going to be funny. Right. But all is based on remember, clowns are exaggerations of a human personality and specifically that person's personality. And so that's what you're supposed to work on initially. I like that. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Sure. So I think are we now at the colonphobia? Yeah, I think so. Why do people hate clowns? Why are people afraid of clowns? So initially we talked about grimaldi and debris having pretty grim backstories. Yeah. And like, everybody knew it at the time. Everyone went to Debra's trial. Grimaldi apparently used to crack that. He was grim all day, but he delighted you at night, right? Yeah. Play on his name. Right. So everyone knew that he had this depressing life. His son was an alcoholic clown who died of drink at 31. Yes. His father was a stage father, a tyrant. Supposedly his first wife died during childbirth. Grimaldi was in bad physical shape from all the slapstick that performed over the years. And everyone knew this? Yeah. And yet he was a clown and no one thought, oh, that's kind of weird for a clown, or very ironic for a clown to have a terrible life. In part because grimaldi invented the modern clown. So that was the conception of the modern clown for a very long time. It wasn't until the early 20th century that clowns were taken away from this idea that they were adults, pranksters, kind of body humor and placed squarely in the realm of little kids. They were expected to be happy all the time and kind of these fantastic creatures that cannot possibly ever really be that way. So automatically, clowns were set up to be something kind of creepy because they were held to these really high standards that they could never meet. And for a little while, it worked like, Bozo the Clown was huge. There was apparently so Bozo the Clown on TV was a franchise, right? So if you're a local TV station, you could have your own Bose as a clown and put on your own Bose as a clown show. But at the main one at WGN in Chicago, the waiting list for tickets to the studio audience was ten years long. And as a matter of fact, Willard Scott played Bozo. And Willard Scott Went on to become Ronald McDonald from playing Bozo. And Ronald McDonald was inspired by Bozo because McDonald sponsored the Bozo show, and they saw how crazy popular this clown was with the kids. So they made their own clown, Ronald McDonald, so that they could better market to kids. Exactly. And it worked. It's it but then eventually, I think there was always this idea that this is a little weird, this is creepy. Like, nobody can be that happy. What's going on there? Well, Charles Dickens wrote the memoir. He edited the Memoir of Grimaldi when he died, and he basically laid it all out there about what a ghastly sort of person that this guy was in real life. And it was a huge hit. Like, people bought this book like crazy. So you coupled that with Pure or what was his real name? Debra. Debra. Who killed a kid with this king. It's a strength. He goes on trial, and so you have this very sort of dark seed planted, and then, like you said, years later, all of a sudden, it's not meant for baldy adults that getting drunk watching Shakespeare. It's, let's take these guys and put them around our kids. Yeah, exactly. So you have a recipe for, at the very least, clowns to be confusing. And then all of a sudden, chuck out of nowhere in 1980, the worst case scenario nightmare comes to pass. John Wayne Gacy. Yeah, the idea that was in all the parents back to their head, right? Like, this is a little creepy. This is a grown man hanging out with my kids, and he's sort of acting out these weird, happy, violent things, like he's tripping people and squirting them, and he looks creepy. And now he's another killer. Yes, he's a serial killer as a clown. Pogo the Clown. The serial killer of the worst variety. And he was largely in charge because I think Pogo the Clown was a white face clown, if I remember correctly. Oh, yeah. I mean, you look up the pictures of gaye as a clown about the creepiest thing on the Internet. Yes. How many kids he killed? Like, 33 young boys. Yeah, 35. And he was convicted of 33, I believe. But he didn't help the case of clowns by, like, when he went to prison, he would still paint pictures of clowns of himself as a clown. And he had quite a collection of paintings from prison that did not do anything but reinforced the fact that clowns are creepy. Right. And of course, it was like international news. A clown found to be a killer and sexual predator, serial version of it. It definitely captured the public imagination from that point on. It was like, clowns are now overtly sinister. Yeah. And movies, killer clowns from outer space or Stephen kings. It pennywise the clown. Yeah. That was one of the legendary scary clowns, right? That new one on American horror story twisty. Yeah. Have you seen that one? But look at it. John wengates is scary in real life. Sure. Pennywise the clown pretty scary, but still masterfully scary. Now you've gotten to twisty the clown and American horror story, and he's as scary as it comes. But think about the amount of violence they're having to imbue in this guy and show graphically, because this frightening clown has become such a trope over time. It's just got to get more intense and extreme. Right. Eventually, just to really get the full thrill, like theater promoters are going to have to send a clown and to kill half the audience to scare the other half in real life. So what you're saying is it's an endless loop where clowns are just getting worse and worse and worse. I don't know. I think eventually it'll just be so played out that people be like, oh, it's scary clown. Seriously? Right. Just the clowns. You actually use this and eventually what will happen was I think that clowns can there'll be a door and opening for clowns to regain some of their innocence from that, but to a negotiated degree because they'll have gone through that period of being overtly frightening and associated with something really sinister lurking beneath the surface. And maybe we'll expect a little less from clowns. Sure. And then therefore, they can take their rightful place once more. They're having to go through this. It sounds to me like you're predicting a clown renaissance. A clown renaissance? A well maintained and tasteful clown renaissance. Maybe not a golden age or heyday, but something that's stable indefinitely. Got you. Well, the other thing I think we talked about this on Internet roundup is the french teenagers that were dressing up as clowns, causing mayhem, they're not helping anything. None of that helps. No. And then there are other cases I've seen. Where was it? I think it was England, where there was just this creepy clown just sit there hanging around. I think it was in Canada. Was it Canada? It might have been in both, actually. None of these things are helping legit clowns. I'm sure they're all like, thanks, guys, for just dressing up and being creepy on a bench. Just sitting at night. Yeah, at midnight. But when you think about it, it could just be a clown that got off work. I mean, why is it so creepy? I don't think that's it. Yeah. I want to give a shout out to a Smithsonian article that we used in part, for this. It's called the history and psychology of clowns being scary. Yeah, it was good, which is a pretty clunky title, but it was a very good, comprehensive, exhaustive article on that. So go check that out. Agreed. You got anything else right now? No. If you want to know more about clowns, type that word in the search bar howstep works.com. And we should do one on just how circuses in general works someday. Have we not done that? No, we haven't. We've done circusy things. We've done like flame eating, daredevils juggling, sword swallowing, like a human cannonballs, all that jam. But no, what's left? Circus is how circus work. Yeah, but I mean, what's left? It's not those things. We'll find it. Okay. I think I said search bar, didn't I? I think so. While it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this oh, saving a marriage. Okay. Hey, guys. My wife wants to give you credit for making two young lovebirds fall deeper in love. My wife Lindsay and I have been married for almost a year. April 25 is our anniversary. Congratulations. Yeah, this is probably pretty close to that. We are a perfect match in almost every aspect of our relationship, except for one major area. What to listen to on the radio on road trips. She can't stand listening to my awesome Moroccan music, and I can't barely tolerate her country. He's like, Jeff flipper rules. What's your problem? This is the Donny and Marie, actually. They were brothers and sisters to this cross. Yeah, she's a little bit country he's a little bit rock and roll. Got you. We spent a lot of time in the car, though, and we always end up taking turns with one person singing along with their favorite hits, the other one sulking until it's their turn to control the dial. There are even times when we would just drive in silence instead of compromising. I think I know where this is going. One day we stumbled upon stuff you should know and our lives were changed forever. Turns out we both loved the podcast, and the driving portion of our road trips now has gone from a frustrating compromise to an amazing bonding experience. And it's all your fault. That's awesome. We've even spent a few evenings listening to the podcast instead of watching TV at home. What? That's crazy. We're interfering with TV dealing. Turn the podcast off. We're going to be branded communists. We started from the most recent and are working our way backwards, so prepare for them to get less good. Yeah. Good luck. We have about 400 episodes to go until we run out. We've been discussing how we're going to deal with the inevitable SYSCA withdrawal once we reach episode one. I hope you guys keep coming up with new ideas for the next 50 to 60 years, because I don't want to have to go back spending half of my time listening to country music. 50 to 60 years. We can swing that. And that is Ben Brown and Lindsay Brown. Or Lindsay, his wife. I don't know if she took his name or not. Ben and Lindsay. Ben and Lindsay from Guntersville, Alabama. I'm sure they're the only Ben and Lindsay there. Yeah. So, Ben and Lindsay from Gunthersville. Happy anniversary. Congratulations. Yeah. We're glad we could make life a little easier for you. Yeah. Go turn your TV back on. Yeah, for real. Come on. Seriously. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us how we are enhancing your life, we love to hear that kind of stuff. You can tweet it to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffuseno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstaforce.com. And as always, to join us at our home on the web stuffyoushenknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com." | ||
415f96ec-53a3-11e8-bdec-e76feca31a72 | The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-case-of-sacco-and-vanzetti | The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder, was one of the first "crimes of the century." But did they do it? To this day there is speculation that they did not. Learn all about this famous case in today's episode. | The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder, was one of the first "crimes of the century." But did they do it? To this day there is speculation that they did not. Learn all about this famous case in today's episode. | Tue, 12 Mar 2019 16:50:24 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=16, tm_min=50, tm_sec=24, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=71, tm_isdst=0) | 53113917 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's guest producer Josh over there. So you put the three of us together, together, and we're going to get a little true crime history on you with the trial of Saco and Benzetti. Yeah, these guys a little backstory on, I guess, the time. We're talking about the 1920s in the United States. We're talking about two gentlemen that were both anarchists, that were both Italian immigrants, and both supposedly followers of this really notable anarchist named Luigi Galiani, who this guy was sort of an anarchist leader. He put out anarchist rag. He was called for violence. He has a history of authorizing, like, bombings, assassination attempts, like really tough stuff. Right. And so this is who supposedly Sacco and Vincenti were, I guess, by association, advocating sure, advocating for this type of violence themselves as immigrant anarchist. Do you remember in our anarchism episode during this period, in like a ten year period, anarchists assassinated like, five or six major heads of state around the world, including McKinley, in the United States. It was a big deal. It was a big deal. There was also a struggle going on for the soul of America. Were we going to be socialist? Were we going to be capitalist? Should we just go with anarchism? There was a lot of debate over which economy we should go with and what politics we should go with. And there was something of a Red Scare because Communism was on the table too. There was a red scare at the time, too. So it wasn't like the kind of time you would walk around like, yeah, I'm an anarchist. No, get on board. And at the same time, if you weren't an anarchist, you're probably scared of anarchist because they would bomb stuff and they were well known for it too. Yeah. So. I mean, this is not just the United States. Like, all over the world there were political radicals, there was violence from anarchy and riots and like you said, people trying to take down, like, politicians or judges that were deporting, at least in the United States, deporting immigrant anarchists back to their home countries as quickly as they could root them out, basically. Right, so this is sort of the stage in the early 1920s, and I guess we should hop in the Way Back Machine oh, yes. What? And head on over to Bastandown. Okay. That's Boston, by the way. Yes, I know. Okay, it doesn't matter if I know. Just make sure the wayback machine knows. Oh, the way back machine knows It can read my silly accents. So here we are. It's 1920 around Boston, actually. We're not in Boston proper, we're about 10 miles south in the little town of Braintree. Yeah. Which is known these days would be Boston proper. Yeah, it's like the metro Boston area. Right. And Braintree was known as a shoe manufacturing center. It had more than one shoe company, which meant it was a shoe manufacturing center. And on this particular day, in April of 1920 I think it was April 15, right? Correct. In Braintree, there was a dude named Shelley Neal who was an agent for the American Express Company. And the function I got of Shelley Neil was that he was kind of like a Brinks armed guard. Yeah. Like a courier for money. And not just some money, like a lot of money. Yeah. On this day, from the 900 and 18:00, a.m. Train from Boston, Shelly Neil, went to the Braintree train depot and picked up $30,000, $30 in cash, which is about $427,000 in 2018 money. Yeah. He does this every week. Right. He picked it up and he took it back to his office, and he opened up a metal box, and inside it had two canvas bags, and each was the payroll for one of the two shoe companies that he picked up money for, one of which was called Slater and Morale. I'm not sure what the other one was. Maybe it was three K. Definitely. Slater and Morrell was one of them. The other was New Balance. Okay. Yeah. So Slater, Amarille and New Balance were the ones whose payroll he had on them that day. Yeah. And it's so amazing how that stuff used to work back then. Like how payroll was just so low. Phi. It would literally be a huge amount of cash delivered in a box that he would take to an office, and someone would sit there and stuff cash into envelopes to then go to, like, a factory to pay off employees. Not pay off, but to pay them legit check from working. You didn't see nothing this week. This is for all the shoe leather. All right. So that's how it worked back then. And so this is what he was doing. It's just like any other Thursday. However, on this day, as he went in, he noticed a car out front that he had not seen before. This big car that had, like, these little curtains on the inside, windows that were pulled shut. And other people in Braintree later on would report seeing that car kind of tooling around. And they said, it looks like it's got like four or five men inside that look Italian. And they're just sort of driving around Braintree, which I guess to raise some suspicions. Sure. Because, again, if you were Italian, you may have been associated with anarchists who were associated with bomb throwing. So four or five of them kind of aimlessly driving around the town of Braintree, this little tiny town, I'm sure aroused some suspicions and definitely did, because there were a lot of people who later on said that they saw this car driving around between 09:00 A.m. And 12:00 P.m.. That's right. So about three that afternoon. Here's what happened next for payroll. These people had to get these envelopes. So what's known as a Pay Master, and this is also sort of part of the armed guard thing because the Paymaster A has a gun and then has a guard with a gun. This guy's name was Freddy Parmentor and the guard was Alessandro Berdelli. And so they stopped by to pick up all these envelopes. They're going down to the factory, they're going to pay everybody and all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, bam. Gunfire and mayhem ensues. I didn't realize there was going to be special effects in this episode. Hey. Well, I tried to. You did, man. It has been brought in. So these guys are on Pearl Street and when these shots suddenly just ring out and the first guy, Barrette, is hit and he goes down. I believe it was Barideelli who was hit first. No, he wasn't hit. It was Parmenter who was hit. Baridelli is on the ground and he has lost his gun. And he's being approached by a man with a gun on him and Baredeli apparently has begged for his life, to no avail. The man shoots him in the chest at least once and the bullet punctures his lungs, one of his major arteries to his heart, and then lodges itself in its hip to be fished out later on by a coroner and used in the case against Sacco and Vanzetti. The other guy, Parmen, or the Pay Master, he gets hit a few times, staggers across the street and collapses. And this car, a blue touring car, which is a big sedan that you would think of today, like we'll call it a Lincoln Town Car, even though that's not at all what it was. That blue car that had been seen kind of driving around. Right, okay, that's another way to put it. It was a Buick, but the same one that had been seen driving slowly around Braintree all morning suddenly pulls up and the guys who had shot these two men and taken the money, about $15,000, hopped in and it drove off and everyone lost sight of it. Yeah. And very importantly, the man who shot Bare Deli had a hat, a felt cap on. Right. So just remember that little fact. There were eyewitnesses all over the place. It's not like no one saw this happen, like dozens of people saw this. Yeah, it was a daring daylight robbery at 03:00 in the afternoon. Daring do. Right. A man named Jimmy Bostock was one of the witnesses. Apparently Bare Dell died in his arms and all people in the 1920s didn't know any better. He immediately started messing with the crime scene, started picking up gun shells. Another guy came by and picked up the hat and they just didn't know any better at the time, I guess. Right. So the crime scene has been totally messed up, but the cops show up because again, this is a big deal. This is a small town, and something close to $220,000 has just been stolen and two men murdered for it in this little tiny town. So it's a big deal. And the cops showed up, and probably the first thing they said was anarchists, maybe. I'll bet that's kind of what they would say, I think, at the time. Yeah. Should we take a break? Jeez, okay. Already? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this falls into acts, and that's definitely act one. Okay. All right, so dead men in the street, the cops are on the scene. Is it unseen or insane? Chuck, we've talked about this a lot and seen no, because it makes sense. You do in the scene, right? By saying in scene, the cops are showing up, they're investigating the place. They're not really finding anything aside from what the witnesses have already kind of gathered up and are now holding out to them in their outstretched palms. Here's your evidence, copper. But the car is searched for all over, and it's not found. It just totally disappears for a couple of days, and it turns up a couple of days later in the woods, I believe south of Brain Tree in a place called Bridgewater, which is a little even further south from Boston. I think it's another, like, ten or so miles down south from Braintree. Right. I think Bridgewater only had seven Dunkin Donuts, so it was a small town. Right. And so remember when I said the cops were probably, like, anarchists? I knew it. There was another daylight robbery of payroll, and I found somewhere that it said it was successful. I found somewhere else that it was unsuccessful. But both of them agreed there had been no loss of life whatsoever. But it was similar enough and it happened, like, two years or a year before. It was similar enough that the cops immediately thought of the people they've been thinking of for this earlier crime. They thought, this is clearly the work of the same people. Yeah. And when they found this car in the woods, very importantly, the license plates had been ripped off, and there were other tire tracks nearby. So it seemed pretty obvious that they ditched this car, get in another one. The officer on the scene said, maddie, I think this is the car from the Braintree meta. All I can think of is Jeremy Renner in the town. Sure. That's what I think of when I think Boston. Yeah, everyone thinks of that. Sure. Another thing is going on in parallel, so we need to set this up also on April 15, which is the day of those Meridas, there was a guy named Ferocio Cochi, and he lived in Bridgewater. He was an anarchist. He was being deported. So he quit his job to be deported. Does not show up to be deported. He calls the Immigration service after that on the 16th and said, my wife is a sick, so I have to tend to her and they send so much emails out. Am I going to get in trouble for that now? No, you won't get in trouble. Everybody loves your Italian accent. Please tell me you can still do an Italian accent, right? I think so. We're going to find out after this episode because I'm just doing the accent. Sure. Not saying like, they're all mobsters because The Sopranos got in trouble for that. Oh, yeah. Did they say all Italians were mobsters? No, but I mean, I remember they're just being hey about from the Italian American community. Like, why is it every time in movies we're just mobsters? I could see that, sure. I mean, I could see them, but these aren't even mobsters. No, they're anarchists. Right. So he's being deported. He doesn't go. He calls them and says, my wife is sick. And they said, fine, we're going to check out your story, though. They found that his wife was not sick and that all of a sudden he's saying, okay, it's fine. Actually, I'm really ready to go. Like now. Yeah, come on, can you get me out of the country quickly? And they're like, well, you should probably leave some money with your wife. He's like, no, she's good. Let's just go. Yeah. So they're like, all right, this is a little odd. Maybe he's involved. Can I paint the scene a little bit, though? I want to go back over and highlight two things that you've mentioned so far. Sure. One, this is a time where to cover up a crime, all you had to do was remove the license plates on the car you ditched. That was it. You just confounded the cops forever. Well, that helped. And then secondly, if you were to be deported, all you had to do was not show up, but then call them the next day and say your wife was sick. And Immigration and Naturalization would say, sure, no problem. Well, no, they investigate it immediately. Okay, but I'm just saying things have changed. The tag, I think, is what I'm trying to say. Hold on, let me see. Josh, are you trying to say that? Yeah, I'm trying to say it. Okay, cool. Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. It's weird because you looked on both of your shoulders at The Devil and the angel, right. They won't shut up, Chuck. So they summarize it's all coming together. This guy is acting weird. He's also chuck one of those people that they liked for that robbery the year before, which is one of the reasons why they had their antenna up about this guy in the first place. Right. So he's a suspect the cops go to, specifically, Michael Stewart, police chief said, I'm going to go back to his house. I'm going to see what else I can find out from this guy. He shows up and there's a dude there named Mike Boda. He says, yeah, sure, you can look around you can look in the house, go back and look in the garage, two car garage, shed, no problem. I usually have my car there. It's an Overland, but it's in the shop getting repaired. And Stewart goes out there, and it's like, all right, so here's where the Overland parks. But there are some really big tire tracks next to the Overland and the second stall that looked like they would probably fit this large Buick that was so mysteriously kind of tooling around around the time of this murder. Right? And this cop Stewart goes, I'm going to make a mental note of that. And that's what he did. He asked about the other car. I don't know if you said Boda said that his other car was at the garage being repaired. Correct. So Stewart, who's the police chief of Bridgewater, I think I get the impression that he was kind of new. There was another one who kind of factors into this case tangentially later on, who is the former police chief. So I get the impression that Michael Stewart was fairly new, but he's investigating this case. He likes Kawachi. He's now met Mike Boda, who he's suspicious of, too. He goes back to talk to Boda some more to this place where Kawachi lived as Bota's roommate, I guess, away from his wife and kids. I'm not sure why Kawachi was renting this place. Are we going with Kawachi now? Yeah. I'm pretty sure I took Italian in college, and I'm almost 100% sure it's Kawachi. Okay. Do you remember from our Dyslexia episode where Italian is extremely easy to learn because there's just very few ways to write things, to write the phone names. One of the reasons it is easy is because it's kind of like Polish. In most cases, it's actually easier than Polish, but it's pronounced just like it's spelled, except for the CI as a sound. Okay, so Kawachi okay. Okay. All right. That was your Italian lesson. I appreciate that after all these years. The other lessons, chuck, not all Italians or Italian Americans are mobsters. That's your other Italian lesson? Okay. I've known a bunch of Italian Americans, and none of them were mobsters. Bam. There you go. So Police Chief Stewart goes back to talk to Boda, and things get really suspicious, too, don't they? Because he shows up and knocks on the door, and the door just swings open onto an empty apartment. And Stewart spends about 15 minutes going, Boda, mr. Bota. Hello, Mr. Boda. And he finally takes a couple of steps in and realizes Bota is gone. That's right. So he goes by the garage where the guy said that his car was in the shop, goes over there, the car is still there. So that checked out. And he told the owner his name was Simon Johnson. He said, hey, if anyone comes to get this car, just give us a call. And the guy says, Mental note. Call Coops. If someone comes to get this car. Jeremy Renner. So on May 5, this is what, a couple of weeks later, a man comes to the door and this is it. I believe this is it says 09:00. But that's at night, right? Yeah, I couldn't tell at first. And then it feels like night. Yeah. It says also that the wife is illuminated by a motorcycle headlight, I guess, at night. All right. Unless it's very dark in the morning. Right. So at 09:00 at night, this guy shows up to the owners of the garage's door, knocks on the door, his young wife answers. The guy says that he's Mike Boda. I'm here to pick up my car. That Overland over there. And the owner of the garage comes and tells his wife, and he says, Go call the police. We don't have a phone going next door. Call the cops. She leaves out the back door and is caught. Like you said, there's this motorcycle sitting outside. She also sees, with a sidecar, also sees a couple of guys that she said were speaking Italian, kind of hanging around. So it's all sort of adding up at this point to something fishy. Yeah. So I guess the fact that Simon Johnson, the shop owner or the mechanic, was stalling made Boda a little uneasy. Sure. So he took off without the car. Right. Yeah, he jumped in the sidecar and was out of there. Okay. Here's where things get super critical for a pair of guys named Sacco and Vanzetti. There are two other guys that Ruth Johnson, Simon Johnson, the mechanics wife, said she saw hanging out, waiting for Mike Bota to get his car. They split, too. Now they're suddenly, like, on foot. There's no motorcycle or car for them, so they have to leave on foot. So they walk over toward the direction of the bridgewater rail line and she says that she saw them get on the train or at least go toward the train station. I earned another rail car. So I think it might have been like a street car kind of thing. Yeah. So somehow Chief Stewart gets word of this. I think he shows up, he gets word of this and he calls the police chief in the next town over in Brockton and says, hey, there's going to be a pair of Italian guys on the streetcar. When the streetcar stops or the rail car stops in your town, get them. They are wanted for questioning in a murder robbery. And so the Brockton police board the train when it arrives in Brockton. And there are two Italian men sitting there. And the two men's names were Nicolasako and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And they just happened to be Italian, and they just happened to be anarchist, and they both happen to be strapped when the cops came on the rail car and started asking them questions. Yeah. Saco had a. 32 Colt and Vancity had a. 38 Harrington and Richardson which very uniquely had five chambers instead of six. It's very unusual. Seems unique. Yeah. I don't even know how that works. I would have to see this kind of revolver because six is a nice even number for a round thing. I don't get it. But yeah, no one ever says like, don't point that five shooter at me. It's always six shooter, you know? Yeah, it's weird. Although maybe a five shooters what they're talking about when they call it a P shooter. No, that's not what they mean. But it was the there were all kinds of weird guns back then. Right, okay. So these two Italian immigrants who were anarchists and who were carrying guns had one other big problem. They were giving some pretty weak and ever evolving stories in answer to the questions that the cops were asking them. They get hauled into the police station. I believe in bridgewater or braintree. Do you know which one it was? I think it was Braintree, actually. They got taken to Braintree because it was Stewart who was investigating them. So they get taken to Braintree and Police Chief Stewart questions them. But then so too does the chief prosecutor for the area, a guy named Frederick Catsman, who would play an enormous role in this case as well. Yeah, so he was the DA. And I think the key fact that really sold him was he found out that on April 15, on the day of these murders, soccer was not at work at the Three K shoe factory. Right. And he said, you know what, that's enough for me. We have no real evidence or anything else. But you are Italian american Anarchists. You weren't at work that day, so let's go ahead and haul you in here. Right. Because we left off the fact that they found like anarchist pamphlets on the men when they took them off the train. So there was a lot against them going against them at this point, just from the outside of this. But you kind of touched on it. All of this is very circumstantial. Yeah. So right away the anarchists of the area come on board. They formed the Psycho Van City Defense Committee, and one of their leaders, one of the anarchist leaders in the area named Carloteska said, all right, let's hire this lawyer from California. This guy's a radical. He's going to lead our defense. And Moore comes on board. Fred Morrison's like, here's the way we're going to do this. Let's get everyone worked up, not only in this area, but all over the world. Let's get radicals and let's get anarchist and let's get union members. Let's paint these guys. It's just like hard working, blue collar union dudes and let's get people all over the world paying attention to what's going on over here. Yes. Which is a very common tactic still in use today. Just turn public sentiment against the government and the prosecutors in their case and basically painted like soccer. And Vincenti were just a couple of normal dudes who were being railroaded for political reasons and probably out of a certain amount of Xenophobia as well. Sure. So let's take a break. The trial opens in May of 1921 with Judge Webster there, and we'll be back with what happens next right after this. Chuck, before we get back into it, I want to give a shout out to Doug Linder, Douglas Linder, who's a law professor and historian who wrote a paper that we used as a source. So it was pretty handy. Pretty good stuff. Yeah. Law professors, I mean, there's a lot of good information out here on this, but you get a law professor on the typewriter and they're going to condense it into a nice readable workable document. That's right. That's what they do. They're very good at that. Yes. So, all right, trials underway. Like I said before, Judge Webster, there proceeds over this trial. Catsman that's the DA that's prosecuting, he has got a lot of circumstantial evidence. He has eyewitnesses, but not really a lot of hard evidence going on. Right. It's sort of a tough case for him to solidly prove. Yeah. And that was another reason why Fred Moore was able to run around drumming up public sentiment, not just in the United States or even just Boston or Massachusetts, but around the world, that Saco and Vanzetti were being railroaded is that the evidence against them was really weak. The eyewitness testimony was super. If you had the luxury, like historians like Douglas Linda have had to compare the original notes or the original statements made by eyewitnesses against the types of statements they made in court, the statements they made in court were much more certain, much more sure. And this was after a year of reading the newspaper and being exposed to pictures of soccer and Vanzetti. So when they see Saco and Vanzetti in the courtroom, they're like, yes, I saw that man holding that gun, and he was the one that pulled the trigger. The thing is, there was not one witness, but there were witnesses who placed both of them at the crime scene, or at least in the Buick around town on that day. But there was not one single witness who placed both of them there. That's just the eyewitnesses. They also had. The other big piece of circumstantial evidence were the guns that they were found with. And they used ballistic experts to come in and say, yes, this bullet came from this gun. But again, looking at it with history, the benefit of history, this was at a time when ballistics comparison was just beginning to come around. And the people that they employed as ballistics experts were selftaught amateurs who just basically had an interest in this field. We're in no way, shape or form genuine experts because you could make a case. There was no such thing as a genuine ballistics comparison expert. At the time. It was too new as far as forensic goes. Yeah. So on the defense side, immediately they say, those guys weren't even in Braintree. Soccer was in Boston. Vincenti was in Plymouth. Both sides. It's interesting to look back on this trial because both the prosecution and the defense were, like, being very hinky with the truth themselves, influencing people on both sides to testify kind of behind the scenes. Fred Moore, the defense attorney, trotted out a bunch of witnesses that say no. Like Vanzetti was definitely in Plymouth. He's a fishmonger, bought fish from him. And then later on, it was found out that some of these people well, all of them basically were friends of his. And then some of the people came out even later and said, yeah, he kind of told me to say this. But that happened on the prosecution side, too. Yes. Supposedly later on, they would allege that the prosecutor, Catsman and the chief or the lead ballistics or the star ballistics witness had kind of coordinated the answer that the ballistics witness would give at trial and that it would be much more stronger and much more certain than the actual conclusion he came to prior to the trial based on his original ballistics test. Yeah. So there's hinkiness on both sides. Catsman has his hat. Remember, one of the gunmen definitely had on a gray cap. So he has this gray cap. He said this is Sakosh. He gets together with an expert behind the scenes and says, and again with this, like you were saying, sort of the beginnings of not ballistics in this case, but just forensics, any kind of forensics. Yeah. He looked at the hairs in the hat, got a hair from Saco. And Saco was like, Ow, that hurt. And he compared them, and he said, yeah, these hairs are identical. I'm telling you, they're the same hairs. But Catsman was like, you know what? I don't want to go to court and present this because this stuff is all new. They're going to paint you as unreliable because no one knows anything about hair comparison yet. So instead of doing that, he goes to the boss of the shoe factory, George Kelly, and was like, have you seen this hat before? And Kelly said, yes, that's SACO's hat. I've seen him wear that hat. And the hole in it is from the nail that he hangs it on every day, when, in fact, that was definitely not the case. No. The previous police chief later testified that he had accidentally punched the hole in the hat while he was examining it for any kind of identifying marks, which is weird. He also testified that the hat had a very questionable providence, that it hadn't come into police custody for 30 hours after the crime. So he couldn't say, as far as he knew, it was not found at the crime scene, that it hadn't been secured by the police. He didn't. Know exactly where it came from. And then finally I read elsewhere, in a final twist not me if it sounds familiar, but they asked Saco to put the hat on in court and it was too small for his head. It didn't fit. You must acquit. They did not acquit, though. Well, he just ruined it. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. Sorry, everybody. It's funny, there's probably a lot of people out there who have no idea how this is going to turn out, because if you search on Google, just Saco and Vanzetti, one of the suggested questions is, what is Saco and Vanzetti not who, what. It's a nice upper teeth. Right. I don't know if we mention, but Saco had definitely much more evidence against him, even if it was circumstantial, than Vanzetti did. He had a lot more eyewitnesses. Yeah, for sure. So Vanzetti has the thinnest case against him, but he lied to the cops. He had that gun, remember? And on the stand he said, yeah, actually, I got that gun just a few days ago. I bought it for four or $5. And they're like, well, you told us that you bought it four or five years ago for $18. Right. You said there were six chambers in it and only had five. And what's going on here? You're lying to me, Vanessetti. The whole thing with the gun, I don't know if we said or not yet. The reason why the gun was so suspicious and was basically like the central piece of evidence used against Vanzetti is that it was supposedly the exact same kind of gun that Alexandro Baradelli had on him when he was killed. Yes. The whole idea was that Van Zetti had been. At least at the crime scene. If not one of the killers. Who had taken Baridelli's gun after he had killed him and made off with it. Which would explain why he wasn't very familiar with the gun and how many chambers it had and didn't have a very solid story about where he got and how long he owned it. Too. That was the implication of the whole thing. And that was it. That was the crux of the prosecution's case against Vanzetti. Van Zetti's big problem was he was sitting next to Saco when Saco got taken off the train and they had a lot more on Saco and they were tried together rather than separately. Yeah. In Saco. That ballistics evidence made a big difference in the trial because they found out for sure that that bullet that killed Bare Deli was definitely fired from a cult automatic. And your cult automatic is what they alleged. Right. Well, we'll hold on to that last bit till later about what was found out later about that. But I think even some of the jurors said that that was really some of the most compelling evidence against Stock for us in deciding this case. Yeah. And again, they're listening to forensic evidence from a field that's still in the very initial cradle from testimony given by people who are not experts. But that was like you said, the juror said that was it for me. That was what convinced me, was the ballistics evidence, basically. So they go to jury and they go to deliberations, and just five and a half hours later, the jury said, guilty is charged. About six weeks after the trial started, I believe. Yeah, so it was a big deal, you know, like soccer crying out, I'm innocent and Italian in the court. There were, like, protests all over the world, like South America, France, Lisbon. It's just crazy how much this at the time, in the 1920s, became an international thing. And basically they were due for the electric chair. So people all over the world were protesting. There were bombings. It was nuts. Yeah. This is a time when labor was unionized, so you could arouse the sympathy of a lot of people at once by going to the union hall and saying, like, hey, your brothers and arms over there in America are being railroaded into a murder rap. They're going to be electrocuted in the electric chair for something they didn't commit simply because of their political beliefs. How messed up is that? And you could arouse some people pretty quickly back then by saying that as opposed to today. Yeah, for sure. More immediately starts. The defense attorney immediately starts filing motions, trying to get, like, new trials. He had an assistant named Eugene Lyons who later would come out and say, man, this guy basically would do anything. He was framing evidence. He was telling witnesses what to say. Like, once he had it up in his mind, and keep in mind this was like a radical lawyer from California, he said once he had in mind that these guys were innocent, he was like, he basically would do anything to try and get them off. Yeah. He'd suborn perjury. He'd intimidate witnesses. He'd do whatever if he thought that somebody was being innocently prosecuted. Fred Moore would stop at nothing yet to get them off. And this article, I think, kind of paints an incomplete picture of Eugene Lyons and Fred Moore's relationship. Eugene alliance is also very much an admirer of Fred Moore too. He considered Fred Moore to have the heart of an artist, but he had dedicated his life to getting people who are being steamrolled by the system or unfairly treated by the courts out from under these charges. He was an early civil liberties lawyer, basically, is what he was. Yeah. So none of these motions work. He files a bunch of them. We're not going to detail them all, but none of them worked. They were basically all turned down. The was still the presiding judge. He was turning down all these things. Then they went to federal court. They were turning down motions. Eventually they went to the Supreme Court and the supreme court was like, why are you asking us about this? This is a state case. We don't even do this kind of thing. Yeah, the court at the time was very much the majority, I should say, was against applying the Federal Constitution to state issues, so they wouldn't get involved. But it did go all the way to at least petitioning the Supreme Court. They wouldn't hear it, and they wouldn't say the execution either. But as much as a lawyer can exhaust petitions and appeals for clemency and stay of execution, fred Moore did. And then later on, another defense lawyer named William Thompson, who took over for Fred Moore after Saco fired fred Moore, did the same thing. Like, up to the eve of the execution, they were relentless in filing appeals with anything, anything they could get their hands on. They filed an entire motion for a new trial based strictly on Judge Thayer's perceived prejudice against anarchists. Apparently, he did not like anarchists, and he treated sako and Venzetti as such throughout the trial. And if you're just watching this from the outside, if you're reading about this in the press and you're already on Sakura and Vanzetti's side, judge, they are turning down motion after motion after motion after motion. Looks really bad. It looks very much like this judge is bent on railroading these two immigrant anarchists into an early and unjust death by electric chair. So the public's sympathies were aroused even further for Saco and Van City, and that would last for decades after this trial. Up a century almost now. Yeah. So SACO's in jail, and another weird thing happened while he's in jail in Dedham, D-E-D-H-A-M there was another prisoner there who passed a note on and said, basically, I'm confessing to this crime. My name is Celestino Madeiros. And they were like, all right, well, let's talk to this guy. He's confessing to this crime and saying that Saco and Vincenti are innocent. He said I was there. I was with four other guys. So that kind of checks out. As far as the five Italians, he said, we met in Providence at a bar, and we just came up with this plan. He said there was a guy named Mike, a guy named Bill. I don't know the other guys. I was scared. We switched cars in the woods. All this stuff was sort of making sense, but it really didn't. Like, in the end, there were too many other things that were wrong. Like, he said that they didn't get there till afternoon, and everyone was like, no, that car was there, like, maybe between 09:00 A.m. And noon. He also said that the payroll money was in a bag when it was in a metal box. And so there were enough inconsistencies, basically, where he wasn't really a major suspect. Like they considered it. Thompson tried to use it as the basis for a new trial, but none of this worked because they were still kind of calling the shots. This is before they ran it up the flag bowl. Yeah. But again, news made its way out into the international press that someone had confessed, and not only confessed, said that Saco and Vanzetti weren't there. And this judge who headed out for Saco and Vanzetti refused to even hear this motion to have a new trial. So it looked bad as well, too. It did. So it looked bad enough that the governor at the time, Alvin Fuller, said, you know what? We have to do something here. There's just too much public pressure going on from around the world. He said, So here's what we'll do. We'll get a three person advisory committee. They're going to investigate this. He said, hey, you Lawrence Lowell. You're the president of habit. You had this thing up. And then what was known as the Lowell Commission finally issued a report which said, basically, beyond a reasonable doubt, Saco is guilty. And Vincenti said, on the whole, it's our opinion that he's also guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And everyone was like, well, why did you say all those other words then? And they're like, what other words? Yeah. Really kind of a strange final report. What's funny is, in the Boston area, if they're like, we need somebody smart, get me the president of Harvard. Oh, yeah. And in the end, he's like, you are definitely guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and so are you, more or less, in our opinion right now. I know it's weird, and it remains weird, but apparently years later, when Lowell was asked about that, he was saying, like, no, that wasn't an indication that we thought Vanzetti had any kind of innocence to him or that he wasn't guilty. I'm not sure exactly how he explained it, but he basically said, no, that's not what that was. Interesting. I don't know what he thought it was. It was a weird way to put it. But I think the other thing that kind of arouses people's interest in that or suspicion maybe even, is that that's what a lot of people think, that Saco was definitely guilty. I shouldn't say a lot, but some people that Sacco was definitely guilty. And if anyone was innocent, it was Vanzetti. So the idea that this Lowell Commission came up with this back in the 20s, even, is significant. But, yeah, Lowell was like, no, that's not what we meant by that. So none of these stays of execution go through. So they are reunited. They were split up in jail for many years, six years, and then they were finally reunited at Charlestown State Prison for execution in April. And you wouldn't believe how many cops they have in this town to cover this thing, because it was sort of one of the first crimes of the century, I think. And people were mad all over the country and all over the world. Like, we've been talking about. They didn't know if there are going to be more bombings. People were going to literally storm the prison and try and overtake them and free them. So they had tons and tons of cops everywhere. Soccer is first to go. And as they are strapping him in, he's crying out in Italian, long live anarchy. And then in English, very quietly says, farewell, my wife and child and all my friends. And right when they finally do the switch, he screamed out, Mama. And I don't think like that. No, I'm not making light of it. I don't think he was like, Whoa, Mama. No, I don't think so either. I think he was calling for his mother. Yes. Just pretty sad, right? But also kind of sweet. Yeah. And then Vanzetti comes in and he's like, oh, it's my turn. All right. Well, okay. I want to make sure everybody knows that I am innocent. So I think it's significant that soccer was the one that shouted in the courtroom that he was innocent. But during his execution and Vanzetta didn't say anything in the courtroom, but during his execution, he's like, I'm innocent. And not only that, he really turned the screwdriver. He said, I want to make it known that I forgive all of you who are about to do this to me. And he started crying. Well, the warden started crying when he gave the switch. He gave the nod to throw the switch on the electric chair and kill Vanzetti. Tears flowing everywhere. High drama. Yes. I'm surprised there's been a movie. Surely it has been, but I'll bet it was in, like the 70s or something. We just aren't aware of it. Like, Warren Beatty played Saco and Venzetti in some weird casting and somehow Jeremy Renner played all the cops. Right? Exactly. So Sacco and Vanzetti are dead. Like, they're dead. The state took their lives. They executed them. These conceivably, innocent men who were railroaded to the electorate chair on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of some ballistic experts who are not experts by anyone's measure, these men are now dead. And the world reacts predictably. There were riots. Six people died in a riot in Germany. The American Embassy in Paris had already been bombed. So they brought tanks out on the night of the execution and surrounded it this time. And there were no bombings. There were riots in Geneva, Switzerland. This may have been the only time anyone ever rioted in Geneva, Switzerland. There are like 5000 protesters who destroyed everything that was even passingly American. And Sakura and Vincenti went into the history books. A couple of innocent men who were executed wrongfully by the state because of their political beliefs. They were political prisoners who were executed for their beliefs. Basically, is how most people have come to see soccer and Vancity. Yeah. But many years later, a few notable things happened in 1041. The gentleman I mentioned earlier, Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader a couple of years before he died in the 1940s. Basically said, you know what? Sakka was guilty. He was a trigger man. But Ben said he was not guilty. Other people had heard the same thing from Tresca. And then in 1961, they had actual ballistics tests done, and it was concluded that that was, in fact, a bullet from SACO's gun. But people still were saying, no, you know what? I think that bullet was planted. So we render that inconclusive. But I think Doug Linder does a pretty good job of taking the planted bullet theory. Fatal bullet or bullet number three is what it's called in the trial and basically saying that this is why that doesn't really hold up. And probably the biggest one is when those ballistic witnesses gave their testimony, both of the prosecution star ballistic witnesses said, yes, I would conclude probably that it came out of this gun, or it's probable or possible or something like that. They couched their expert opinions when they gave their testimony. And if they were part of a conspiracy to frame soccer in the planting of this bullet, they would have given much more forceful testimony, which in and of itself is circumstantial evidence against this planted bullet theory. But it draws so closely on common sense that I think it makes sense to me. It undermines the idea that the bullet was planted. Yeah. There was another gentleman named Giovanni Gambara who said, you know what? My dad, before he died in, he told me he was on this team of anarchists that met after their arrest to get their defense mounted. And he told me, and everyone said basically that soccer was guilty and Vanzetti was innocent. And then, weirdly, in 2005, Upton Sinclair, the very famous author, said that he was researching a book and he was writing a book about this whole thing. And he met with Fred Moore, that the radical defense attorney that mounted the defense for basically most of the case. And he met with him in a hotel room. It's like, Dude, give me the real story. And he said that More told him, yeah, soccer was guilty. And Van saidi was innocent. And I basically came up with this whole defense on my own, like, made all this stuff up. Yeah. Years later, it came out that the seven eyewitnesses for the defense who said that they saw soccer eating lunch in Boston at the time of the robbery and braintree, had all been set up by the defense, or at least by an anarchist group who had asked them to go perjure themselves. And yes, I think that kind of jibes with the Eugene Lions quote that if he thought these guys were innocent, he would do anything to get them off, including putting witnesses on the stand, knowing that they were going to lie and telling them to lie. And this is a letter from Upton Sinclair based on an interview with Fred Moore so it has a lot of teeth. But there was another letter from Upton Sinclair, another quote from Upton Sinclair, where he said that Fred Moore had confessed to him that Vanzetti was innocent. And he knew he was innocent, but he was pretty sure Sako wasn't. But all he had to do was go to the jury and say, hey, we all know that you don't have anything on Vanzetti. There's no reason for you to prosecute this man. But he knew that if he did that, the jury would be like, well, you're probably right, but we're going to come down really hard on Saco. So he had this dilemma, and he took it to Van Zetti, he said, and Vanzetti said, you know what? Try to save Nick. Nicolasako. He has the wife, he has the child. I don't try to get him off. So Van Zetti, in this retelling by Fred Moore, gave his life on the chance that Fred Moore could get Saco off, because if he got Socco off, he'd get Van Zetti off. If he got Van Zetta off, he would almost surely sync Socco and Venzetti wouldn't take the opportunity to be acquitted at the expense of soccer, which is pretty amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So that's Taco and Vanzetti everybody. That's what a soccer and Vanzetti is now. You know, I guess one guilty and one innocent. That's what it sounds like. It sounds like if you want to know more about soccer and Vanzetti, go look up Doug Linder. I believe he has a whole site on True Crime, and there's plenty of other stuff out there that we found, too, on the Internet about Saco and Vanzetti and their famous trial. And since I said soccer and Vanzetti, like, 80 times, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this response to a short stuff. All right. Hey, guys. Your show is one of my favorite podcasts, so much so that I've taken to listening to it while I get ready for work. Whoa. We know that is your sacred time. Yeah, Nadine. I just finished the episode on Black Loyalists and immediately started to write the email. I'm a Rhode Islander in Nova Scotia for work and got so excited to hear a little piece of Nova Scotia's history on there. I looked into the Loyalist Heritage Museum, but it only has weekday operation, so I don't think I'll be able to make it there. I'll definitely do some exploring of Halifax in the coming weeks, and we'll be on the lookout for more information. I just wanted to mention on the show that Josh said that Rhode Island may not have ever had slaves. Actually, we were the first state to abolish slavery in 1652, but the law was mostly ignored, and we ended up with the most slaves per capita of any colony. I did not know that. We all set. A pretty booming slave trade in Newport, Rhode Island, now known for their gilded aged splendor a piece of Rhode Island history I'm sure most don't learn in history class that I wanted to shed light on. Thanks for always putting out a funny and informative and entertaining show that is from Nadine Greed. Thanks a lot, Nadine. That was great. Thanks for listening while you get ready for work. Hope works going well up there in Nova Scotia. Just think spring to you and everybody up there in Nova Scotia. Frankly, if you want to get in touch with us, you can join us on Stuff. You should know the.com check out our social links there and you can just send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgara and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
4216bbec-53a3-11e8-bdec-f3c3cf70ba71 | Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s, Part 1 | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/iran-contra-affair-shady-in-the-80s-part-1 | When Ronald Reagan was president, America got involved in some deeply shady stuff, not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal – a convoluted operation that managed to combine an illegal covert war in Nicaragua with secretly selling arms to Iran. | When Ronald Reagan was president, America got involved in some deeply shady stuff, not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal – a convoluted operation that managed to combine an illegal covert war in Nicaragua with secretly selling arms to Iran. | Tue, 06 Aug 2019 16:01:52 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=16, tm_min=1, tm_sec=52, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=218, tm_isdst=0) | 44492269 | audio/mpeg | "Hey everybody, its Josh and Chuck and we're coming to see you guys. Some of you, some cities just listen up. That's right, because, you know, we just did Chicago and Toronto and it went great and I think our topic of went really well. Sure did. Everyone loved hearing about out. That's right. So if you're in Boston, you can come see us on August 29 at the Wilbur Portland, maine. Maine. At the State Theater on August 30. I can't wait. I'm going to Labor Day weekend. I'm going to stay the whole weekend. I'll be all over Maine. That's great, man. Where else? We're going to be in Orlando on October 9, and then on October 10, we're going to be in New Orleans, man. And then later on that month we're doing a three night stand, the 23rd, 24th and 25th at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn. That's right, 25th is sold out, but you can still get tickets for the 23rd and 24th and we will see you then. Check it out@sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there eating with chopstick. As a matter of fact, no. Jerry pulls out the chopsticks. It's time to record. That's right. Yeah. She got Facebook open and she's sitting there with her chopsticks. So we're recording now. Jerry's been fork free since 83. Speaking of 83, your shirt, I guess it's kind of 83 ish looks very Thomas Magnum. It does, Chuck. It does. Not just the shirt, the whole outfit. Look at the jeans, the shoes. Yeah, you got the Ferrari outback. Thank you for noticing me. I look like a chubby. Thomas Magnum. It's funny because I just finished Stranger Things Three and saw that there was a have you seen it yet? Are you into that? No, I liked the first season. I never really got back into it after that. No offense to anybody. Sure. The Sheriff Guy Hopper, wears a shirt kind of like that through most of the season. Is that right? And so someone did a cut of like a Magnify intro and had him running around and shooting things and jumping into cars, all set to The Magnificent Thing. Very cool. And it really fits. All you got to do is throw that song with a guy with a shirt like that. And it's Magnum, of course. He has the mustache, too. Well, I'm a mustache less chubby magnum. You should wear a mustache. That's like, interesting. I don't know. I do solve a lot of mysteries, though. Nothing can change a look like mustaches. Oh, dude. Especially spontaneously. Right? Especially a fake mustache, because you just put it on and bam, you're done. Right. So I'm going to go back to the 83 segway. Yeah, we're here. We're right in the middle of the 80s. Yeah, this is super 80s. This is as 80s as it gets iran Contra fee. That's what we're talking about. Some people call it Iran Gate. I poo poo that name. Iran Contra. Sure. I remember this going on at the time. Me, too. I remember watching Oliver North testify. Me, too. And my sister was like, he's so dreamy. Look at how much poise he has. He had his dress greens on, right? He got all those medals, had his Boy Scout three fingers up, like, swearing. I really think he did do that. But even as an adult, like, everything I knew about, around contrast researching this, it was just the glossiest version. Well, I was, like, ten and eleven, so you were like, seven and eight. Sure. But still, over time, as you age, you're like, oh, that's what was going on. Or oh, I understand that. Even as an adult, my conception of it was not very thorough at all. And as I dug into it, I'm like, this is one of the shadiest things America has ever done. Ever. Yeah. And it was really great to do this, and, like, now I know it, now I have a full understanding of what happened. And if it ever comes up at a party and people are like, what was that all about anyway? I'm going to be like, well, please sit down for an hour, and I'll just pull up my smartphone and play our episode. Right? Actually, maybe an hour and a half. We'll see how this goes. Yes. By the way, everyone, this is a two parter. Yeah, buckle up. And so this is part one. I figured we'd start with the beginning. I think that's a really good idea. That reminds me of my friend in college watched the movie. Which one was it? We Didn't Burn Shortcuts, the movie that was on two video cassettes. What? It was so long they had to split them up. Is it Magnolia? A Bridge Too Far? I can't remember my friend in college, very famously among our friends, watched the second tape first and then watch the first tape second and didn't really put it together. She was just like I thought it was a little confusing. Really? So it was accidental? Yeah. And then she showed up in the second part, and I was like, she's already dead. She was kind of country. This is kind of funny. Movies. Are one of them inachronisms? Yeah. Well, this is not an anachronism, because we're going to be normal, smart, singing people and start at the beginning. That's right. And there's really no better place to start than the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Ronald Reagan, if you weren't familiar with him already, when he was president, he had already been governor of California. But even before that, he had a pretty extensive career in Hollywood. Yeah. And while he was a pretty big star in Hollywood, at least B plus list, if not A list actor. Yeah, he was a medium sized star. Sure. But definitely way more famous as President than he ever was as a movie star. Sure. He learned to detest communism and at the time communism was a really big thing in Hollywood. It was very fashionable, especially among the intellectuals of Hollywood. And he learned to hate it so much so that by the time he got to be President, he had this idea that it was impossible for capitalist democracy and communism to coexist even peacefully on earth. You couldn't have both. You had to have one or the other. And by God, Ronald Reagan was going to see to it that the one that we had was a capitalist democracy. Yeah. He wanted to stamp out communism wherever it reared its head and it was rearing its head close to home, which we'll see here in a second, but all over the world. Oh yeah, for sure. It was called the Reagan. Yeah, bits and pieces of it were. Right. And he came up with the Reagan Doctrine. And the Reagan Doctrine was we will aid any opposition to communism wherever it sprouts. Like if you're fighting against a communist revolution, we'll support your country. If you're a rebel fighting against a leftist communist government, we'll help you overthrow. That's the Reagan Doctrine. Yeah. Via money, via arms, via training, via covert operations that we carried out ourselves. There were all kinds of ways that we could and did help stem the flow of communism. Yeah. So there was, as you were saying, there was a place pretty close to home where communism had sprouted up and that was Nicaragua down in Central America. And in Central America in the Sandinista government had taken power and had held on to power well into the by this time, the early eighty s. And it drove Ronald Reagan nuts that there was a communist power right there that was being supported by the Soviet Union through Cuba, ostensibly. I've never gotten the impression that this was ever conclusively proven. They definitely got support from Cuba. But whether it was the Soviet Union who is really calling the shots in Nicaragua or not, I don't know. Yeah. And I think to go even further back and draw the lines a little even more clear the Sandinistas were named for Augusto Sandino, who led the nationalist rebellion against what? The US. Occupation of Central America. Oh, that's where it started, huh? That's where it all started. And from the US. Occupied this is all part of the banana wars. Right. So we occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 for a lot of reasons. But one was like, hey, no one's going to build a canal here unless it's us. Right. That was sort of one of the main reasons. And that all ceased in 1933 with Roosevelt's good neighbor policy, which is basically like we're going to pull out of Nicaragua. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. But we had our fingers all over Central America for many years and that's why when people forget or choose not to remember when people flee horrible situations in Central America to come to the United States now, like, kind of where all these horrible situations started years and years ago because of things that we did. Right. Well, when Reagan became President, intervening in Nicaragua, man, I'm going to have a hard time if I can't say Nicaragua. Intervening in Nicaragua became like a first and foremost priority for them. Yeah, for sure. Almost immediately, they started funding the Contras. The Contra rebels are the groups who were fighting against the Santa Nista government. They were right wing groups, and they were funding them. They were training them, like you were saying, and they're doing all this secretly. There was an operation called Operation Black Eagle. Man, that one. That was something else. Yeah. So we were already funding them. And at the time, Congress was on board. Congress was on board, especially at first because the Republicans controlled the House. Well, you know how when somebody comes in and just steamrolls over the other party, usually in a presidential election, very frequently in the midterms, the Congressional midterms, there's like a backlash against that. Yes. Like a House flip. Believe it or not, that happened to Ronald Reagan in 1082. And the house did flip. They flipped over to the Democrats. And that Democrat controlled House, combined with the Newsweek cover story that came out, kind of turned the tide against Reagan's policy on helping out in Nicaragua. Yeah. There was a CIA director named William Casey who was he was kind of telling Congress what they needed to hear here and there. You have been here. Vague briefing. That was probably a generous way to say it. Sometimes Casey would send another guy, though, named Dwayne. Dewey. Clarage and this is where things really went south, because Claraj did not present well to Congress. And anytime Congress feels like they're being subverted or ignored or kept out of the loop or not able to offer their checks and balances on the executive branch, they really get mad. They do. Like, we're seeing that today. History just repeats itself over and over again. Exactly. Yeah. And in this particular case, the place where the administration, the regular administration and Congress just started butting heads over Nicaragua, it was doing clergy. That's how poor a job he did. But in his defense, he was coming from a place where he was a CIA man through and through. And this is less than ten years after Congress had just basically rooted out the CIA, held public hearings. That's when the MKUltra came out. And the fact that they've been dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSDs. Yeah. So in his defense, he was mad because they uncovered all the awful things that he'd been doing. Right. True compassion, Chuck. Yeah, it's true compassion. So Congress is starting to get a little unhappy with this. And there was one Congressman in particular named Edward Bowland, I believe, and he was from Massachusetts, and he said, hey, I just read about this cover story in Newsweek. It has a title. America's Secret War. Nicaragua. Seems like they should have flip flopped that. Nicaragua, america's Secret War. I think they both have the same end goal. That is fine. Right. But he was like, Wait, why am I reading about this in a magazine? Yes, and I'm a member of Congress, right? Because at this time, like, Congress is like, oh, okay. We think we're just kind of funding things. We're maybe helping out a little bit. This Newsweek magazine was like, no, it's way more than that. There is way more American involvement down in Nicaragua than you've been led to believe. Congress. Like, actual covert CIA ops, like blowing up bridges and blowing up buildings and direct saboteur type ops. Yeah. Not just, here's some arms. And then you close this one eye, but leave this eye open when you're shooting. There was way more involved than that. Or we could just do the shooting. Basically, just let me do it. So Congress and the guys of Edward Bowen said, no, we're not doing that. And they passed the Bowling Amendment, which basically said, if you cannot use CAA funds or Defense Department funds to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, it's done. Good night. Congress went to sleep. And so that should have been that's the end of it, right? Because Congress passed what was it, a law? No, passed an amendment. Enact. Enact. Yeah. So everyone just stopped. Right. That's how it works. All right, what's part two going to be about? We're just going to see here quietly. So this did not stop anything. Here's what happened. In 1983, the CIA had this one operation where they went into the commercial shipping harbors of Nicaragua. Oh, boy. I know it's contagious. I said it right in my head all morning. Nicaragua. And they put mines there. I was about to say land mines. But they were sea mines. Yeah, mines. Floating mines. Right. And the idea here was we're going to plant these mines, that we're going to whip up our own press releases for the Contras where they take credit for it. Like, we don't even trust them to write a good press release. Right. The cave the press release for it. So where the Contras are saying that they did it and the overall effect it's going to have is they're not going to be able to ship arms via the seaport, at least into Nicaragua. Plus, it also makes the Contras look way more together and with it than they actually were. Right. Like, all we need to do is give them some money and they got it covered. Right. So the CIA does this and they're thinking, okay, so shipping in the Nicaraguan harbors is going to stop. It does not stop. No. As a matter of fact, there was damage. So they use little firecracker mines, which make a big blast, and a lot of water everywhere, but if it's a big ship, it's not going to hurt the ship. Well, it sunk a lot of small fishing vessels, but it also damaged ships from the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, and the USSR. Commercial ships. So The Wall Street Journal broke this story and said, hey, Congress, you remember how you passed this amendment saying there could be no CIA involvement in Nicaragua? Well, they mine the harbor of the sovereign nation, and it blew up a bunch of other country ships. And Congress, once again, like, man, you keep doing secret things behind her back. That really makes us mad, right? So we take a break. All right, let's take a break, Josh, and shut stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. Okay, let's keep going. So what does Congress do? They're like, all right, they're mad. We passed one Bowling amendment, which I don't think we said, chuck, the first Bowling amendment was passed 411 to zero, unanimously saying, do not mess around in Nicaragua anymore. That's when you know Congress is mad, right, when they unanimously agree on something. And then The Wall Street Journal breaks the story about the harbor mining long after the Bowland amendment was passed. And now Congress does even matter, right? So they passed two more amendments, bowland amendments, because there were loopholes, basically that allowed the US. To sort of do these things semi legally. So it was like, well, here's a loophole. So it wasn't really fully illegal to do this stuff. Yeah, that's like the Reagan administration's way. All right, they closed these loopholes, and now it was pretty ironclad. I don't know about ironclad, but it was pretty tight amendment wise, at the very least, congress walked away thinking, it's done. We made ourselves quite clear, right? Ronald Reagan signed these into law. Yeah. He didn't veto them. No, he accepted these things. I think he even said, like, yeah, this is a good idea. Great way to go, Congress, and signed it. I'm not going to do a Reagan impression. Congress thought that the matter was settled, but it wasn't settled. Like, this is how laser focused Reagan was on overthrowing the Santa Monica government down in Nicaragua. He just took a CIA operation and took it even further underground than it had been before. Basically, he was like, okay, if you guys are going to outlaw this stuff, we're just going to have to get even more illegal. Yeah. So there were a couple of factions here at work. One was this continued operation underground, deep, deep underground now. And then there was Reagan's public. Like, he still wanted to get real money from Congress so he didn't have to do this stuff. Right. So he kept up this public PR campaign, beating this drum about Communism at our doorstep. He said that the contrast were the moral equals of our founding fathers. That's a big one to pull out. Like, that's a direct quote of our founding Fathers and started in with the and again, you see this stuff kind of repeating itself, the campaign of fear, where he basically said, unless we do something tough here, then there will be a tidal wave of feet people. I don't even know what that means, but that just seems super offensive, swarming into our country. He meant refugees, feet people seeking a safe haven. It was one word even, I think, one word. It's funny because I looked up feet people, and that's a company that I think makes shoelaces. And they're like, yes, say it again. Think.com so. This is all going on and on the download. All the operations are going on and on the public facing side, reagan's just continuing this PR push, right. Basically saying, like, congress, look at these heartless old gas bags turning off the funding to these Founding Father, moral equivalent to our Founding Fathers. Go vote these guys out of office and vote in some people who will turn the funding back on. Yeah. And while the Contras may have been fighting Communism, they were doing so through means that the Founding Fathers probably would not have approved of, like, murder and torture and rape and mutilation kidnapping. And, I mean, it wasn't so widespread that it was like, that's all they were doing, but they would resort to those tactics. Right. And that's not founding father stuff. No, it's definitely not as far as I've ever learned. No, I don't think so. And, I mean, it's had a few hundred, couple hundred years to come out. Yeah. And it still hasn't. I read some of the stuff, too. Like, some of the Affidavits were just brutal. Oh, yeah, dude. The war down in Nicaragua, the civil war that the US. Basically fomented and supported, it went on for a decade. It went on into the it was not just against countrymen. Like, civilians were getting murdered by the scores and just they would get kidnapped and tortured and killed. And it was a really brutal time in Nicaragua. And the Reggae administration is right in the middle of this, like, providing as much aid as they can to one side. Yeah. And one of the big problems was that the Contras back then were a bunch of different factions, and they didn't answer to a single leader. And the one thing I got out of the Affidavits, one of which this woman described them taking her children and her finding their mutilated bodies the next day. It was brutal. One of the leaders said that there's no disciplinary system at all within the Contra groups. Oh, yeah. There's no accountability. You could do anything you wanted, and there's no discipline set up. So it was just they were fractured, and no one was talking to each other, and it was just a big mess. Right. But Reagan was doing his best to paint everything in black and white. Right. Contra is good. Santa Nisa is bad. So anything that contrast did was good. And stuff that couldn't be painted as good would just be denied or glossed over, not reported on that's. Right. So while Reagan's out running around trying to drum up public support for the Contras and thus Congressional aid being turned back on and also saying don't do drugs yeah, that's a big one. Even though we're shipping a lot of drugs back and forth. Awfully rich now that you know all that stuff. Yeah. He's also secretly supporting them, going in flagrant violation of what Congress has said that America can do. He tells his people he wants the conscious movement to be kept alive, body and soul is how he put it. And he basically said, do it. This is what history has told us, that Reagan basically said, keep the counter movement alive, body and soul. I'm going to go work on Congress. I'm putting my hands over my ears from now on. Whether that's true or not, we will probably never know. Right. As far as the history books is concerned, that's what happened. Right. So here's what they did. They said the CIA has a bad rep for a lot of reasons, and Congress is not super friendly with them. Well, they expressly forbade the CIA from operating them. Right. So he said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to use the National Security Council. And the CIA chief, William Casey? He's around? He's going to just like advice here and there. And William Casey was like, oh, no, I really got to be involved because this is really good stuff. They're like, no, we're talking officially here. Oh, yeah, exactly. So at first, National Security Adviser is Robert McFarlane. And then he was succeeded by John Poindexter. Very important you remember that name. And then Casey is still there, like you said, doing his thing on the download unofficially. Right. I think even in some cases, kind of stepping on toes or whatever, he was like an additional boss to the main guy, the guy everybody has heard of, the guy whose mind or whose name jumps to mind when you hear about this. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Ollie north. And in retrospect, especially if you lived through the Iran Contra hearings and you're familiar with Ollie North, you would guess that when Ollie North was tapped to head up this extraordinarily difficult secret operation to go against Congress and keep the Contra movement alive and kicking, ollie north was a bad, a covert operator to the 9th degree, right? That is not at all correct. No. Career Marine. Very highly decorated Marine. Served in Vietnam. Won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. Devout Catholic, and by all accounts a stand up guy. And to many, many Americans, he is still like a top notch American hero. Sure. Well, he was like the President of the NRA until, I think, recently. Yeah. I think there's some scandal that just happened where there was it came out that he tried to depose Wayne LaPierre or something like that? I don't know. I don't either. But even beyond that, like, even beyond whether he's a stand up guy or not, as far as patriotism is concerned, sure. Just job experience. He had, like, none he had no experience whatsoever, as far as I could ever tell, in covert operations. He did a pretty good job for a while. He did an amazing job. He was basically the White House's operations and intel arm of the shady stuff. It was doing stuff that was so shady, the CIA was even kept in the dark about it. That's how shady the stuff Holly North was doing. And he had no experience. He's learning as he went. Yeah. Just making it up as he went along. And he really did do a pretty good job of it, if you look at it from that angle. Just as far as getting her done. Right. So what they basically decided was, all right, if we can't get real taxpayer money and official funds, we'll just go and raise funds on the side in secret through business people, that we can have these big parties and dinners and say, hey, listen, communism is knocking at our door. This wouldn't be good for America. It wouldn't be good for your company. Right. And why don't you give us some money? Open up the checkbook, Reagan's. Here, you want a photo? Yes. Sometimes he would show up to the secret fundraisers, and it really worked. Like, they raised a ton of money from the business elite of America to stop the Sandinistas Nicaragua. So they actually forget this. They had two private citizens found a nonprofit, the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty. The sole purpose was to get these illicit funds to send to the contrast, which means that the people who are donating to the president's illegal secret proxy war could write their donations off on their taxes. That's right. It's just mind boggling and hilarious in some senses. Yeah. But they were not the most stand up nonprofit, because, as you point out, they raised $6.3 million through that organization during 85, 86. About 3.3 million made it to the Contras. So that means 52% program expense rate. That's pretty bad. Yes. It's not good at all. Now, $3 million it took supposedly to run that nonprofit, those fundraising breakfast, for a year. Yeah. Pretty bad. Good omelets, though. Yeah, the best. Top notch. So from this idea, you're like, okay, this is probably kind of legal. We're just fundraising. We're not giving any American taxpayer funds. We're just getting other people to donate private citizens. Saudi Arabia was a big one, and it was all the stop communism. So I think their intentions were that, oh, definitely, there's more. Yeah. But there was a definite end, justifies the means kind of thing. And really, isn't the President really the most powerful person in the world? Right. Can Congress really tell the President what to do as far as foreign policy goes. That was kind of the idea. I think. So Saudi Arabia donated a bunch of money. There's all these private citizens donating money. And here's the thing. The contrast found themselves flush with cash. Yeah. Many millions of dollars over just two years. Saudi Arabia alone donated 32 million to the contrast. This is a couple of loosely affiliated factions fighting in two spots of Nicaragua that suddenly have 30 plus million dollars at their disposal. The problem is they don't have the contacts in the international arms trade to buy arms with this money. They said, a bunch of money. And they're like, who wants this? And they were getting crickets and got some bombs. Right. The cartoonish black kind, the round ones that are shiny. It takes 15 of those before Craigslist, too. Right. So their only avenue was to go back to the Americans and Oliver North, and he began working with a guy named Richard SEACOR. He was a retired forced retired. We'll get into that in a minute. Air Force Major General. And he had a lot of experience. There was this group of dudes in the were current CIA, former CIA, former and current American military who all had their fingers in the illegal arms trade. Right. So exactly what you can imagine a Hollywood writer would come up with. This is the real life version of it. Yeah, for sure. So you could farm out assassinations to them. They could rustle up mercenaries. They could carry out sabotage operations. They could find whatever gun, bomb, anything you need. You want some money laundered? Yeah. Right. Anything that is extraordinarily illegal and deals in death like these guys could get their hands on. You have some poison done. Sure. A bomb, disguises, a briefcase. We got it, buddy. And here's the other thing, too. They were in a legal black market arms ring, but they were also even more illegal, and that they would sell to whoever. Whether you are an enemy or a friend of America, it didn't matter. These guys were operating well above any sort of national loyalty or anything like that. Yeah. This was about making money. Sure. Like many millions of dollars. Yes, you're right. So especially a guy like Seacord, he was in it to make dough. Definitely. Whereas An Ali North was seemingly in it to stop the communism. Right. So that's an important point. But the fact that they contract with Seacord to kind of swoop in and help hook the contras up with arms means that the Reagan administration is contracting with this extraordinarily illegal black market arms ring. Yeah. One of which they took down some of these dudes over the years. One of the founders of this group was a CIA op named Edwin Wilson. He was sentenced, he served 22 years, twelve of which were in solitary confinement, but was sentenced to 52 years for illegally arming Libya with 10,000 machine guns and 20. Tons of C Four that he hid in barrels of mud and flew on a chartered jet to Libya. Right. It's like Hollywood stuff. I know, it really is. Like, this really happened. It's crazy. And it wasn't just Libya. This guy was funding or outfitting Momar Qaddafi. Oh, yeah. Edamin was another customer. Like, whoever, if you need to keep a stranglehold on power in your country, we're the people that help you do that. Yeah. And when I teased earlier about Richard ccord being forced into retirement, that was due to his connection with Edwin Wilson. Right. So he was forced to retire from the Air Force. They couldn't pin anything on him, but there was enough of a connection there where he had to step down. Yeah. They're like, you can do this the hard way or the easy way. We're going to give you the option. And he took the easy way. And then he went on to make a lot of money. Right. He was like, okay, well, I'll just do the arm ceiling thing full time now. Right. And he did. So when they brought him in. At first, C Cord was basically acting as, like, a very lause, fair intermediary. He was basically the guy who, on behalf of all the north, was like, yeah, I can introduce the contrast to my friends in the arms ring in Canada, of all places. Yeah. He introduced the contrast to some Canadian arms dealers. So now the set up was this the friendliest armed arms dealer. Right. They're like, all these bullets will really put a hole in somebody a yeah. Oh, sorry, I meant to include rocket launchers on that order. Sorry. That was pretty good. So Seacord was just there to make some introductions, make sure things went smoothly, and then it was up to the Contras to use these funds that were coming in from other people and to buy weapons from the Canadians. Easy peasy. Right. You'd think? Okay, that's fine. It still has a slight veneer of arms length legality as far as America is concerned. Yeah. And we should mention, too, that to do this, he set up a shell company, the Stanford Technology Trading Group, with an Iranian American businessman named Albert Hakim, who knew how to get around certain official procedures and stuff like that. He's another guy who could get things done. So he set up Swiss bank accounts, untraceable accounts, because that's what you do to run the funds through. And this became known as the Enterprise. Yeah, they're Stanford Technology Trading Company or Group. Sorry. Aka the Enterprise. Yeah, that was like everybody called it that because they're like, this sounds way cooler. The Enterprise. Right, all right. But like, you were alluding to you'd think it would have been going great, but the Contras in the north, who was the FDN, they were the largest by far, the largest group. They were the better organized, from what I understand. Yeah. They were doing a pretty good job. But in the south, they were not doing a very good job. No. Somehow they were like, we don't have the arms and equipment. They're like, what are you talking about? You have the same amount of money, you have the same contact. Yeah. Just buy the weapons. And they're like, oh, no. So Ollie North was like, okay, all right, here's what we're going to do. He called the leaders of the FDN and the FSLN to Miami to meet with them, and he said, here's how it's going to be from now on. Yeah. Any veneer of legality is going out the window from now on. I'd like you to meet your new boss, Richard Seacord. Not only is he going to make sure you have arms, he's going to take the funneled money himself, buy the arms himself, and then he's going to have it kicked out of a plane over your camp. So now America is directly involved in supporting and arming and training the Contra rebels in the north and the south of Nicaragua. And if there's any kind of legality, it's totally gone at this point. Yeah. And in the meantime, Seacord and Akeem were marking up their stuff as much as, like, 300%. They made a lot of money off of this. Yeah, they made a ton, but they put a lot back into the Enterprise. I mean, they took this job very seriously. That was a company. If you were all the north, you are quite happy with the work you're getting from Richard Seacourt and Albert Hakeem, because the shipments went out on time. They got everything they needed. They had so much money, they had it left over, but they were also investing it into the Enterprise. They bought planes, they rented airstrips, they hired employees, they contracted with other airlines. Like a CIA front. I can't remember the name of it right now, but they were doing the work for sure. Great health care. Yeah. The best benefits. All of the contracts had really nice teeth. After Richard Seacorn took over work from home. Yes. All right, so let's take another break here and we'll come back and bring it home for part one with a little bit about the propaganda machine that was set up. Stuff you should know. Josh and Shark. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right, Chuck. So things are in full swing. America is unknowingly, totally hooking up. The countries now basically running this proxy war that the Contras are fighting against the Sandinista government. Right. The Enterprise is working full bore. And if it couldn't get any more illegal, if you thought it couldn't get any more illegal, prepared to just be knocked right over. Yeah. So here on the home front, it was decided that there needed to be a pretty massive, intense propaganda campaign. And we're not talking about Reagan just going on the news, talking about Communism being at our doorstep. We're talking about a real deal propaganda campaign. And they even set up an office, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean that was founded and managed by Cuban American name Auto Reich. Okay. And this was all exposed later on by the Miami Herald, by the reporting of a guy named Alfonso Chardi. Yeah, I just want to interject here real quick. So do you remember when we've done historic stuff in the past, and I'm like, Go read the contemporary articles? These are so good, really good reporting going on, because the story was so huge and multifaceted. Oh, yeah. I mean, Newsweek broke it before Congress knew. Yeah. Right. The Washington Post broke it. Wall Street Journal. Yeah, wall Street Journal and then the Miami Herald. Yeah. La. Times did a lot of really good things going on in Miami's backyard. But it was back when it wasn't like, oh, think piece, think piece, think piece, actual article, think piece, think piece. It was, like, real reporting. And even then, it still wasn't up to snuff in the end. But there were actual journalists, like, actually paying attention and writing about this stuff and informing the public about it. And this is when you and I were kids, and I think maybe even the seeds of us, because we both kind of had desires to be real deal journalists in our lives at one point got us. Now, speaking of the joke R-I-P mad magazine. Oh, yeah. What a shame. Yeah, they tried that. Reboot didn't work. Yeah, tough. It is tough business these days. Yeah. And I got friends that worked for them, too, like in this recent Reiteration. Oh, really? Yeah. Or Reiteration, I guess. I know one of their illustrators is The Stuff You Should Know fan from years back. Yeah, it's very sad to see it go. It's a very 80s reference, though. It was it really wasn't uptrack. All right, this is going on. They set up this office run by Auto. This whole thing was designed and orchestrated by the CIA. But here's the deal. The CIA wasn't supposed to be doing this. They were barred from doing this. Yeah. There was a longstanding prohibition on the CIA from operating in the US. Basically, like, we know who you are, and we know you're so good, you can't use that stuff on us. You can only use it overseas. It's fine if you go over. Throw other countries on your mind tricks. Yeah. Use those on other groups, but you can't use them here in the States. And actually, Reagan himself also had his own executive order explicitly banning the CIA from, let's see, doing any activity that was intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion or media. This is Reagan's executive Order twelve 333. And at least his administration was like, Forget about that. We'll just get around that. Yeah. And who was this? It says here that the CIA's biggest, foremost psychological warfare expert, retired from the agency officially, and then was hired as a consultant, I guess, to this Office of Public Diplomacy. Was that Auto Reich? Was that someone else? I don't know. Right. Yeah. But that's why I was saying earlier, the Reagan administration, Wade, just like, here's the letter of the law. Well, let's change this letter in our sentence, and now we're following the letter of the law. Right. And that's what they did. So the CIA psychological warfare guy retired, came on as a consultant. He said, oh, here's what you do. You need to basically start setting up some sting operations, because the point of this is to I can't remember who said this, but to paint or to glue black hats on the Santa Nistas and white hats on the Contras in the public mind. Right. So when you say sting operations, we mean, literally, the United States and Oliver North smuggling cocaine into Nicaragua, photographing sand in Eastern officials with this shipment, and then smuggling the cocaine back to the United States. Back to Florida. Back to Florida. We told you we bring it back. Chill, man. Unbelievable. Give us our driver's licenses back. So this photo was published this is during the middle of the Just Say no movement championed by Nancy Reagan. So it all fit on the surface, but what was going on behind the scenes is just unconscionable. It is unconscionable. Unconscionable. It was both. But this gave Reagan this photograph that got published all over the place. Yeah. And he's like, look what's going on. Look what these guys are doing. They're bringing this stuff into America, killing our kids. Exactly. Right. So these are the people that were fighting or the conscious are fighting. How can you keep the funding turned off for the contrast Congress jerks? And that was the only evidence, too. Yeah. The case somehow came out and said, by the way, I don't know if anybody cares or not, but we have no evidence whatsoever that this Santa Eston official has ever engaged in drug trafficking aside from this photograph. But this was a follow up, probably weeks after the big splash of the original photograph came out. So that was one sting operation. There's another one that involved Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who actually was selling drugs to America's youth. Yeah, but he was also a friend of the CIA. Exactly. So much so that he was a CIA operative for a very long time. Yes. I don't know about a friend, but he was at least an asset. Right. So this thing operation was they were going to, through Panama, have Panama arranged for a shipment of arms to be seized in Honduras. El Salvador. El Salvador, yeah. On its way to Honduras. Or maybe just in El Salvador. Ostensibly arms from Nicaragua. Yes. Basically saying, you're arming Salvadorians, you're arming Hondurans, you're exporting your revolution. This is exactly the kind of thing that Ronald Reagan has been saying. We need to contain we need to pluck the sprout of communism out from Nicaragua because they're trying to spread out of the region. Totally made up. Complete sting operation. And it didn't even work because Manuel Noriega was like, I didn't like that New York Times piece you guys just published about me. I'm going to keep this shipment of arms for myself. Yeah, but I love at first, he was like, I can do that. Sure. Send me the arms. And then we were like, okay. There would be I think it's from the Iran Contra investigation. The description of Manuel Noriega was that he ran a narco kleptocracy. That was the government that he ran. Break down that word. He was a shady as they come. That just means drugs fevery. Yeah, exactly. So this is what's going on in the United States in the mid 80s. Yeah. And here's the deal. If you were a reporter at the time and you were reporting on this stuff, the NSE didn't like that very much. So they would meet with editors and reporters themselves and be like, hey, can you report on the sand and Eastern that they're really not good people? Can you help us out a little bit? Right, well, but here's the thing. If you didn't play ball, then didn't they cook up some story that they would send, like, Sandinistan sex workers there to pleasure the reporters? That was the rumor was that if you were a journalist who reported favorably on the Santa Monica government, the reason you reported favorably on them was because the Santa Monica government was furnishing you with sex workers. Right. That was directly from the Office of Public Diplomacy. Right. And I read the thing about it, and they said the guy was like and we're not just talking women, either. If they were gay men, then we would send gay sex workers. Right. So totally discredit them. It's like a complete page right out of the Edward Bernays playbook. It's orchestrated by the CIA's foremost expert on psychological warfare, and this was the state of America in the mid 80s. But that was just one dimension of this whole thing. And I say this is the end of part one. What do you think? I think that's great. And we're going to make this a cliffhanger. That's right. And as per tradition, we are not going to do a listener mail, but instead we'll do a call, which we rarely do. A little marketing. Call everyone if you like. Stuff you should know. We've been doing this so long, we're so bad at this, yet we've managed to grow anyway. It's crazy. Tell a friend, share an episode with a friend now that they don't have to explain what a podcast is. Right. It's like, cleaner now. Maybe start with a good one, like ballpoint pens or something. Yeah. Tell a friend about the show. Leave a nice review, or just any kind of review at all on itunes. That would help us out. Yeah, that's how classy Chuck and I are. He even corrected himself from good review to just any review. Whatever you want to leave. We're not going to try to influence you. No. Like the Reagan White House. That's right. So, yeah, we'd really appreciate it. Spread a little love. Try and turn one person onto our podcast this week and that really helps us out. Nice, Chuck. How about that? It sounds like a good pyramid. We like to do this once every five or six years. Well, thank you for joining us this week. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to Stephen owe.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradiodio. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
How Time Travel Works (Live at SD Comic-Con) | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-time-travel-works-live-at-sd-comic-con | How does time travel work? Could it ever cross the line from science fiction into science fact? Join Josh and Chuck -- along with a live audience at the 2012 Comic-Con -- as they explore the ins and outs of time travel. | How does time travel work? Could it ever cross the line from science fiction into science fact? Join Josh and Chuck -- along with a live audience at the 2012 Comic-Con -- as they explore the ins and outs of time travel. | Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:51:47 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=12, tm_min=51, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=208, tm_isdst=0) | 26062510 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporxcom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Prerep, I guess, is what you call that, right, Chuck? Sure. Prologue forward. That's a good one. Prologue. I'm Josh and that's Chuck. And we are introducing a live podcast that we recorded in San Diego just a little while ago, july 12, I think. I don't remember. I believe it was the 12 July. It was great fun, though, at Comic Con. Yeah, it was a big deal. There were people who waited in line to get in. Some of those very people didn't get in, get turned away to see us. I know, that was weird. All those people were sorry. Yeah. For the people that came that weren't fans of the show. And if you happen to be listening now, then welcome and thank you for coming. Just out of interest, that was pretty weird, you know, to see people there like, I don't know who these guys are, but it sounds interesting. Those were the 300 people who had their arms crossed in front of their chest. Yeah. Expectantly and then disappointed. So we're going to just kind of get into this. If anything seems out of place or you're freaked out by people laughing, just remember it's a recording of a live podcast. Jerry did a great job recording it. And so here's us doing time travel at Comic Con 2012. For those of you who don't know, we have a podcast called Stuff You Should Know. It's on a website called HowStuffWorks.com our beloved website. And pretty soon we are going to be on the Science Channel, too, in January 2013, right? That's right. Okay. All right. Time travel. Yeah, let's do time travel. Everybody ready to learn a little bit about time travel? We're just going to do our thing. We're recording this live. Everybody say hi to everybody who's not here. For fans of the show, we have our producer. Jerry is actually here. She exists. Jerry. Jerry, do you want to say hi? Yay, Jerry. All right. Brass taps. Jerry, did you press record yet? Okay, so we are recording. Good. Yeah. All right. So, Chuck, Josh, have you ever heard of a guy named Andrew Basagio? I never know what to say here, because I do, but should I say no to say maybe? Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about this guy, all right? He's a Seattle attorney. Oh, I know this guy. Okay. And ever since 2004, he has been talking publicly about how he was part of something that he says was called Project Pegasus, which was supposedly a DARPA initiative for time travel. Yes. The US. Government was using children because apparently children were specifically suited for time travel, which I didn't know. More so than adults, we should say that this guy is the only source for this information. That's kind of a big qualifier. Very much, but he does have a pretty good story. Like throughout the 70s, from age seven to twelve, he did a lot of Lincoln assignments. I guess he traveled to Gettysburg at one point, where he was captured in a famous Josephine Cobb photograph, supposedly. And I went and looked, and I mean, it could be him. It's really blurry photography. There was a guy in the picture. There are several guys, but it was from 1863, so they didn't know what they were doing back then. And then he also traveled to Ford's Feeder several times, where at one point he ran into another version of himself from another time that had traveled back there for that same night. The Lincoln assassination, by the way. And all of this, by the way, is based on technology that was made from schematics found among the personal effects of Nikola Tesla that's right. Who died in New York in 1043. Who knew? So supposedly the US government ransack his department, came up with this build these time portals. Now, far be it for me to cast aspersions on another person's story, Chuck, and my motto is, to each his own. Always. Yes. We should like cling swords when we say. I know. But I would buy this guy's story a little more if he said that he was traveling to the future. Because after researching for this presentation. Doing a little bit of time travel research. I found that there are a lot of bona fide legitimate physicists cosmologists who say that. Yes. It is entirely possible to travel to the future. And we kind of do it every day. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. It's true. Do you want to talk about it now? Yeah. You know, Josh, there's an old joke in the scientific community, in the time travel community, let me see if I get this right, about an immigrant who comes to the United States, ellis Island, I imagine, and he lost his watch. It's really sad. And he goes up to a scientist and he says, please, what's this time? I don't know what country that is. That's a general, maybe European accent. Okay, he's European. And the scientist replies, I'm sorry, you'll have to ask a philosopher. I'm just a physicist. Kind of a silly joke. Good time travel scientists, this kills in lab rooms, but it is a silly joke. But it really gets to the heart of the matter. When you're talking time travel, it is very much a philosophical question. And if time flows like a river, like some people think in one direction, the question is, can you stop that flow? Can you reverse that flow? Can you go back in time, or can you speed up the flow and go forward in time? That's kind of the question. Yeah. I find it hardening to see, like, physicists and philosophers getting along, having a beer, talking about time travel, having their brains melt together, and you were talking about time flowing like a river. Can I talk about my boy, Stephen Hawking? Yeah, sure. Do we have any Hawking fans in here? Same here. I love that guy. That's Joshua's boy. Yeah. Hawking is my homeboy. Stephen Hawking was talking about how he wrote this really great article or essay or whatever you want to call it for the Daily Mail, of all people, about time travel. And then he talks about time as a river. He says, very poetically, it's like a river because it flows in one direction and we're all just kind of going along with it. But it's also a bit like a river in different spots. It travels at different speeds. True. And if we can figure out how to exploit those different spots then we can get to, like, the brass tacks of time travel. Yes. Hawking basically thinks you can travel into the future. All you have to go is really fast. Right. And we're talking I think the stat is the fastest thing ever was Apollo Ten. Yeah. Apollo 1020. 5000 miles an hour. Pretty fast. That's very fast. If you want a time travel, Hawking says you need to go 2000 times faster than that. That's really fast. Can I interject something? Sure. I actually did the math and Hawking got his math wrong. No way. From what he goes on to say that you need to get very close to the speed of light. 90%, 99%. Sure. You have to go like 20,000 times more, not 2000. So he's been Hawking, and I hope he doesn't hear this because there will be a SmackDown afterward, I'm sure. Be like, oh, you know math. Well, one of the big problems with going that fast is fuel. In order to go that fast, you need a humongous ship that can carry fuel enough to travel I think he said six years. Like ramping it up speed wise. And that's not very likely. At least any time you would need the speed ship to go toward the speed of light. Accelerating constantly for six years. And then like the fourth year you'd start to time travel because you'd hit like 90% speed of light. Sure. Which is like 600 million mile an hour pretty fast. And then I think at that point time goes an hour on the ship equals 2 hours back on Earth. So you're starting to travel in the future relative to the Earth, right? Yeah. Then after another two years you get to like 99% of the speed of light which is like 660 miles. Things are really happening. That's when like, a day is it a day? I think it's a day. A day on the ship equals like a year on Earth, which, okay, that's time travel. That's very fast. And if you turned around and went back to Earth, you could be like, check me out, I'm from the past. Because really, this is another thing I figured out from researching this is time travel. Really? It doesn't matter if you don't have anyone to show it off to? Yeah. Like, you can go travel out and outer space as long as you want and live forever, but if no one's there to see it, who cares if it's tree falls in the woods? That kind of thing. Exactly. The philosophers. Exactly. Yeah. So go ahead. You go ahead. Are we at Carl Sagan? Yeah. Okay. That's always a great question to ask. Are we at Carl Sagan? So Carl Sagan, who's my homeboy, has a viewpoint that sort of body slams the skeptics of the world. And I know there are skeptics, and skeptics like to unite and tell people things a lot with great vigor, but I am not one. I've always been more of a molder than a Scully. You know what I'm saying? That's nice. Yeah. Thank you for that. And here's what Carl Sagan has to say. Because basically what skeptical say is, if you can time travel, then why aren't we always visited by time travelers all the time? Hold on. That's Chuck Skeptic. Yeah, that's a skeptical I think we just had a skeptical dunning. He's gone. So Carl Sagan has this to say about I'm going to read it because I cannot summarize it any better than he says it. He says, first of all, it might be that you can build a time machine to go into the future, but not into the past. We don't know about it because we haven't yet invented that time machine. A little brain melting, but it makes sense. Secondly, it might be that time travel into the past is possible, but they haven't gotten to our time yet. They're just really far into the future. And the further back in time you go, the more expensive it is. That one. I'm a little bit like a little brave economics into it. Yeah. And then thirdly, maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented. So we haven't invented it yet, so it can't come to us. We are. So as far as time travel, you need to be drinking something to understand that? No, not really. It's just saying maybe there's, like, you just can't go back beyond the point where time travel is invented. He's just being a rabble rouser. And the final thing he says is, there's a possibility that time travel is really perfectly possible, but it requires such a great advance in our technology that the human civilization will destroy itself before they can invent it. That's the gloom and doom one. Exactly. And Sagan's raising all these points to say, like, you know, if somebody's saying, if time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers? And he's saying, hey, man, keep an open mind. That's what he used to say. And put on this turtleneck. Right? That's all. Just wear turtlenecks. Everyone will mellow out like Carl Sagan. And there was one other thing about Hawking's View he made a good point where if you aren't a show off and you don't need to time travel just to impress your friends, in the future, you could use the same ship that's going super, super fast towards the speed of light to just go to other parts of the Milky Way. It would come in handy very much for these long distance trips. Right? So say you wanted to make it to the Orion Nebula. You could do this. Several thousand josh and Chuck, come in. Do you hear something? Josh and Chuck come in. This is time pilot John Hodgman speaking to you from the future. Oh, it's Hodgman. Hey, Hodgy. Actually, you probably shouldn't be talking to me because I can't hear you. This is a time message. It only goes in one direction, backwards. I'm not even sure that I reach you. It all depends on if I got the time coordinates correct. Time coordinates, by the way, just latitude and longitude and altitude and time. Well, listen, Josh and Chuck, if you're getting this message, I need you to do something. Things have gone horribly wrong in this time stream, and it's all because of something that happens at Comic Con 2012 that you are intimately involved with. Basically, you piss off Joss Whedon because you don't recognize him. So I urge you, look at a picture of Josh Sweden and don't piss him off, because if you do, he gets so angry and he hates podcasts, and then he becomes a dictator and stops making movies. But if you recognize him, I guarantee you he will make another season of Firefly. Also, Josh and check that person in the Wookie costume is not a Wookie. Okay, well, I hope that fixes everything. It's really not good here in the future, so I hope you can fix it. I also hope that this message went to my time stream in the past and didn't get booted off to another multiverse, in which case is this reaching you in a different multiverse? Watch out for the floating, ghostly piranha. They will eat your face off. All right, I've got to go. That's all the time I have, so to speak. Time pilot John Hodgman from unnamed Future. Signing off. Goodbye. What a guy. He is always looking out for. You never know when future John Hodgeman is going to pop in. Does anyone know what Josh Whedon looks like? Okay, we need a picture later. He's not here. Is anyone going to the Firefly panel? Yeah, you better go get in line right after this. Wow. Well, that was what should we do now? We talk about methods of time travel, maybe? Oh, yeah, go ahead. Okay, so if you're talking time travel, which we are, there are two directions. You can go into the future or you can go into the past. I'm a past guy. I've always liked to see the Old West. I knew you were going to say Old West. Well, I just want to be a gunslinger. Do you? Yeah. And we're fringe leather stuff. That's right. But if you want to advance into the future, here's what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to exploit spacetime, which isn't the easiest thing in the world, but it's possible it actually happens every day up in the sky with GPS satellites. I don't know. That guy is nodding. He knows. Many of you may not know that these satellites actually accrue an extra third of a billionth of a second every day. Doesn't sound like much, but it's time travel and it's kind of cool. And the reason this happens is time passes faster in orbit down here on Earth. Basically, Earth is like a big dopey St. Bernard, like, dragging on time, and all the mass on Earth is just slowing down time and little tiny increments out there in deep space, you don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Right. And that's called gravitational time dilation. Yeah. And it's a real thing. And we observe this all the time. Scientists do. Astronomers do. When they see light in deep space, they'll see light moving in a straight line. And if it gets close enough to a sufficiently large object like, say, SAGITTARIUS A, which has the mass of 4 million suns, time will actually bend and they see this. And it's called the gravitational lensing effect. Right. So if you were to, let's say, travel to SAGITTARIUS and circle it, this black hole. And if you don't fall in, which would be bad. Actually, it might be pretty cool. No, it would be really cool. There's a word for it, like what happens to you? Sol, kind of. Okay. It's called spaghettification. Like the infinite density of the center of a black hole just thins you out into a spaghetti version of yourself that is not alive anymore. I could use that, actually. Good luck. So if you were to be able to circle SAGITTARIUS A for a little while without falling in, you would experience time at half the rate on Earth, which is time travel again. And you come back to Earth and you show off for everybody. Yeah. And that's basically the center of this. SAGITTARIUS is a really super dense point. It's called a singularity. But don't confuse that with the singularity. Two very different things. That's another big future problem. Yeah. We all be in big trouble with the singularity. Can I throw out some of my favorite, please? Universal cosmic anomalies. So Chuck was talking about a black hole. One of my favorites is called a car ring or curing. We can't figure out how you say it. Honestly, we looked. We really looked. So probably for the rest of the time when I say it, I'm going to say curing or caring. Okay, sure. Okay. And basically, this is like a black hole that forms from a lot of neutron stars that have collapsed and neutron stars are about the size of Manhattan, but they have, like, the mass of our sun, so they're super dense. A bunch of them will form into this ring that kind of turns into this whirlpool. And because of the centrifugal force of these things, singularity doesn't form, hence spaghettification doesn't befall you when you go through the center of these things. That's right. But it's still a black hole, right? Yeah. They think that if you go through, though, it's a one way ticket because probably on the other side is what's called a white hole, which is the opposite of a black hole, and it pushes light and matter out away from it. So there's no way of getting back. But it's still possible that you can travel through time, at the very least to another part of space. Right. You want me to tell you about another one? Well, this next one is my favorite. Oh, the Einstein Rosenbridge. That's right. Wow, that got applause. Yeah. And here comes the rest. Also known as a wormhole. Yeah, but everyone calls it a wormhole because you couldn't have a TV show called through the Einstein Rosen Bridge with Morgan Freeman. I guess you could, but through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman is, like, catchy, right? It's sexy. It is very sexy. Super sexy. So in Einstein Rosen Bridge or wormhole, it's kind of actually easy to grasp if you consider time or space time. It's like a flat sheet that you fold it in half and you left some space in between. Right. And then you have a sheet if you want to demonstrate. I like this. Okay. And then gravity is pushing toward the center, towards the sensory space in the middle. So if you have the sheet like that and you put like a baseball on either side, these depressions are going to form that are kind of akin to the bending of time. Time dilation. Gravitational time dilation. And if the depressions that they form connect, you got a wormhole. Boom. Yeah. And you may be able to travel through this. No one knows for certain, but it's just kind of like the physicists are at the point now where they're like, oh, and there's also this other weird thing, and maybe you can travel through time. And that is that what they say. That's kind of what they say. Chuck is an Old West kind of time travel guy. I like time travel in the past, too. I tend to think the time travel, the future is the one we're going to accomplish first. Yeah, I think so. The reason most physicists poopoo the idea of traveling back in time is because paradoxes arise. Yes. And when a paradox arises, usually that means the point is you can't argue it any further with a learned person. Yeah. This is the point where we talk about something called causality. And everything we know here on planet Earth, as I say, is based on the time since it's based on cause and effect and it's a one way street. Something happens first and that leads to something that happens after. You can't have an effect without the cause. Right. And it's a one way street going then in that direction. Cause, effect, and you have one of the big great famous paradoxes is the grandfather paradox. Right. The status of all paradoxes, which it kind of demonstrates yeah, this bums chuck out because the grandfather it's like, what the grandfather do? But say that you went back to kill your grandfather, right? You're an assassin. Maybe you'll do anything for money, a looper, if you will. And you go back and you walk up to your grandfather and you shoot him and kill him dead. But this is the virgin of your grandfather before he's conceived your father. Therefore, you can't possibly exist. Therefore, how could you get back to time travel in the first place? To kill yourself? Yeah, that's so sad. It is sad. But you know what? Time and Saturn, the grandmother paradox, that's where you go back. And they couldn't call it. They tried it and they were like, go back and kill your grandmother. Are you serious? Like, can you just call a grandfather at least? Because maybe he hits you once or something. At the very least, he made you mow the lawn for a nickel or something. Yeah. Grandmother just coddles you and feed you chicken and pie. Sure. Or at least mine did. You miss Granny Bryant, don't you? I do. Although she lived to be 100. I know. That's a ripe bullet. That is a ripe old age. That's called the sidebar. That's an inconsistent causal loop. My favorite is the consistent causal loop. Yeah, this is pretty cool because it's paradox free, which means it could actually happen. And there's a physicist named Paul Davies who describes it like this. Let's say a math professor travels into the future and steals this really valuable math theorem. Then he goes back to the past and he gives that theorem to a student. And that student ends up growing up to be the very person he stole it from. Everyone's gone. Pretty awesome. No one dies paradox free. Right. My favorite example of this, though, is well, we have a special guest here named Brian who's going to help us with this. Brian coming up here brian, everybody. Gives Brian a round of applause. So this is Brian. He's going to read to us an example, an explanation of probably the coolest example of a consistent causal loop. So, Brian, will you take it away? Sure. Probably the best demonstration of a consistent causal loop is found in the film Back to the Future. Toward the end of the movie, marty McFly performs Johnny B. Good on his guitar during the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. His playing catches the attention of one Marvin Barry, cousin of the famed musician Chuck Barry. His interest peaked. Marvin calls Chuck berry to alert him to this unusual sound, which prompts, we must assume Chuck Barry to write and record Johnny Be Good. But since he is from the future, we must assume that Marty McFly learned to play the song Johnny Miguel in his own time, based on the song recorded by Chuck Barry years in the past. This is impossible, however, because it was Marty McFly's performance of Johnny B. Goode that prompted its creation. This paradox where the origination of a thing comes as the result of time travel violates the law of causality, a truly important law. In deed. It's true that we could have also cited the pocket watch in the Christopher Reeves movie Somewhere in Time as an example, but Back to the Future was a way better movie. Yeah. All right. Very much, Brian. Nicely done. Thank you. Well done, sir. And then the final possibility is my favorite one, which is Many Worlds, Parallel Universes. I saw some head knots. People love that one. Because you can time travel all over the place, man, and you're just creating separate timelines and you're in many different sandboxes and it just doesn't even matter, right? Because if you go back and kill your grandfather in another version of the universe where you weren't born, who cares? Who cares, man? Because I'll just go on another timeline. Why are you talking like that? Because that's what the hippies like, man. I got you. Do you want to summate? I guess in summation, we certainly don't know if it's for sure possible, but I think it's important to ask these questions. People like Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and six century philosophers are talking about slowing down time and speeding up time. Then it's worthwhile to me. Agreed. And that is our presentation on time travel. Thanks. So I think we're about out of time unless we have a few minutes for Q and A. Do we? One question. Let's do one question. Let's do two. Quick. There's a microphone right there. Nice rocket. Have either of you ever wanted to be on Celebrity Jeopardy so you could just smoke them? I would love to be on Jeopardy. I don't know if we qualify for Celebrity Jeopardy yet. Maybe college, but I used to sit around in college all the time and play with my roommates and did pretty well, I thought. I think that the X factor is whether or not you freeze on TV. Yes. One more. Bam. In the hat. In the back. Baseball hat. Hello. Hi. Questions? Are you guys going to do books? Like, you know how you get the little books and all this stuff? Are you going to release those eventually, or do you plan on it? We have two audiobooks, which are like books, but they're way easier than regular books. But, yeah, we've definitely talked about that before. We're still trying to figure out what the idea would be behind it. But, yes, we're definitely not opposed to that. So look for in like 2015 maybe. Yes, we could all time job there right now. Exactly. So let's see, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us on Syscast, you can visit us on Facebook.com, and you can always send us a good old fashioned email by wrapping it up, spanking it on the bottom and sending it off to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Thanks. Have a good day. Thank you very much, everybody. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarkk, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
How Rodney Dangerfield Worked, Live From LA | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-rodney-dangerfield-worked-live-from-la | Other comedians cry on the inside, but Rodney Dangerfield built his entire act around his sad life. Get to know this legendary comic who was nearing 50 when he got his break. | Other comedians cry on the inside, but Rodney Dangerfield built his entire act around his sad life. Get to know this legendary comic who was nearing 50 when he got his break. | Wed, 18 Nov 2015 17:34:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=17, tm_min=34, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=322, tm_isdst=0) | 55129823 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, I guess I want to say hi and welcome to the podcast, but this is a little different because this is the intro to the podcast. Th that's right. We recorded a live episode at the La podcast Festival. Right. And this is it. Yeah, this is it. We did one on Rodney Dangerfield. It was September 19, 2015. The Sophie Tell in Beverly Hill. Very chic. Very chic. And it was a lot of fun. Great. So we hope you guys have fun listening to it and stick around after the credits roll, so to speak, because we have a little bonus track at the end of this one. How are you guys doing? Thank you very much for coming to our show. We do this normally, but it's usually just two of us and Jerry sitting here on Facebook while we record, like, eating miso soup. Yeah, she loves miso soup. And then we do live shows, too, but normally there's, like a gulf of a stage between us, and, like, you guys are right here, so we're watching you, too, I guess, is what I'm saying. She's got one of our shirts. Nice shirt. And she's the only one. Oh, I like that. Of course they are. It says, I listen to podcasts before cereal burned, and on the back it says, But I love cereal. We should also say hi to everybody in live oh, yeah. Streaming, folks. Hello. And of course, thanks to Audible and Squarespace and the rest of those people don't sponsor us. Does that count as a mid role ad? Sure. Okay, cool. Check the guy with a stack of money waiting outside the door right now. Mr. Monopolies just hanging out outside. Okay, so you got anything to start with? I got nothing to start with. I usually don't drink this early in the day, but the nerves and I felt it would be fitting as a tribute to our topic, which we're going to get into. So I decided to work up a heavy sweat because Rodney Dangerfield is known for drinking and sweating. Yes. You're basically missing the tie. Got everything else covered. Thanks. Are you guys familiar with one Mr. Rodney Dangerfield? Yeah. That's good. I'm glad to hear that. He's an increasingly underappreciated comedian. Like, I've talked to at least a couple of people who have not seen Back to School. I know his. And I was actually talking to someone who works here at the festival who said, Is he dead? And I said, yeah, that happens a lot to that. And she said, Why don't I remember that, Allen? It's no respect. No respect. That's the cool thing about the guy. Like, that was his whole shtick. That was his whole hook. Right. Well, we need to start in the traditional way. Okay, you ready? Very nice. Thank you. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Tuckers Bryant, and we are here at La Pod Fest and all you lovely people, give yourself a hand. Is that better? You feel? Yeah, a little more. You guys are happy with that, too? Good. Okay, well, now we have to start over. How many people have seen back to school? Great start. So, as we were saying, the weird thing about Rodney Dangerfield is that his whole stick about no respect was actually really close to accurate. As a matter of fact, not just while he was growing up, he had a really tragic, terrible childhood, but also as he got older and older. And even after he blew up, people just kind of took what he was saying and ran with it. He had this one story where he opened a club, which we'll talk about, called Dangerfields. So it's very obviously his club. And he was on his way up to the stage. He'd just been called up there, and on his way, some guy stops him and says, rodney, can I have your autograph and can you also give me some more butter? And like, this happened to this guy quite a bit, actually. Yeah. So it does turn out that you will see, even after death, the guy got no respect. But as Chuck will assert later, I predict he's a comedian's comedian and very actually well respected by the ones that count. Sure. And I don't know if you guys know this, but a lot of comedians have inner pain, which is the reason a lot of them get into comedy and the reason that many of them drink until they black out on many nights. Entertain is no secret to the comedy world, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who was as legitimately depressed and sad as Rodney Dangerfield. He was like a crying clown. For real, he was. He often talked about the heaviness he felt every day when he woke up. He said he would wake up in every day, and there it was. Lingering above him was his heaviness, with a capital H even. Yeah. And if you ever want to go down a YouTube rat hole, just look up some interviews with the guy on YouTube from the he does a lot of interviews, just like local TV stations promoting movies and stuff. And when he's out of his stick element, it's one of the saddest things you've ever seen, man. It's really depressing. He just had this air about him. You could tell he had the weight of life on his shoulders. And it all pretty much stems from his awful childhood. Right, childhood. Isn't it hilarious? So far, everybody. So we should start at the beginning with him. He was born in 1021 on Long Island. Not in Long Island, Chuck tells me, and he was born to a Volvo and father who took off with one of Rodney's brothers to go hit the circuit, and that was that. I think he saw him like once or twice a year for a half hour, an hour or something like that. Yeah. He said he saw his dad literally, like, twice a year growing up, and he was born Jacob Cohen, and his dad was a juggler in a comic who apparently hit the road because of his wife. We were talking about what an awful person she was when we were going over this stuff and that she was, but the more I thought about it, she had a serious problem. It was back in the 1920s. You didn't diagnose things like they do today, right. You just ran off to the vaudeville circuit. Pretty much. But she was clearly depressed, like profoundly depressed and sadly, completely abandoned emotionally and neglected, I guess. Little Jacob, he was left on his own from the time he could remember. His mom literally never hugged him once, never kissed them once. He swore up and down. Yeah. And never complimented him or tried to build him up. She was a bad lady. And starting probably around age eight or something like that, he realized that if he's going to eat dinner on a regular basis, he's going to have to go get a job and go grocery shopping himself. Right. So he basically raised himself during about age eight or so. Yeah. And speaking of groceries, one of the great things that stuck out to him about his childhood, he had to get a job and after school job, he was still in school, and he lived in a fairly wealthy neighborhood, but he was not wealthy, so we used to deliver groceries to his classmates home, which kind of demoralizing when you're like, ten. And while he was out there running around on the streets, he wrote an autobiography the year he died in 2004, and he called this chapter Male Prostitute because he was, like, ten. And he was so unsupervised that there were apparently at least one or two local molesters that were like, hey, Rodney, come on up. I got a nickel for you. Yeah. And he swears up and down that it was just kissing everybody. Don't worry. The child was just kissed by the grown man for a nickel. And it happened a lot, and he was doing it because he needed the money. Yeah. So, anyway, Rodney Dangerfield, let's fast forward out of this horrible funk. By the way, we're going to pepper in some of his best jokes here and there, and I debated on whether or not to try and do it as him, because it's hard I've already promised certain people here and there. It's hard to do that. It's hard to tell a Rodney Dangerfield joke without kind of doing him. And I took a little informal poll last night with some folks, and they're like, yeah, you sort of have to. Yeah, I think so. It's not like it's a good impression, but plus it makes me delivering at my flat, weirdo aspect where I'm not even trying it all the weirder, so prepare for that, too. But one thing that he did, and that of course, a lot of comics do, is they turn that pain into funny. And he really relied on his jokes as a way to I mean, the only time he was happy was when he was on stage performing. And as soon as he left, that heaviness would come back. But he often joked about his mum. He would say, My mom never breastfed me. She told me she always thought of me as a friend, which is a funny joke, but when you know the real pain behind it, it's just like the saddest thing you've ever heard. It takes a tad bit of the funniness away from it. I've got a good parent one. You ready? Yeah. So I remember the time and this is my rotting dangerfield. I remember the time I was kidnapped. They sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof. That probably did not happen, but it gets the point across. And plus, it's funny. And so if you're one more parent, Joe okay, sir. I tell you, my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio. Funny. All right, that's going over better than I thought it would. So starting about age 15, he realizes he's actually kind of hilarious and that he has a talent for taking all of this horrible, tragic stuff and turning into funny stuff. And he started writing jokes, and he got good pretty quick. He started selling jokes age 15 or 16 to establish comedians. Right? Yeah. And he kept him he had this duffle bag. He would write jokes by hand his entire career and put him in this duffel bag. So he literally had a duffel bag full of, like, thousands and thousands of jokes. And apparently, I think you said that during a typical performance later, once he hit the big time, he would tell, like, over 300 jokes in a set. Like 350. Yeah. In an hour. He ran it. There quick jokes, but still it's amazing. But he remembered them all and he knew which ones fit best. Like, the guy was a comic genius. Hopefully that's coming across here, or will by the end of this. Right. So he gets this big break at age 19. He's written jokes for a few years, and he's going to try this out. And he gets a job at a Catskills resort for $12 a week. Ten weeks, including grooming board, dirty dancing, that kind of scene? Very much so, yeah, but he's like the up and coming comic on stage, right? Have you guys ever seen Iron Man meets Dirty Dancing? That mash up? No. Go check it out. It's so bizarre. It's one of the better things you'll ever see that has nothing to do with riding dangerfield. That was just an add on, basically. So he's working. He's working hard. The stint and the cat Skills. I don't think he gets re up, but he keeps going back to the Cat Skills. It's one of his regular gigs, but on the side while he's working, he's a singing waiter at the Polish Falcons nightclub where Lenny Bruce's mom was the MC. He was an acrobatic diver. Right. But I don't know what you're all thinking. Triple nd no, he did not do the triple Indy in the movie. Obviously, for those of you who have not seen Back to School, that was an injury. Yeah. He was a diver in the movie. A competitive diver. Yeah. Well, I was going to punish them for not having seen it. Okay. Sorry. Just trying to drive him a point. So in, he gets married for the first time to a jazz singer named Joyce Endig, and he had a couple of kids and moved to New Jersey, which we all know is the death knell for any comedian trying to work in New York. Kind of means we've given up. But he didn't give up just yet. He did for a minute, for sure. Yeah. Not at that point, though. He was still trying to work, but when he turned 27, he quit comedy and literally did not perform from the age of 28 to 41. And at 41, he was like, let's try this again. Right. Well, he and his wife divorced, so he's like, I've got a little more time. I think I'm going to go try comedy again. They actually got back together, like, the next year and stayed married for another ten years or something like that. But this time around he was like, let me see if I can figure out how to balance home life with this. I'm trying to break into comedy. Right, yeah. And let me try and develop an act. I think the first time he floundered because he didn't know what kind of comedian he wanted to be. He tried singing, he tried impressions, he even tried prop comedy for a little while. But he also I mean, he had these jokes about how much his life sucked. He used some of the same jokes his whole life, but they just didn't hang on them quite right because he had his whole life ahead of him and he was young and full of promise. That second time around, he was right there in the sweet spot. Like age 41 ish little, desperate, kind of sweaty, and these jokes about how bad his life these jokes about how bad his life was or where it was going really just kind of hit a lot more. He adopted a persona, basically, and that definitely helped. Yeah, it was sort of him, but it was also a character. And when I was researching this, I was kind of thinking about that. You don't see a lot of character comedians anymore. No, that was the sort of heyday with like, Andrew Dice Clay and Rodney Dangerfield and Emo Phillips and it seemed like there were a lot of characters, but now it's just like, look at this thing that happened in my life and how funny it is with all these witty observations chuck Travolta about my life. I'd like to see some good character comedians come in. I can't think of it. Are there any out there? I guess Brent Weinback. That's kind of a character. Wait. What about, like, Larry the cable guy? He's total I assume he's a character. No, that is a character, because he started out as a completely different kind of comedian and then adopted that persona. Yeah, but I don't count him as a comedian. He's not watching. Don't worry. No, he's not. He's writing bad jokes. Gonna start a flame war with Larry the cable guy. I'll totally take him up on that. Flame war. Although he could squash me with his sacks of money. So he adopts his character. He changed his name legally at this point to Jack Roy, which was that his father's name. His father's stage name was Phil Roy. Yeah. So he changed his name legally to Jack Roy, and that was his real name till the day he died. And he was performing under that name for a while until he tried this second go and decided, I don't want anyone to remember Jack Roy. So he told this guy that was booking him at a club in Manhattan, could you just make up a name for me and put that on the I guess it wouldn't markey, but on the playbill. Yeah. Or in any ad they took out. Yes. So the guy who ran this place, the Inwood Lounge, I think, came up with Rodney Dangerfield. Right. But the weird thing is he had actually lifted the name from a Jack Benny character. Like there was an original Rodney Dangerfield, and it wasn't Rodney Dangerfield. Right. That's weird. It's a giant twist of the podcast. It's all downhill from here. So Jack Benny came up with this character and I think the 40s maybe or something like that, of this grade z Western hero named Rodney Dangerfield. And I guess the lounge owner remembered it and came up with that. Rodney Dangerfield had no idea about this. So he's walking around, like, using this name for years. And apparently he met Johnny Carson once at one of his shows. And Johnny Carson's, like, you know where your name came from, right? He said, no, what are you talking about? Yeah. Explain the whole Jack Benny thing. And later on, he saw Jack Benny, and Jack Benny wasn't, like, mad or anything. Actually said, I really love what you did with the character, and you did it just right. So no harm, no foul. Yeah, they hugged it out from the very famously. So on the second go round, he was making a living doing okay, but he got his real big break in 1967 with Ed Sullivan. He couldn't get booked on Ed Sullivan. But at the time, they would book other comedians for the run throughs as, like, just placeholders for dress rehearsal, basically. And so he got a spot booked on that and apparently did so well in dress rehearsal that Ed Sullivan took note on the side of the stage, which means he went like this, you're funny, right? That's how you knew I sold them and thought you were funny. As if he just told, bring him to me. That's good. Thanks, guys. It works for Nixon, too. It's great. Nixon, actually, that was the result of a huge long shot. He told his agent, just get me on Ed Sullivan. And it played out, panned out very well. He ended up being on Ed Sullivan, like 17 times or something like that. And it led to all these other late night appearances. He was on Carson, like, I think a record. He holds the record for being on Carson the most 70 times. Something like that, yeah. Merv, Griffin, Dino, all the dudes who are running late night. And basically where the taste makers for all of the comedians were suddenly promoting the sweaty, weird, coke up pothead boozehound, huge pothead name, by the way, rodney Dangerfield. Right? And he took it and ran with it. Like, right when he hit in 1967, he got to work. He was such a big pothead. Actually, the original name of his biography was going to be my Love Affair With Marijuana. And he was serious. He wanted to call it that because he smoked pot, he said, for 60 something years. But well, up until the day he died, I think from like 21 on, like, he was smoking pot in ICU, in the hospital, because he had an early medical marijuana exemption long before anyone even knew what that was. He just wrote his own no one even knew what that was. But if he flashed it in your face, you didn't ask questions. So he got his big break. Actually, Carson had blackballed him for a while because he accused Carson in a letter of stealing, or one of his writers of stealing one of his jokes. So Carson famously wouldn't have him on the show for a long time until they eventually met and worked it out. And then Johnny became, like the biggest fan ever. And if you want to enjoy yourself at home on the YouTube, just go look up Johnny Carson on Rodney Dangerfield. On Carson. There's a lot of clips where, I mean, Carson was just like the ultimate set up dude. It just let him do his thing. Yeah. And he would laugh until he was crying because he couldn't believe that Dangerfield is getting away with saying most of the stuff he was saying on TV on Carson's own show. It was good. So he's married. He's working a lot. And he decides that he doesn't want to happen to his own kids what happened to him. Which was to be neglected so he said. You know what I'm going to do. Even though no one's ever done this. I'm going to borrow a bunch of money. Quarter of a million dollars. And I'm going to open my own comedy club in New York City so I can stay home with my children. Brian and Melanie. I think. Right. And it's not like he had any money right then. This is a huge risk. He's doing okay, but he had to borrow all yeah. Not that. Okay. Right. So everybody tries to talk him out of it. He goes ahead with it, and it's such a success. He has the loan paid off in, like, 18 months. Just a huge success. And this club actually became venerable in its own right. Yeah. Still there today. Dangerfields in New York. Yeah. And it had this HBO special that it broadcast out of, and a bunch of comedians got their big breaks on that show, like Seinfeld, chris Rock, I think. Yeah. Jim Carrey, what's his face sagget. Jeff Foxworthy. Yeah. A lot of Jeff Foxworthy fans in the room. Rita Rudner. Of course. Sam Kennedy completely made Sam Kenneson's career. And that's why comedians love him so much, because it meant more to him to play father to these young comics and to give them their start than almost anything else. He really that was sort of his life's goal, was to seek out talent that he thought was original and really kind of boost him up. He was a huge Freudian. Yes. The whole father son thing. I wonder why. So, Chuck, where are we at? We are at Dangerfields. It is. And he decides that, you know what? I should start making movies because well, he made a few movies before that, but nothing that anyone would know. He was actually cast first by Stanley Kubrick in 1956 for the movie The Killing. The Killing. Great movie. Who said, yeah, wow. Yeah. Great movie. So he plays onlooker big part, and then he was in another movie. What was that other one called? The Projectionist. Yeah, it was a big part in a very small movie. He said that it was the type of movie where they went to go shoot on location by taking the subway. Which is probably true. Yeah, I think it was. But he played this movie projection as boss, and the projection has had quite an imagination, and he was a superhero, and Dangerfield was this archvillain nemesis. It didn't go very far, but he learned almost nothing about how to shoot a movie because this is 77. And apparently his huge breakthrough came in Caddyshack. Right. He was already very much a well respected comedian. But when he shot Caddy shack Harold Ramis. Right. Yeah. When he directed it, he said later on that clearly Dangerfield didn't know what he was doing. It was a live performer. So when Harold Raymond said Action, rodney Dangerfield would just stand there and be like, you want me to do my bit. Now, that's what action means, right? Do your bit. So then Rodney would just turn to the camera and do his whole bit into the camera. He's like, hold on, we got to get this right here. So pretend the camera is not there one. And he finally got him to do it because that was the thing that just broke him out. Yeah. And he hated making movies. Like you said, he loved performing live in front of people, and that's where he got his rush. And he once compared making movies to he said when you make a kid write something a hundred times on the chalkboard and they've done something wrong, he's like, that's what making a movie is like. He hated doing all these takes. He hated standing around and waiting. It's why he didn't make a ton of money. He felt like the live audience. He compared it to a heroin addict, like shooting up. He just loved that rush. And he definitely didn't get that from movies, which, I mean, you got, like, the crew standing around looking at you waiting for lunch. It wasn't his bag at all. It was not his bag. You found this description from Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong Torres, which I think describes him, like to a T. Do you want to read that, sir? Okay, so Benfong Torres, who is in Almost Famous, he had a quote. He says, Rodney Dangerfield looks like a midlife crisis. There's a surface orderedliness, he's groomed, and he's dressed like a businessman at a convention. Gray hair slicked back over a haggard shades of Mayor Daily face, dark suit, white shirt, bright red tie, silk stockings, shiny shoes. But the neatness gives way to what he calls the heaviness that looms over him. Life gives Rodney Dangerfield the jitters. He's in a constant sweat. He wipes his brow, incessantly, tugs at his tie, herky jerky as he recounts the horrors of his daily life. He shifts his shoulders uncomfortably and his eyes bug out of their bags. He moves the floor mike around as he roams the Comedy Store stage looking for sympathy, but all he gets are laughs. I just think that's fantastic, man. He nailed Rodney Dangerfield in that. Absolutely. And his shirt and tie, that came about because, well, he hated clothes and fashion. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and say that. I think it's time. He was a slob. He was a slob. He said in interviews how much he hated clothes, how he never cared about clothes and fashion and was comfortable in a robe, basically. But for one of his first acts, he put on the red tie and the black suit and dressed all dapper. And when it came for the second performance, he was like, well, they liked me in that, so I'm just going to wear that. And that became his stick, was this very dapper looking guy who's always very well put together. In fact, I just saw earlier today when he gave out a best makeup award at the 87 Academy Awards. Really? Yeah. And he walked up and he said, hey, nice tuxedo, everybody. Right. And he went underneath torn under shorts. You get the feeling that was the dead truth. Yeah, I'm sure. Probably had, like, holy underwear on it. I'm not quite sure. Yeah, you should look at it, too, man. That's great. I will. Because he basically does five minutes of stand up at the Academy of Awards and then gives out an award. So Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. Yeah. Take some notes and then some dangerfield stuff. Should we take a break here, Chuck? Take an ad break. Yeah. And we'll be right back after this big announcement. Folks. It's called a podcast event called The Message. That's right. Thanks to GE Podcast Theater and Panopley, there is an eight part series out right now called The Message, and you can get it wherever you get your podcast. Yeah. And you know what? It's going to blow your collective scientific minds, because it's currently rocking our world. Yes. So the message follows the story of Nikki Tomlin, who's a PhD in linguistics. Right. That's right. At the University of Chicago. If I'm not mistaken. That's right. And she's following a team of cryptologists, which really if you say cryptology, you've really got me hooked already. Sure. They're a research tank. Tank called Cypher, and they're trying to decode a message received from outer space from 70 years ago. Yeah, it's from outer space, we think. And if you're not familiar with the story, well, then I guess you better go listen to The Message. You can get it on itunes. You can get it on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for The Message and subscribe today. Yeah. So thanks to e podcast Heater and panopoly for pushing the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a great job. Go subscribe to The Message and listen today. And we're back. All right. I told you that would work. So he makes Caddy Shack huge hit. He's allowed to kind of just do his thing in that movie. I'm sure most people have seen that classic comedy, which Josh said would stink if it weren't for Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray. The rest of it is like a tepid coming of age. Dramedy sucks. Ted Knight, he was fine, but, I mean, you can watch too close for comfort and get just as much as you want. I just don't think it needs to be in the movie, all right? I think it was Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. That's what made Caddy Shack a classic little Chevy Chase. Ted. Ted, you know how I feel about Chevy Chase. My father raised me to hate Chevy Chase. Did he really? He really did. Your dad didn't like him. Oh, man. Still does not like Chevy Chase. Why? Didn't think he's funny or he thought he was pompous ass. Yeah, something about Chevy Chase sticks in my dad's crawl and he passed it on to me. Isn't that weird? It is totally weird. That's what you get when your dad's not a vaudevillian. They pass on weird stuff like that, too. So he makes caddy shack. It was a huge hit. Now he was legitimate. He was sought after for movies. And then in 1983, he wrote a movie called Easy Money. Has anyone seen that? Anyone? Yeah, it's actually a pretty cool movie. It's not bad. It's a little weird structurally, which kind of makes sense that he wrote it because he clearly did not have to write a script. He knew how to write a bunch of good jokes, though. So he played Monte Capilletti, an Italian American drunk. Pothead baby. Photographer Because this was back in the early 80s when anyone of any ethnicity could play anyone of another ethnicity. Sure, right. Because he was Hungarian born. But, hey, play an Italian guy. It's cool. So in the movie, his mother in law was the inspiration for Twin Beds and hated her son in law. And when she died, she said, all right, you can have all this money if for one year I think, like $10 million if for one year you quit gambling and boozing and smoking and doing drugs. So easy money was Joe Pesci. It was okay. Right? Like, the first half of this movie is just a series of vignettes to where he just completely screws everything up and your stomach's all upset and everything. And, like, you're really emotional, and then nothing comes of it whatsoever. Right. And then finally, halfway through, the plot arrives and then it gets kind of good, actually. Agreed. A lot of build up, not a lot of pay off in that one, but one roger Ebert liked the movie even though it was a little weird and said basically the movie was about watching Rodney Dangerfield. He said, Rodney Dangerfield gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to WC. Fields in this lifetime. Right. And Rodney himself said, that was pretty much me on screen. That's as close as you can come to my real life in Easy Money. Yeah. Right? Yeah. He's a baby photographer. So 1986 is when he finally makes Back to School, which was his biggest hit. I think it costs like, 13 million to make 11 million a gross. Well over 100 million. Which in 1986 I mean, today, that's still good money. Yeah. In today dollars, that's $150,000,000,000. It's inflation for you. Right. And this one, he had the idea I think he got a story credit of a guy, a father that goes back to school. He was a big loser in life, so he goes back to school with his son to get his degree. And he told that idea to Harold Raymond, and he was like, that's good. But what if he was rich? What if he was wealthy and had it all and still goes back to school, like, knowing what he knows now with a lot of money and riding was like, okay, that's the movie. Yeah, it's a good idea. And actually that was a huge movie when it came out. It was the six biggest movie of 1986. It was behind Top Gun platoon. Karate Kid Two, star Trek Four. And there's one other one that's written down somewhere in here, but there are big movies and it was like the 6th highest grossing movie of the year. And it's Rodney Dangerfield, right? Yeah. And so he has hit it big at this time and is a huge, huge movie star in the biggest comic. I think they did a survey in the late 70s, right before his movies with college students that said that Rodney Dangerfield was their favorite comic and he was 61 years old. 58. 58 years old. Same thing, basically was when he hit it big as a comedian. 58 years old. Right. And like, college kids are like, into this guy. And actually, if all of you seen back to school, if that's all you've seen of riding Dangerfill, you don't quite have the understanding of what he was actually like. He was pretty edgy comic, actually, and pretty hilarious. And college kids loved him in the 70s. He hosted Sarah Live in 1980 when he was, I think, like 60 or something, 59. And he started to blow up like at about age 60. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Should we tell a few more of his favorite jokes? I think it's high time to you guys look over a few of these. He has a great joke about his psychiatrist. I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me and he said I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn't met me yet. Classic. Yeah. Let's see. I like this one. It's lowbrow, but I like it. You know what class is? When you're alone, you fart, you say, excuse me. That's class. Isn't that weird? So if you haven't noticed a lot of his jokes, they were selfdeprecating for himself, but also about his family. He talked about his wife was dumb and fat and his son was stupid. And even when he wasn't, I mean, it was all a character. So even when he wasn't married, he was telling jokes about his wife, which must have made it a lot easier when he went home at night. Probably. So one of my favorite wife jokes was, I tell you, my wife can't cook at all. How can toast have bones? And your impression is getting better as we go along. Oh, I'm drinking whiskey. Yeah. I'm not saying that. Let's see. I've got one. Like I said, it's a little weird. And I like that in a comic. Just bizarre stuff. He was talking about the bar that he was doing stand up in that night. He says, what a joint. I asked the bartender for a double and he brought out a guy who looks like me. I missed those days, man, where comedians just wrote great jokes, set up punchline over and over. Yeah, I tell you, I drink too much. The last time I went to the doctor, I gave him a urine sample. I had an olive in it. Classic. And then another thing I've learned about Rodney Dangerfield, when you go back and listen to his stuff, he wasn't, like, mean. He was self deprecating. Even when he was targeting, like, his family, mostly nonexistent family, all of it reflected back on him and basically what a loser he was. Right. And he didn't have very many mean jokes. He didn't tell, like, many gay jokes. He didn't tell racist jokes or anything like that, which and this is like in the 70s when everybody was telling me, but he did have the fat joke that stuck out to me. Are you fat? Do you look at a menu and say, okay, love getting laughs from Rodney Dangerfield. Chuck, we should just do this. I was about to say, I think we have a new act. You should know one day. Talk about a rush. I got one more. I tell you, I was dating a woman. She called and said, come on over. Nobody's home. I went over, nobody was home. Good stuff. I have a new career. Reading Rodney Dangerfield jokes. That's a whole no one's done that cover comedians. Oh, man. Dude, sharknado. And now this. You're all aware of Chuck predicted sharknado, right? Okay, he did. You're welcome. Okay, no more. You got any more? You like the one about his dog? Tell that one. Okay, all right. My dog is lazy. He's so lazy. He doesn't chase cars. He just lays in the driveway taking down license plates. All right, so now we're in. That's enough. Stop laughing. In the early 1980s, he's making these movies. He won best comedy album Grammy for the album no Respect, beating out Richard Pryor, Monty Python, Gilder Radner and Father Guido Sardi. And in 1982, the Smithsonian Institution put his red tie and his shirt in the Smithsonian the American History national Museum of American History, right. Along with Jimmy Dranny's hat, RT bunkers recliner and Charles Lindbergh's plane. But the joke Rodney said was he got a feeling after they left, they were just going to use the shirt to wipe down the plane. Always self deprecating. Yeah, Andy, and when he handed them the shirt, he said, this is a big deal. I only have two shirts. Which may have been true. And also in the 1980s, who remembers the Miller Light commercials from the 1980s? Tastes great. Less filling. That man back there has his hand up. All right. They were great commercials. It was, like, named the 8th best advertising campaign in history for McCann Erickson, the ad agency. And I went and watched a ton of them earlier today, and I remember them all from being a little kid. And it was weird for those of you who haven't seen them. The premise was you would get a bunch of ex athletes and then Mickey Splain and Rodney Dangerfield and some other random pop cultural icons at the time and to sell Miller Light and get in a big argument about taste great and less filling at the end. Rodney would usually come in as the ship who does something wrong to spoil everything, screw everything up for us. Such a weird. Like Bubba Smith and Dick Buckets and baseball players. I get all that. I don't know. It was so strange. But they were huge and they were the one who could store the weed for everybody else. They let them. On January 1984, if anyone remembers, his hit rap single Rap and Rodney have you guys heard this? Really? It's something else. It is. And it was a big hit, actually. It was a top 60 hit, which is pretty big. Top 59. Chuck, give it its due. That means it was number 59. Yeah. So it was right behind Uptown girl. And it was Rodney Dangerfield rapping about being old, which sounds really bizarre now, but legitimate rappers at the time like, say, the Sugar Hill Gang were rapping about having dinner at your friend's mom's house. So it wasn't that far off the mark for the time, being nice to your family. That's what raps were about. At twice the good old days, he was on The Simpsons, I think, a couple of times. Would have he I don't know if he was on more than once. I think he's on twice. But in 1996, he played Mr. Burns illegitimate son Herb who got no regard. No regard at all. I wonder why they didn't say respect. Did they not? I think they were just a joke messing around. Okay. Yeah. The man himself was there. I would have been surprised if he was like, look, guys, it's one thing. I don't want to say respect. Maybe not. It was just a boy that I'm trying new things here, trying to branch out. Which actually he did branch out. He was actually a really creative guy. He had a live Broadway show that ran for a couple of weeks in 1988 called, appropriately, Rodney Dangerfield Live on Broadway. Exclamation point. For a couple of weeks? Yeah. He wrote a romance novel called Lock and Tessa. And if you Googled the image for this, it's disturbing. Yeah, it's basically like your typical it's Fabio, basically with a woman. Except it's got Rodney Dangerfield's face on it and it's available on Audible. Oh, is it really? Yes, it is. With Rodney Dangerfield reading it. No way. I kid you not. Would I joke? About what's? On Audible. Well, I looked up earlier to see if his autobiography was on there. It's the only Rodney Dangerfield thing on there. It's awesome because it has the album art, too. So you get that for free with the audiobook. He wrote and I guess he didn't direct it, but he produced and wrote the movie Rover Dangerfield, the animated classic about a dog who gets no respect. And then Mr. Oliver Stone called him up one day and said, I had this role for you in a movie called Natural Born Killers. And it's about this sadistic father who was molesting his daughter, raping his daughter, and I think he'd be perfect for it. And Ronnie didn't get it at first. She was like, why do you want me for this kind of role? He's like, you'll see? Yeah. And did you guys see that? Natural Born Killers. You can get this scene on YouTube. It's when Oliver Stone did the phony sitcom. It's how they portrayed that part of the movie. So they have a laugh track, and it's really disturbing. It's like three layers of bizarre. Right? Rodney Dangerfield is a sadistic, incestuous molester, but it's Rodney Dangerfield that's the weird part. And then there's a laugh track to just throw you off that little extra bit. It is very jarring. It was pretty well done. But the notable thing about that is that Oliver Stone let Rodney Dangerfield rewrite all of his lines, and he got a lot of critical acclaim for everybody's. Like Rodney Dangerfield. We had no idea. And he's like, seriously, if you go today and just Google the Rodney Dangerfield of, you can find a whole list of things. He's such a cultural icon. That phrase itself has become a thing now. Like Petitzera is the Rodney Dangerfield of California wine or the Memphis, Tennessee City Council is the Rodney Dangerfield of local government. Seriously, that's the thing. Avon saw guitar preamp was known as the Rodney Dangerfield of guitar preamp. Yes. My favorite is Palladium is the Rodney Dangerfield of precious metals. Isn't that stupid? We're not making this up. So, Chuck, right about now, let's step back a second, press pause on this, and have a beautiful little message break. Agreed. Hey, everyone, when you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. So here's some more examples of the lack of respect. And here's sort of the thing. The irony is he got nothing but respect from his peers throughout his career. But outside of that, there was still just doses pepper throughout his life. And examples of times where he didn't get any respect. Like when he sued Star magazine. They published a story about him being in Las Vegas and said he would drink, like, tumblrfuls of vodka and smoke pot all day long and do cocaine, which was all completely true, probably, but he knew that they couldn't prove it, so he sued them for libel and the court ruled in his favor. Right? Yeah. So that's respect. Right. So they awarded him $1 for damage to his reputation and one dollars for personal distress. Yeah. And then the judge went, yeah, sorry, live stream, people. I realize it's archive. He did get awarded $45,000 for presumed damages. And I did a little more research today on that. Apparently he sold it all on coke and weed. Apparently Star magazine showed that they didn't turn a profit, so he couldn't go after him. He couldn't appeal for more money. Right. So he tried to go after their parent company, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And they said, you didn't start the suit that way. They worried it now, basically. Yeah. No respect. And even in death, as we mentioned earlier, rodney Dangerfield is dead. Why didn't I know that? I have an example for you. Hold on. Before he dies. Okay. He was on Howard Stern the year he died. And somebody watched that interview. Yeah, I did. Oh, man, that's depressing. He's 81. He's clearly, like, at death store, but he still has his sense of humor about him. But somebody called in to Howard Stern and said hey, Rodney, it's Bob Hope. I'll see you in 15 minutes. And Howard Stern is like, well, that's not funny. Bob Hope is dead. So they were saying like, that Bob Hope was calling from behind the grave and would see Rodney Dangerfield in 15 minutes. And if you can't get respect from a caller on The Howard Stern Show, where can you get respect? So it's actually in that interview, which I said, it's like 45 minutes long and it's completely depressing, so don't go watch it. And not just because he was old, but Howard is trying to talk to him about his childhood and stuff. Well, he had just written his autobiography and really just laid it all out there. He'd alluded to the rough life that he had in interviews and stuff like that. But he published this book right before he died, and it was rough. Well, I think the saddest thing to me about his mom was that despite being completely neglected emotionally and getting no love at all, as a child, he still wanted to be like, a good kid, and he still worked to support her and apparently came home and showed her his report card. He worked hard to get good grades. She wouldn't even look at it. She just signed it without looking. And that was the saddest part, is he still sort of defended her in that interview, like, right before he was dying. And he made up with his dad before his dad died, apparently, even though he never saw him. He said he forgave him for all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Really sad stuff, though. He wanted to hear some more jokes. Well, actually, why don't you tell him how he died? Okay. Well, in this interview, in the same interview, he's telling Howard Stern. Howard Stern is like, he's about to go in for the should I pretend there's not a siren in the background? He's going in for surgery, and Howard Stern asks him, like, are you afraid you're going to die? And he goes, you know what? Dying in surgery would be the best way to go. They drug me up. I go to sleep, and then I just wouldn't wake up. That's, like, as good as it gets, right? Yeah. So he goes in for this very surgery. He falls into a coma during surgery. Almost there. And then he wakes up. Then he has a heart attack, then he dies. Yeah. That's how Rodney Dangerfield went after that life that he had. That's how he went. He was so close to going the way that he wanted to go. No respect. You want to hear no respect? A year after he died, CNN tried to get in touch with him to get his reaction about the passing of Johnny Carson. If you read his obituaries, a lot of them a shocking amount, mention that he was well known for his role in the Scout. He wasn't in the scout. I got to the bottom of that. Lay it on me. He was going to be in the Scout. Okay. The role was originally intended for him and Sam Kennesen, and he didn't do it for unknown reasons and ended up going to Albert Brooks and Brendan Frazier. Okay. But it was one of those things I think we're one of those Internet neat things on the Internet where someone prints something, then everyone else just copies and pastes it. So I think one person wrote that because everything else I saw was worded the exact same way. Like list his movies as the Scout, which he was never in. No, he wasn't. Thanks for looking into that, man. Sure. That's what you get when you hang with Chuck. But he did find love, again in a situation in 1993 that everyone probably thought was like, a typical gold digger. He was 61 years old, and he married a 30 year old woman who was really hot blonde in La. But by all accounts, everything I looked into it was not that she really loved them and was great for them, and they were super happy together, or as happy as he could be. And it turns out that it wasn't that kind of a deal after all, which made me feel good. Yeah, like, for example, when he died, she made sure that his funeral wasn't until five or dusk because he always asked her not to schedule any appointment for him before 05:00 p.m.. So she made sure his funeral didn't come until after that. His funeral was a really big deal. Everyone basically came out in droves. His pall bearers included Jim Carrey, who he took Jim Carrey on the road for two years when he was a struggling comedian and he opened for him in Vegas and Jim Carrey was getting booed off the stage. Everyone hated him. And Rodney stuck by him for like a full two years. And Jim Carrey never forgot that. Chris Rock, Tim Allen, Larry David, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Adam Sandler and then your boy Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton, he was supposed to sing what he was, but he was too choked up to sing at Rodney Dangerfields funeral. Apparently, they were really tight friends because Michael Bolton's song Everybody's Crazy was in Back to School, and I guess he parlayed that into a trip to the set where he got to meet Riding Dangerfield and they became friends for the rest of their life. So Michael Bolton was too sad to sing at Dangerfield's funeral. And, you know, everybody is disappointed. I bet there were a couple of people there that were like, yeah, it's okay, Michael, we know you're upset. Right. You don't have to do this if you don't want. Everybody will understand. That's what they said to us before we went on. So we're going to close this with a final nice little cherry on top about Rodney Dangerfield and sort of his outlook on his lack of respect when it comes to the Academy of Motion Pictures. Motion Picture Sciences, yes. Is that what it's called? Yeah, as you guys call it in La. The Academy, right. He applied for membership because he wanted to be in the Academy, and he had the credentials. He was in movies, and they said, no, no, you had to be in like, at least three major roles. He had 13 under his belt by this time, including Natural Born Killers, for which he received a lot of critical praise. Right. And they turned him down like jerks. Right. He even got a letter from Malcolm McDowell. Roddy McDowell. Roddy McDowell. Which one is Malcolm McDowell? He's the good one. Are they brothers? I don't know. Are they? No relation. Okay, Roddy. It was Malcolm McDowell. Stop saying it was Roddy McDowell and Clockwork or Malcolm McDowell. That was Malcolm McDowell. Okay, good, because I felt a lot better about this then. Roddy McDowell was in Planet of the Apes. Yeah. Okay, good. I'm glad that those two were separated in my mind because I was like, I really like them. And clockworks. Yeah, good. Roddy McDowell, who everybody hates, wrote a letter to Rodney Dangerfield, this rejection letter that said that he had not had enough of the kind of roles that allow a performer to demonstrate a mastery of his craft. Basically, you're just playing Rodney Dangerfield, and we all know it, even though he had all the credentials to get in. Right? So Rodney Dangerfield, he's like, let's see. What year is it? What year is it? 1995. What's new? What's on the horizon? The Internet. I think I'll build the world's first ever entertainment website. And he built his own website and realized that this would be a great place for his fans to come, like, vent their anger. And it was as a matter of fact, this guy think about that. This is and his fans came on and were like, the heck with the Academy, that kind of stuff. And the Academy actually relented and said, you're in, man. You're in, Rodney. Come on in. That's right. What do you say? No. He said, thanks, but no thanks. He still has a website, Rodney.com. And if you go to that I just found this out earlier. There's a section called Jokes and had audio clips. I was like, oh, this is great. But it's not him. It's some dude reading, like, as bad as me. Really? Just saying his little one liners over and over. And it's not in front of people. It's like, dead quiet, and it's just some dude saying his jokes. It's really weird. I can't tell you how much I'd love to cover comedian idea, just how stealing from other comics is such a taboo. We just need to just get out in front of just own it. Yeah. Mix up a little like Mitch Hedberg and rich little people's mind. Do a little Stephen right there in the middle. Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, I like it. So that's Rodney Dangerfield, everybody. That's our show. If you want it anymore, you're sol that's right. Yeah, you can clap if you want it's. Cool. Hey, that was fun, right? That was a lot of fun. Yes, we had a great time. And big thanks to the La podcast Festival for having us out. Yes, please have us back. We'd love to. Yeah, it was really cool. We got to see other shows, and we did our own and had a nice little crowd there. Very supportive, nice kind of people all the way around and look for the next La podcast. Best coming, I would imagine, next September 2016. Hopefully we'll be there. Yeah, keep your ears up for it. We'll mention it whether we are or not, because we're that kind of guy. That's right. No listener mail for me, buddy? No, but if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@householdworks.com. And as always, join us at our super awesome home on the Web stuffyoufnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.com. My psychiatrist said you're crazy. Oh, hold on. I already messed it up. No, that's right. My psychiatrist said I'm crazy. I told him I wanted a second opinion. He said, okay, you're ugly, too. Yeah, he wrote that joke. Man, everybody knows that joke. It's a good joke. When my wife has sex, she screams, especially when I walk in on her. Boy, he wrote a lot of jokes about his wife cheating on him. Like hundreds and hundreds of jokes because he wasn't married. If it wasn't for Pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all. The football team for my high school was tough. After they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family. That's a good, clean joke. That's good. Nice. What else we got here? I solved my drinking problem. I joined AA. I mean, I still drink. I just use a different name. I'm getting old. At my age, shooting up means using an enema bag. I think there's one more about a dog. Oh, yeah? What a dog. I got what a dog. His favorite bone is in my arm. I think that's it for me. Yes, I'm pretty sure I want to say that. I have another one hiding in here somewhere, but I can't find it. All right, go to the YouTube, folks. Yes. Make sure look up. Iron man versus Dirty Dancing. You will love it. Anything else? No, that's it. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much. You too. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
How Avalanches Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-avalanches-work | Each year, as snow builds on peaks across the world's mountain ranges, the potential for avalanches builds. Learn about the science of how these natural disasters develop and are triggered - and how to survive one if you ever find yourself trapped. | Each year, as snow builds on peaks across the world's mountain ranges, the potential for avalanches builds. Learn about the science of how these natural disasters develop and are triggered - and how to survive one if you ever find yourself trapped. | Thu, 22 May 2014 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=142, tm_isdst=0) | 40365733 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles David, Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel over there. It's like Jerry with a beard. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. That's a good way to describe Noel. Yeah. Because it's not at all accurate. No. Except for the beard. But it's funny. It is funny. That's the point. How's it going? It's going fine. You got a good intro for this one. Not really. I was going to mention the terrible avalanche on Everest. Oh, yeah. It took the lives of, I believe, 15 Sherpa. Yeah. That was sad. Yeah. It was especially sad because we know how Sherpa work. We've done an episode on it before and to Live and die on the mountain, it's kind of like well, it's become the Sherpa way a little bit, but it's still a major tragedy. Yeah. Because Sherpa, if you go back and listen to that show, I think we even called it what? Like warm, warm friendly living. Yeah. They're really great and just good souls and it was super sad to hear about that. Is that what prompted this idea? I believe so. Just say yes. Okay. Yes, it was. I thought it might have been. I know you know a lot about snow crystal shape because of your Don't Be Dumb episode recently. I thought that might have been it. Yeah. About whether or not there is such thing as two snowflakes that are exactly alike. What's the answer? I think that's a good way to start out. No, not really. Okay. Each one is perfect and special. If you're comparing snowflakes that are formed from a very small amount of water, then you're probably going to find some that are identical. Right. But as I say in that episode of Don't Be Dumb, if you count those, you're a jerk. So like a real snowflake, like a snowflake like the children love and that you have embroidered on your sweater, now there's no two that are alike. That's pretty cool. Even though something like 70 septillion snowflakes fall to Earth in a year. Wow, that's a lot of snowflakes. Yeah. But when you put them all together, they don't necessarily stick. Yeah. And every once in a while something can happen. Not yodeling. That can trigger an avalanche. Yeah. And when we were reading through this, I found that there were a lot of differences, obviously, between avalanches and slides that we've covered. Yeah, we did. Landslides. Yeah. And I even found a few little similarities in Wildfires, which I did not expect. Lay it on me. Well, we'll get to it later. Okay. Like potential ways to it. Well, lay it on me at a future time. Okay. So avalanches. Yeah, basically an avalanche is well, it's a failure of a large or small amount of snow to stay in place any longer. Yeah. Friction once again. Yes. Just like with landslides, the mass overcomes the force of friction that's holding it in place and it just kind of moves downhill all at once. The thing is, that doesn't seem like a big deal, but in North America, an avalanche can reach something like 230 0 m\u00b3 in size. That's huge. It's about 20 football fields filled 10ft deep with snow. How fast? I've seen up to and beyond 100 miles an hour once they really get going. Yeah. That's a big deal. Yeah. So 20 football fields filled 10ft deep with snow moving at over 100 miles an hour down a mountain. If you're on the way to save the day, pretty much you're in trouble, basically. So avalanches are a pretty big deal. Even though it's just snow and snow is beautiful and wonderful and cold, all of it moving at once is a problem. That's right. And there's a lot of different ways that an avalanche can form. But really there are three factors involved. You've got snow, you have a slope or an incline. Sure. And then you have some sort of trigger. And like I said, it's not yodeling loud sounds. Just don't really have what it takes to trigger an avalanche. That's in the movies. So you'll see that? Yeah. German movie. That's right. Well, I guess let's back up a little bit to what were originally talking about, which was the shape of the snow itself. Right. Because that has an impact on what's when the snow hits the ground, it's going to form what's called a snow pack. And how stable the snow pack is depends on the snow that makes up the snow pack. And like how it bonds together depends on the actual shape of those little crystals. If you have a six pointed crystal, it's going to be steady or more stable than like needle shaped crystals packed together better. Yeah. And then, so there's different factors that contribute to what kind of snow falls, what kind of snow accumulates. And then snow undergoes a metamorphosis once it becomes part of the snow pack, depending on conditions. That's right. For example, the temperature gradient has a big effect on how snow within a snow pack, which is just these blankets and blankets of snow that build up over the course of a season if there's say, a higher temperature gradient. So at the surface it's very cold, but below toward the ground, it's actually warmer because of the radiant heat coming out of the earth. Sure. The larger the temperature gradient, the larger the difference in the amount of water vapor. So warmer air or warmer snow holds more water vapor. And water vapor likes homeostasis, just like everything else. So it moves from one end to another and that actually helps trigger metamorphosis of snowflake shapes within the snow pack by taking what's already rounded. And that's what you want. It's a stable snow pack. Yeah. Which I thought would be more unstable, but it packs together easier. Right. Rounded snowflakes pack together easier. And when water vapor moves from one place to another, it takes rounded snowflakes and actually makes them faceted, which are more angled. Yes. Flat surfaces, basically. And those don't lock together as well. So that's one form of instability is when you have a temperature gradient. Yes. And if you have a lot of those faceted flakes, it's going to be called a depth HoR. And is the light. You can even kind of see them on sunny days. The sort of shiny crystally surface layer on top that's like not really bonded. Exactly. It's frost is another word for it. I like horror, like avalanche. We should name this avalanches the Disaster with the most Jargon, because there is a lot of jargon involved in avalanches. There is. We've already skipped over some of it. Like Rhyme. Well, yeah. Rhyme is when I-M-E. Yeah. It's basically have you ever seen, like, a ship going to the Arctic and it has like globules of ice? Yeah. Or like a tree collecting ice? That's Rhyme, where it's just basically a bunch of water turns into ice really quick and accumulates quickly. That's Rhyme. Horror is frost. Rhyme is like globules of ice. What about a grapple? That is when you have deposits of Rhyme that build up and form pellets of snow. Yeah, but they're not stable, even though they're pellet, like yeah. Which kind of flies in the face, because I thought round was more stable. I think they're larger, though. Yeah, I think they're spherical. Whereas round is like flat and rounded edges. Okay, so pellets are like yeah, those things. You get a handful of those yellow pellets rolling around in your palms like so, and you're going to see, like, there's no friction there. It overcomes friction. That's true. You can also get rounding if it's a low temperature gradient and you get a lot of sub freezing going on and it's going to cause the rounding, which is actually good. That's going to make it more stable, like we were talking about. Right. So you've got temperature gradient, you've got rounding from a low temperature gradient. You have different types of snow that accumulates. If faceting can that be a verb? I just made it one. Yeah. Faceting. Yeah. Faceting is basically another type of metamorphosis where snowflake undergoes a change in the snow pack after it's already fallen. It's just laying there like you think when snow falls, it's felled, but no, it's going through some changes. Basically, a puberty of snow is what happens in the snow pack. And when fascinating happens, it's the opposite of rounding. Those edges become more pronounced, more angular, and a snowflake can turn into what's called depth horror. H-O-A-R again. Yes. And it's pretty cool. Did you see the picture of deck four? It's the coolest looking snowflake you can find. That is pretty cool. Like, it looks carved out. Like it looks 3D printed, basically, doesn't it? Yeah, it does piece of machinery or something, but from the looks of it, it looks like it would just totally lock in with any other snowflake. But for some reason that's not the case. So when you get death horror, which is a very faceted, snow packed snowflake, it's not going to lead to a stable snow pack. None of these are basically everything except rounding leads to an unstable snow pack. That's right. And that's one of the triggers or one of the factors involved in an avalanche. That's right. What you have is if you have a failure layer, and that's the weak layer inside the snow pack, it's called the failure layer because it fails you and causes the avalanche. It fails everybody, but it can be caused by a lot of things. The things we were just mentioning and depending on some other factors, is how it's going to deal with that failure level. It can slough off the snow, and I think most people have seen that is when you see like the inverted V shaped loose powdery snow coming down a mountain yeah. That's slough. That is slough. And that is not super dangerous. It usually doesn't do a lot of damage. So that's not like the worst case scenario. No. And slough is the result of typically the failure layer is high up in the snow pack. Yes. So it's just some surface snow that's going to move as part of the avalanche. Yes. If it's deeper, then you're going to get the bad boy of the avalanche scene, which is the slab avalanche. And that's when the failure layer is deep down and it's going to bring obviously a lot more compact, big chunks sliding down over that bed layer. Or it could be a huge chunk, a single chunk, reminiscent of when you have a lot of snow on your windshield and the sun comes out and heats it and the glass becomes warmer, so the bottom of it loses friction and stability and slides down all at once. That's right. That's basically a mini slab avalanche happening on your car. Yeah. And if it's wet your slab, it's going to be slower, which sounds good, but it's going to hit with more force. It has more water to it has more mass and volume, more weight, baby. Yeah. So let's talk about that slope. They generally happen between 25 and 60 and most common between 2035 and 45 deg is when you're going to get an avalanche. If it's more than that, steeper than that, then it's just going to be sloughing constantly and probably not be a danger. Right. And if it's less than that, then it's not enough of a slope to cause any problems. Yeah. It's not really going to move very much, if at all. This is called party time on the mountain. There's also other factors that contribute to whether an area is avalanche prone or not to. Like if it's on the sunny side of the mountain where it gets a lot of morning sun, it will actually warm up and basically settle. The ice pack settles and becomes more stable than on the shadier side of the mountain. Same with leeward and windward. Yeah. Both of these I thought was the opposite of how it should be. I had that same problem too because they say specifically the freeze thaw cycle can create like a layer of ice in the snow pack that will be a failure layer eventually. So if it's in the sun every day, I mean, it's slightly melting a little bit. Right. Then why wouldn't that also be the case? I didn't get to the bottom of that one. I have no idea. But that's what I kept coming across from source after source. Yeah. And the same thing with like you said, leeward means it's on the opposite side of the wind. And I would think that being on the windy side would be more dangerous. Well no, because that causes slough the wind like blows at all. Okay, I guess that makes sense. That one makes sense. It's the sunny side but it's just confusing. Yeah. I still say a strong gust of wind could cause a slab. Sure. I'm going to fly in the face with the experts and then they also rate and not write like, this is a five star avalanche. The best I've seen all season. Right. They have a rating scale from R. Yes, nerds there is an R avalanche. I guess you mean me because that was going to be my first question. I sent you the chart. I know. Okay. But I'm still going to ask. So the R is the size of the avalanche relative to the path that takes into account its width, is length, its depth, the size of the avalanche. R one is laughable. R five is the whole side of the mountain just came down. What's an R? It's a little above laughable. It's more like a whoa. It's kind of like you would imagine. R is an avalanche. Okay. All right. And then R stands for destructive force. Right. And that like in an R that avalanche can gouge the Earth, it's moving with such power and intensity and they can go up to, I think, 1.9 miles, traveling almost 2 miles at a solid with a solid chunk. Pretty scary stuff. Yeah, scary stuff. And before we get to even more stuff, let's take a message break. Okay, so I believe we're talking scary things. And what can be scarier than avalanche triggered by a yodeler? We've already said that's not the case. Yes, three times. Well, sometimes it can be, usually it's people, but sometimes it can be a natural thing. Like if a tree falls or if the weather really changes quickly. What else? A big chunk of ice falling off a tree. You could trigger it. Yeah. A cornice. Basically an ice pack can build up over a cliff's edge and just kind of hang there and then eventually it'll collapse under its own weight and it can fall onto a ridge line below. That can definitely trigger an avalanche. But in most cases, it's people. Yeah. And apparently in most fatal avalanches, the person who dies in the avalanche triggered it. In most cases. Yeah. Karmic nature, I guess it seems a little harsh. Yeah, a little imbalance. Yeah, I agree. All right, so let's say you have an avalanche happening. There are going to be three parts to this avalanche. You've got your starting zone, which is above the tree line, and that's where the slab actually that's the top part where it breaks free. It's also known as the crown. The crown, yeah. That makes sense. Then you have your track and that's basically just the path that it takes. If you go to these mountains in the summertime, you might see that track as a big open area of green grass between trees. Yeah. Because the avalanches wipe the trees off of that slope. So if you were unclear on whether avalanches are powerful yes, they take out trees on their way down. Yeah, and houses and ski condos and skiers, which is another reason why they are so dangerous for someone caught in the avalanche. Because it's not only the snow that may or may not bear you, you're also getting pummeled against stuff on your way down because of the force of the avalanche pulling you along, like being whacked into a tree or something. Yeah. And then you've got your run out as the third segment, and that is where it comes to a sliding slow stop. And that is bad news because they liking it to concrete in this article and it just sets up super hard. And if you're underneath it, you've got 15 minutes or so to get yourself out of there or it's bye bye to life. Like the clock is ticking. Yeah. Apparently most people say that you can survive buried in an avalanche for about 18 minutes. That's tops. The best way to survive an avalanche is to never start one. And there's techniques that well, basically local governments where mountains and ski slopes are situated, and then ski resorts will hire ski patrols, basically go out and test. And there's actually people who are called avalanche forecasters and they, I guess, study the snowfall, the atmospheric conditions. Like if there's been a freeze thaw cycle, they can predict roughly like when or where an avalanche may happen. And they say point the house, or that way, and they'll make sure people are off of the slope and they shoot artillery at slopes to try to trigger avalanches. That is one way to do it. And that's where it reminded me of Wildfires doing controlled burns and stuff like that. They'll actually set off an avalanche to keep an avalanche from happening. Right, but that's really the only way. Well, there's also ski checking, which seems more like smokers, kind of. Yeah. But it's almost like yeah, I guess it is a little bit. It's mind bogglingly dangerous sounding. Yeah. It's a job where you on purpose get on your skis and ski along the fracture line to see what happens. To try to trigger it or trying to trigger it. Yeah. Okay. And then they're going to quickly try and outrun it. Yes. They're hopefully skiing at the fracture line at the top of it, like around the crown, rather than inside the avalanche zone. You don't want to be there, so it would fall out below them rather than carry them down. And if you're ski checking, you're never ski checking alone. You're always part of a team and everybody's watching you and you have a beacon on and all the other stuff that you're supposed to have. Yeah. But it's still one of the more dangerous things I think you can do in snow. Yes. I hope we have a listener that does this because I'd love to know more about it. Speed checking. Yeah, I'd like to hear that too. Some of the other things they can do to prevent or interrupt an avalanche that happens is to put, like, physical objects in place to prevent it, like nets and anchors and fences and stuff like that. And that if an avalanche starts, at least it can divert it or stop it quicker or maybe prevent it from happening to begin with. Sometimes they'll hire local teens to just stand there and link arms. Stand in the way of avalanches. Yeah. The red rover approach. It depends on where you live. Okay. Estonia is huge on that. Really? That level of prevention. They can happen anytime. They are most common in the winter, obviously, but they can happen in any month and usually in the first 24 hours after a big snowfall is going to be a little more likely. I guess things haven't settled in quite yet. Yes. And heavily logged areas, areas that have been denuded of trees. Sure. Because trees all taken together can kind of serve as anchors for a snow pack. Yeah. So trying to reforest areas is a big thing. Now, I didn't find this out, but I wonder also if trees represent a kind of a crack in a large snow pack, too, in that, like if there was a piece that was coming off, it would take less with it because it would eventually reach a tree and that tree would represent a break in that connectiveness in the larger snow pack. I'm going to say yes. I would say yes to that. Just makes sense. Yeah. But the problem is people like to do things like what are called back country sports in places where there aren't trees. Yeah. I mean, the majority of avalanche victims are youngish dudes who, let's be honest, they're out there with their snowboard, but they're getting dropped in by a helicopter. But there's plenty of dude at the snowboard too. Yeah, that's true. But they did say males is the most common, so I think that's a fact. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They're bros. They're ski bros. Man. I can't believe I guess I do believe that, but the person who causes the avalanche is the person who most likely dies. Yeah. And the reason why is because when you accidentally trigger this avalanche, you're on a line, a fault line, basically, that you're triggering. But it doesn't necessarily mean that everything's going to happen below you. Right. You could be skiing right through the slab and the stuff above you is going to come down too. So, like, this whole slab is going to come down with you in the middle of it. You're the one who triggered it. You're the one who got buried alive too. All right, well, we don't want that to happen to anybody. So I guess we should talk about how to do your diligence as a backcountry bro. Yeah. Avoid these things, what you should do. So basically, before you go out, you want to check with any local message boards or websites that have avalanche warnings. It's a pro hotline, right? Yeah. You want to call? Yeah. Be like, is there going to be an avalanche? Right. And there's like, people who are paid to monitor this kind of thing and alert the public. So step one is to know whether there's a high likelihood of an avalanche happening where you are sure you also want to have taken a course in surviving avalanches. Yeah. If you're doing this hardcore backcountry stuff, then hopefully you've done that beforehand. And there's a lot to learn too. We're just kind of scratching the surface here. There is a lot to know to understand avalanches, to be able to forecast them and to test, like doing field tests. So you want to really know what you're doing before you go out. You always want to go with somebody else. Got to have a bro, buddy. The thing that I think you would just have to be a total idiot to not have is a beacon. Yes. A functioning beacon on you at all times beneath your clothes so it can't be swept away. Yeah. And you want that set to transmit if you're the person, the transmitter, so they can find you when you're buried, dying in 15 minutes. They're not expensive. They are not hard to come by now. And if you go out doing anything in any back country sport and you don't have one on again, josh Clarke thinks you're an idiot. We may as well go ahead and talk about a couple of other pieces of equipment that you should have if you're into this. They have these little backpacks now that have airbags in them that you basically like pull a little rip cord and a big pillowy bag, erupts, sort of like a car airbag outside the top of it. And what that's going to do is take up a bunch of space so you have air to breathe once you're buried and you have a big hole of air at least. Right. Plus it also has the effect of if you ever have a canister of mixed nuts and you shake it, you'll notice like the bigger nuts, the Brazil nuts, all move to the top. Same thing with you and an inflatable vest. You become bigger. So you will move toward the top of the avalanche slab. Yeah. And some padding in case there's debris. Yeah. And then the other cool thing is called the Avalon. Avalung and those are usually built into your backpack too. And it's super simple. All it is, it's sort of like a little scuba mouthpiece that you breathe through. And what it does is it diverts your exhalation down through the backpack and out like where your butt is. Right. Because the danger there is if you're trapped under snow and we'll get there in a second, you're going to have a small pocket of air. And one of the ways you can die is from poisoning yourself with your CO2. That's right. So if you got the Avalon and you got your airbag in your backpack, you're beacon and maybe an inclinator to see what that slope is before you go tackle it with your snowboard and say, brah, that one's 48 degrees. Well, what do you want to be above? 60? Yeah. Jeez, I know. Not me. That's awfully close to 90. Yeah. Maybe then go toward the 25 slope. You also want to do some tests too, like where you're going to be skiing snowboarding high, marking. Yeah. Be proactive. You want to dig what's called a quick pit, which is basically you become an amateur. What is a snow person? Like? Smell a sense of snow. Avalanchologist nologist, it is a snow ologist. But there's a word, santa Claus. Right. You want to become an amateur Santa Claus. You dig a pit that affords you a view of all the layers of the snow pack so you can basically visually inspect it for a failure layer. There are other tests you can do as well that we won't get into. But if you are going to go out there, they should be teaching you this in your backcountry survival class. Yeah, of course, class, sure. But you can also familiarize yourself on the US. Forest Service website. They have a bunch of step by step instructions with pictures for testing for avalanches. Yeah, we looked at these and it just doesn't do any good to try and describe it. We would just get you killed. Go look at the diagrams. Yeah. And you also want to pick up your ears and listen for whomping noises or hollow sounds and avoid shady areas. Like just keep your eyes peeled. If you're experienced out there, then you're probably going to know what to look for. Yeah. And then there's one other thing too. If you see tracks already in a snow pack, that does not mean that it's already been tested and is safe. No, that means you can go that way, right? No, it means that the person who went before you is lucky, right? Technically, possibly, yeah. And the last one, never travel above your partner. Oh, yeah, it's a big one. Yeah. If your partner gets above you, then they're being very selfish to kill you or you. Yeah. You should wonder, wait, that travel insurance policy I signed, now I get it. So if you've done all this, you know how to do a rush block test, and you know how to dig a quick pit faster than anybody else, and you never travel above your partner, and you still just triggered an avalanche, you've done everything right. But it's real, right? You're the person. Stuff is real. You're the victim. Let's say yes. All right, we're going to give advice for two people, the victim and then the person who sees it and goes, oh, my gosh, the witness. The guy just got buried. Yeah. All right, so if you're one of the pro victims, three ways you can die physical trauma, like we said. Let's say you get smashed by a tree on the way down. You can suffocate in the snow or die of hypothermia. Take your pick. None of those are good. If you find that the avalanche is happening, this is before you're buried alive. And let's say you're a skier or a snowmobiler or some other extreme sports person. They say to try and outski it and outright it if you can. Yeah. Get the little rear viewer going and hit the gas as quick as you can ski off the slab. And if you can do that, then great. Yeah. If you can't, then you may be buried. And the first thing you want to do is block your mouth so it doesn't fill up with snow. And you want to try and put your arm over it or block it as much as possible if you don't have one of those air bags. Because whatever little space you create in front of your mouth is your breathable air. Right. You want to use one arm or your hand or something, and with the other arm or leg or whatever you can, you want to thrust it toward whatever you think is up. Try to get some sort of visual cue of where you are two people. Yeah. And they suggest a swimming motion that's on your way down, you're trying to basically swim your way to the top of the pile of the slab that's carrying you down. Well, yeah. And then once you start to come to a stop, then you throw your hand in front of your mouth and you try to thrust the leg up or something like that. Right. What I read, though, is you're going to be so disoriented, you'll have good luck with any of this, right? That's like punching a. Shark. Yeah. But some people can do it. Yeah, it happens. Some people have the presence of money to do it. Those people are the ones who these instructions are for that's. Right. They advise you to bail on your ski gear. If you have one of those backpacks, though, with all your emergency gear, obviously you want to hang on to that. Here's the hardest part. Stay calm. Yes. Stay calm. They advise you if you are on a snowmobile and you get removed from it. I don't know how you would do this, but try and get out of the path of the snowmobile as well because that will kill you. Yeah. But again, this is all happening so fast. I guess you rely on instinct. I guess. So you turn into a steely nerved dude, bro. And then again, staying calm. Stay calm. You're now buried under snow and the best advice is to stay calm. Yeah. Don't start screaming because you're burning your oxygen. No one's going to hear you because they're still pretty far away. Yeah. Hopefully they watched you the whole time. We'll get into that in a second. And you just have to do what you can by conserving your energy, conserving your breath and conserving your voice until you hear somebody above you. Yes. Then you can start screaming as loud as you want. Right. But there's no sense in screaming whatsoever until you hear somebody. And then you better have that beacon on. If you have that beacon on, you're set to transmit you're with one or more other people who are with you when this happened. Yeah. Hopefully they're not buried, too. Your chances are actually pretty good. There's something like a 92% survival rate for people who are dug out within the first 15 minutes. Yeah. That's pretty quick, though. So I guess that brings us to if you are the other bro and you see this happen to your friend, this is what you're going to want to do. Because you were there for help, you may not have enough time you got 15 to 18 minutes. You may not have enough time to ski to the rescue unit to get word out. So it's sort of up to you to try and get your buddy out. Yeah. If you're in a larger group, then yeah, you send some people back for help and then some other people stay to conduct the search and rescue themselves. If it's just you, basically every bit of advice is if you have any idea of where they went down, where you think they might be, go straight there. Yeah. And it's sort of like following your golf shot. Like if it starts to happen, you don't want to look around for help or anything. You want to lock your eyeballs on your buddy and follow that as long as you can until he completely disappears. And wherever he disappears or she that is your last point of reference. You're going to want to hit first. Yeah. You want to just keep your eyes on that point and go straight to it. You want to wait a second that it could be another avalanche. Yeah. You want to make sure the snow is settled. And then you go over to the area where you last saw the person and you take your own beacon. Because the cool thing about beacons is not only do they transmit, they receive. That's right. So anybody with a beacon can transmit for help and receive to lend help. Right. Yeah. So when you do that, if you're just one person, you go to the last place you saw the person and you start your search using your transponder and you start doing zigzagging motions down the mountain. Yeah. Basically you do a sweep of the avalanche area. You do a sweep, you might have something called an avalanche probe on you. And that's super long ten or twelve foot pole that collapses down to a couple of feet. So you can have it in your little backpack. And it's basically a big poker that you can poke down in the snow. If you hear your buddy go, Ow. Yeah. Then that's great. And then some ski poles also have the bottoms come off so that they can be turned into avalanche pokers. And hopefully you have a shovel on you because that is highly recommended as well. I don't think we ever pointed that out. Yeah. You can shovel a lot faster you can move snow a lot faster with a shovel sure. Than with your hands. So if you have a beacon, a probe and a shovel, you could be okay, that's a T shirt. Yeah. And the other side is a guy like, falling off the snowmobile. So you said zigzagging. If you're by yourself, if you're with a group of folks, they recommend that you lock arms. And sort of like when you're searching for a dead body in the woods, you just set up a line of people to cover as much ground as possible. That's right. And then if you find your buddy, dig them out and treat them as quickly as possible. They may need a little CPR, they may need a little TLC. So turn on our CPR podcast while your friend is one of us. Yeah. Remember Staying Alive. Yeah. And just pump the chest to the beat of Staying Alive and everything will be all right. That's right. And I've got nothing else. Do you? I don't either. No, that's about it. Or if you want to avoid this stuff altogether, you do like me and don't ski. No back country sports for you? No, I mean, I used to ski, but I was never very good. And once you hit a certain age and you're not a great skier, it's like, why even go out there? I've got a 50% chance of injuring myself. I would say you probably have a higher percentage chance than that. Man, I was in Vermont skiing one time and I took a spill that it was sort of like Chevy Chase and Christmas vacation. I had to have slid a half a mile down this mountain without being able to stop myself on my butt without my skis. And a little twelve year old maybe snowboarder, snowboarded down with my skis, stuck him in next to me and said, dude, I've never seen someone slide that far in my life. And he snowboarded off. And I said, well you're pretty young, but yeah, it was pretty entertaining to see. I'm sure. And this is when I was younger. It would be much funnier now even. Oh yeah, when the old guy falls it's always funny. Sure. Like you said. Chevy Chase movies. Yeah. I do have one more thing, Chuck. It turns out the Saint Bernard as a mountain rescue dog with its whiskey or brandy cask around its neck supposedly is a myth. They did have San Bernard's in the Alps and all that and they did use them to carry supplies and stuff and sometimes even spirits around their neck. They were never used as like ski patrol avalanche rescue dogs. Okay. They were just in the same area the avalanche has happened in a lot and they just happen to have booze around their necks. I call that confirmed. Well, just the popular conception that a St. Bernard is going to run up to you and dig you out and then yes, it's not correct, it's a Napoleonic lie. I am going to say that it's happened once, okay. Because I want to think it happened. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And St. Bernard's are cool dogs to be sure. Of course, if you want to know more about avalanches, like we said, if you're serious about back country sports, you better go take a course. You better go to the park services website on avalanches. Get that beacon, dude. Yes. Or else Josh Clarke thinks you're a dummy. And you can also go to householdworks.com and type in avalanche in the search bar there. And since I said all that, that means it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this Defying history. And this dude purposefully said, if you read this, please don't show Josh because I want to hear his reaction. Okay? So here we go. Hi guys. I was listening to the 4 July extravaganza from a few years back and realized I might have ruined a piece of American history. A few years ago I bought a thicker, older book looking to hollow it out so I could keep money and other important items in there that I didn't want to keep in my personal safe. Is this guy in prison? Yeah, he's not. A few days ago I was listening to the part two of that 4 July extravaganza and on the way back to University of Wisconsin Good Badgers, and I heard you talking about the book Epic of america. Do you remember talking about that? Vaguely, yes, because we had guest hosts. We had Joe Randazzo and Wyatt's Nak and Joe Garden and Hallie Hagland. So they may have referenced that book, but I don't remember. That okay. I knew that was the name of the book I bought to hollow out, but thought, surely it wasn't the same book. I got home, took a closer look, and it turns out I was wrong. Upon further research, I found I had bought a first edition 1931 bona fide copy of Epic of America by James Treslow Adams. I cut a hole in the middle of it. I thought it's somewhat ironic I chose to fill the epic of America with money, and nonetheless, I'm distraught with my lack of knowledge and accidental disregard for one of the great analyses of the American dream that is from Grant Hermit's heritage. We go Grant. That's his reaction. Grant indignation. He's ticked. You know, we got hollowed out books from the guys who make Rick and Morty. Yeah. Adult Swim. Yeah. Hollowed out to fit perfectly. A flask. Yes. A Rick and Morty flask. It was pretty neat. Thanks for that. Why don't you get one of those, Grants? And when I saw that book, I thought, well, that's neat. They sent us a book, and it was called, like, interesting Science Stuff or something like that. I think it was called boring science. Oh, Boring Science. Yes, to ward people away from the book. I don't want to read that. Right. Then you open it up and you're like, whoa, I've got it on my bar right now. Nice. The book. Sure. That's awesome. Where else would it be? I guess on my shelf here at work. In your work bag? Yeah. With you at all times. If you want to tell us about some bonehead thing you did with a piece of Americana or anything else, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on our Facebook page at facebook. Comstuffysto. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And, as always, hang out with us at our home on the Web, the Illchillcrebuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com you." | ||
10 Easy Ways to Save Money | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-easy-ways-to-save-money | Times are still kind of tough, but there are some time-tested and easy ways to get ahead and in this episode Josh and Chuck explore them. Learn about not only how to save, but also how to make your new-found dough grow. | Times are still kind of tough, but there are some time-tested and easy ways to get ahead and in this episode Josh and Chuck explore them. Learn about not only how to save, but also how to make your new-found dough grow. | Thu, 17 Oct 2013 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=290, tm_isdst=0) | 41660995 | audio/mpeg | "Are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. Perhaps you enjoy wrapping along the paperboy, or you believe that blessed be the fruit. Or you dream of one day smashing a glass while stealing. Who's. Ah. Whether you're sworn to Team Kim or you just want a good old fashioned mysterious murder, there's a place that has it all. From Atlanta to only murders in the building, it's all on Hulu. So check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription is required. Terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck. Bryan is with me, and Jerry's over there. So this is stuff you should know. Your legendary podcast. Live version? Yes. Well, it's recorded live to tape. Tape? We've done. Live version? Yeah. Like with an audience? Yeah. I don't know if you remember. Sure. We've done it. Sure. Should we set up this a little bit? I'd like to. Oh, yes, go ahead. Well, people, when you listen to Stuff You Should Know, a lot of times you're regaled with stories of history or stories of science or cool animals or you name it. We like to cover lots of stuff, but occasionally we like to do a little advice. Yes, but the fact that we're doling out advice does not mean that we are professional advisors. No, but occasionally we like to talk about things like green living or health and fitness or in this case, finance. Just because we know the millennials out there think they're never going to have to worry about anything. But eventually you're going to be off the teeth of your parents and you might have to think about this stuff. Either that or the millennials are already more worried than anybody else right now. Yeah, and not just millennials. I think anybody could use this advice and put it to pretty good use. Well, yeah. One thing I realized is that you're never too young or you're never too old to start being smart and thinking about money in your future and stuff like that. If you're in the last weeks of your life, it's too late. It may be too late, so never say never. That's true. But yes, the younger you are, the better off you are. The later you start, the further you have to catch up. But the point is, there's no reason to not try. And what we're talking about is saving money. But it's not just saving money. It's part of like saving money is the basis of basically a conscientious lifestyle. Yeah. You don't have to be rich and you don't have to even want to be rich. Basically all you have to have is the desire to be financially independent or close to financially independent and financially free. And that doesn't mean you have to have gobs of money or endless amount of cash, actually, it's pretty easy to sit there and figure out how much money you need and set that as your goal and get to it. And the cool thing is, if you do kind of take this advice, you do kind of start following this path, I guess you could say. Sure. It becomes a bit addictive and you realize that you've just altered your mindset and you're living basically the antithesis of a wasteful consumer culture life and sticking it to the man. That's right. And you don't have to be a fregan to do it. No, there's a middle ground that's just being smart and frugal where you need to be. I get into it. It's not like I'm loaded or anything, but I don't think about the money so much as I think about efficiency and waste. Right. That really occupies a lot of my mind. Once you start thinking about everything in those terms, all of a sudden it becomes very clear and every little bit counts because take energy, which we'll get into, if you unplug your toaster every day after you use it, what's that going to add up to? Like, virtually nothing, actually. I have a bet on vampire power. We'll talk about it. Good, I'm glad you do. And it's not much, though, right? Well, we'll talk about it. All right. But let's say a toaster is not much. Just a single toaster, right? It's not much. Thank you. But if you take that toaster and pile it in with savings on not buying coffee every day while you're out and thinking about your auto insurance and just all the stuff that we're going to talk about and think of all of it as what you're throwing into a pot or savings, then it does count. It does matter totes yeah. Good intro. Thanks, man. So the recommended amount that I've seen I don't remember what investment advisor wrote the article or whatever. But I've seen before that you want to save what amounts to about eight times your ending salary. No matter what your ending salary. That's the salary you're going to have when you retire is that is a mind bogglingly daunting number. If you think about it. To have that much in the bank by the time you retire. Yeah. Eight times? Yeah. Man, I better get busy. Supposedly you're supposed to have, like, one time what you estimate your ending salary would be by the time you're 33 times, by the time you're 40, and then so on, until by about the time you're 65, you should at eight times your ending. Sorry. That's a lot of money. Yeah, I'm a lot of savings. Okay. I think pretty much everybody is a bit behind. Sure. I think that's a very important point. I don't feel like anybody, especially somebody who feels daunted by that number, should feel like that they're on the outs and that everybody else is doing well, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that just because everybody else is saving that you shouldn't start. Yeah. Don't compare yourself to others. Just take care of your business. Right. And that's what this whole thing is about. Don't worry about the Joneses. So one of the first things you want to do is figure out what that eight time amount is and set that as your goal by the time you're 65. And then start looking around and figuring out ways to get there. And one of the best ways is to stop wasting. Wasting is the opposite of saving. That's right. So if you save, you're not wasting, and if you waste, you're doing the wrong thing. Exactly. So here's some ways you can save. Yeah. You don't get into this. Entertainment is a lot of times one of the first things on the list because a lot of things in the entertainment category are luxuries, meaning they make your life better, which is super valid. You just can't do it all all the time. Unless you're super rich, then go nuts for you. You're super rich already. Then for instance, maybe you can get the same content online as you're paying for either with a cable bill or like a magazine subscription or a newspaper or something. You might be able to get all that stuff free online. Save yourself some bucks. Sure, that's one way to do it. You make a good point that entertainment is a luxury, but it's also in a lot of ways of necessity too. You just have to look around and say, where can I trim some fat? Where am I being wasteful? Is there anything that I'm just not really using that I'm paying for in the entertainment category? And if so, then that means I probably don't really need it and I should stop just paying for it out of habit. Yeah, well, the Netflix is one thing I dropped finally the DVD delivery in favor of just the online streaming. And what did it say? I think it's like $8 a month or something that adds up when you throw it into a pot. It adds up. It's like over the course of the year that's like, that's a nice meal out or money you could invest in something else, right? Yeah, same like you said with magazine subscriptions, if you're getting the magazine and it's just sitting there and you're not really reading it or getting anything from it, cancel your subscription and say, by the way, I already paid for this, so send me what you owe me. So yeah, if you love your magazines, then that one wouldn't count. Again, what we're talking about here is trimming the fat, not living this horribly mindset lifestyle. Yeah. That is no fun whatsoever. No, but like we said, once you start getting into this, you're probably going to find that it's actually fun to look for ways to trim the fat. Yeah. And speaking of trimming the fat. Take a look at your gym membership, people. How often do you go and what do you do while you're there? If it's something you get a lot of benefit out of, then by all means keep going, set your health. But do you know who pays $75 a month to go running on a treadmill? Jerry? A sucker. Because there are streets, there's sidewalks, there's running trails. Right. If you're not utilizing most of the stuff at the gym or going to classes and things, you might want to think about trimming the fat. Or if you really need that ritual for that treadmill and you don't mind paying that money for the treadmill, that's fine too. But just think about it. Yeah. If you are shameless or you have no self consciousness whatsoever, you can go use the exercise equipment at the park. Yeah. Those little things they have going on. Yeah, I just couldn't do that. Or you can work out at the park. We could buy a treadmill and have it tease you and mock you and haunt you for the rest of your life in the spare room. Right. Which is what happens sometimes. I think that's the opposite of good advice as far as this one goes. That's true. What about automotive costs? That's a really satisfying way to save money because nobody likes paying for car up, maintenance and gas. Right. Two things people hate spending money on. I got some numbers for you. Okay. Let's say you drive 80 0 mile over five years. If you bought a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon compared to one that gets 15 miles to the gallon, you're going to be buying 2000 fewer gallons of gas over that time average of 350 a gallon over five years, you've saved $7,000 in gasoline costs, which is like I mean, that's super substantial. And you could put that into your 401 kwh or whatever oh yeah. And make that into a lot more money by the time you retire. Just by 10 miles a gallon difference. By not getting that ginormous SUV, you can't even park. Maybe get something more fuel efficient instead. Sure. Well, yeah, I mean, that's a seven grand in your pocket that you just wouldn't have had before. Exactly. What else? Your car insurance is another good place to go, like anything you're currently paying for. That's a good place to start and say, how can I pay less for the same amount? Or do I need the same amount that I have right now? So usually if you have a decent insurance person, you will find that they will be happy to talk to you and say, yeah, you don't really need this. Or if you raise your deductible a little bit, you'll probably be okay and you'll be paying less per month without losing out on anything. Really? Yes. Another place you can save gas is and a lot of people don't realize this but your tires in your car are supposed to be inflated to a certain amount. And if they're lower than that, you're going to be wasting gas. Yeah. In fact, for every \u00a32 per square inch that you're off that they're low, your mileage goes down by 1%. And in this article, they judge most cars are about five to \u00a310 per square inch low, and that's about 5% less fuel efficient. Just by putting air in your tires? Yes. That's crazy. Plus, even more, there's a lot of gas stations that have free air. Yes. Not as much anymore, but your road trip does. Do they? Oh, yeah. All right, let's go to QT. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need, right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Let's see what else. Chuck all right. You want to talk grocery stores? Always. All right. First of all, right. Now would be a terrible time for me to go grocery shopping because I'm very hungry. Yes. They say to eat first time. Yeah, it really does work. It makes an enormous difference on buying stuff that you normally wouldn't buy if you are hungry at the grocery store, like you're just going to buy more. It's a proven fact. That's right, Josh. And then going out to lunch at work is a big deal. Big expense, potentially. Yeah. They say in here, $6 a day is 800 a year, but $6 a day, that's super cheap. It is. You probably won't live a year if you're eating six dollar lunches every day. Yeah, let's say that's $12. Or if you go out for business lunches, you're really racking up money. Right. And if it's not just you, but also your spouse or significant other life partner or whatever also doing the same thing, you can double that amount right there. So I just get around the whole thing by not eating lunch. But you could also pack your own lunch, save a substantial amount. Plus, it's like you're being your own mom, packing your lunch in the morning. You make yourself a note, even. Right. And then chuck at the grocery store, too. If you take a little time and go online or get your favorite grocery stores app, they have those these days. You can find all sorts of specials, coupons, that kind of thing, and say, what can I do with celery and chickpeas? Right. And then you put them together and base your weekly plan on that. You could make hummus and dip the celery in it. Exactly. And you take that list that features chickpea and celery and whatever else it takes to make hummus and take it to the store, and you stick to that list. Maybe some garlic. Exactly, paprika. But the point is, you've thought about all this before you went to the store, wrote it down on a list and then stuck to the list and then used the coupons that originally got you to think of hummus in the first place. You just save yourself some money, an incalculable amount, mainly because I don't want to calculate it right now. That's right. Yeah. Keep your eyes peeled at the store for specials. I know you don't want to grab the little flyer when you walk in because it makes you look like you're 80 years old, but that's where you find out the deals. They're buy one, get one free on a tub of butter. Go get the tub of butter and get your second one for free. That's right. Also, I want to apologize to her 80 year old listeners who like circulars at the grocery store. Yeah, my mom was way into coupons. Yeah, well, a lot of people are. Yes. I read that apparently coupons have gone down in quality because of this coupon craze that's going on right now. So many people are using it that companies are like, we can't afford to put out decent coupons. Did you just say there's a coupon craze going on? Yeah. Really? Did you not know? No, I didn't. Oh, man. There's whole TV shows dedicated to it. Coupon craze? Yes. Really? Is it the name of the show, coupon Craze? No, there's like extreme couponing. Really? I think on TLC. I've never heard of that. What? No. Is it just people like it's? People who are so good at couponing. I saw a man on a TV show, he had like a $400 grocery bill, and from his coupons, he brought it down to like $14. I thought you were going to say they paid him $100. It was close to it. It was very close to it. Yeah. Most grocery stores have the little club card. Use those. That's really satisfying to see all that money go away in the end. Yes. Not only that, some of those cards will get you like extra bucks or points or whatever that will actually deduct money from your additional money on top of coupons from your bill after a while. It's not a bad idea to take advantage of loyalty programs. Oh, that's what it should do if it makes sense to you. There are plenty of people out there that own companies that have come up with loyalty programs that are frankly scams, and you have to be wary of them because you don't want to buy stuff you wouldn't normally buy just because you're going to save $0.50 on it because it costs you 350 that you weren't going to spend anyway. But if you're going to the same store again and again and again, it's just down the street. They have pretty good prices. You like their coupons, sign up for their loyalty program and it will pay off in the end. Yes. I go to a buzz market here. I go to Kroger when I can, and they keep track of your thing through your little card. And then I get gas or two because A, it's cheaper already, but every like, four or five. Phillips they'll give you credit from your grocery buys on your gas, right? They'll say, like, would you like to save ten cents a gallon because you bought groceries? Is there like an actual no button? There's a note. No, because you can save it. Like give it to your wife or whatever, or I'm flushed this week, if that's how you live, sure. But I always say, heck, yeah. Give me the remember hearing a long time ago that they were trying to outlaw gas discounts? Like, some of those places sell gas below what they pay for it to attract people into their stores, and it was like driving other gas stations out of business. Yeah. When it comes to saving, baby, it's survival of the fittest. All right, let's talk about family expenses, things like your prescription drugs or maybe your baby formula, all these things. You can get generic versions of that are FDA approved to be just as good as your brand name version. Yeah, you know who buys brand name stuff, suckers? Brand name drugs. Yeah. Well, it says here in this article that drug companies spend all their money on research and development and stuff like that. That's not true. Most drug companies get universities to do their RMD for free, but they just have the patent on it for the first few years and can charge whatever they want depending on the country they're in. The point is, generics have the exact same thing in it. By law, they don't own the patent, and the patent is expired. So now everybody can sell it for cheap. Buddy, I know one way you save a lot of money in the past few years. Smokies yes. Not smoking. Yeah, cigarettes. How much are they now? Last I saw, they were like, $5 a pack. In Atlanta, they're like, $12 a pack or so in New York. Really funny dollars a pack. And I remember when they started to go up. Yeah, because I smoked at a time when you could get them for like, a dollar, $50 a pack. Sure. And then all of a sudden, they were like, $3.04, five. And there were articles because tobacco is going through the roof, and there are articles on what the price point would be where people stop smoking. Yes. I remember hearing a lot of people say five, and that's just not some people, I'm sure, quit because they hit $5. But no, people will still smoke and pay $5 or $12 a pack every day to shorten their life and incur more medical expenses later on. Right. And the point is, if you quit, it's just like having a higher fuel efficiency car, or it's just money in your pocket that you otherwise would have spent unnecessarily. And like you said, this is just harmful and you're spending money. So that's a great one right there. Quit smoking. Thousands of dollars a year. Bam. Right in your pocket. Boom. They say quit drinking in this article, too. That your addictions are costing you money. Pretty much anything that you could give up, that maybe you should give up, that can save you money, that falls into this category. Yeah. Or maybe if you like your glass wine with dinner, maybe just pick and choose and cut down and save a little money and improve your health a little bit. Right. Buy the gigantic box of wine to get better value. Moderation. It's the key. Except with smoking, there shouldn't even be moderation there. Yeah. Just don't smoke. Household energy is the one I'm obsessed with, pretty much. Really? Yes. I grew up in a house, teachers as parents, three kids. Like, we had to use coupons and turn off the lights when you left the room and not leave the TV going. And we had to do that to get by and to live just a normal lower middle class life. But that's not something you should change because it's just wasteful. Well, yeah. Even if you have the dough, you shouldn't waste energy. Yes, that's exactly right. That's a good point. Chuck. One of the things about changing your mindset to a saving mindset is not only is it good for you financially, but it also tends to have positive spillover effects. Like, for example, you're saving money, saving energy, but it's also a lot better for the environment. Anytime you're cutting out waste, there's pretty much no downside to that. So this is a good example of, like, a good positive spillover effect. Yeah. Do you know what I do is I think about the electronic meter on the side of your house spinning, and literally every time I turn things off and follow Emily around the house turning things off after she turns them on, I literally think about the meter slowing down. And it makes me, like, breathe the sigh of relief as the meter breeds the sigh of relief. I know it sounds silly, but no, it doesn't. I really think about that thing turning down and you just go, oh, yeah, that's much more like it. There is an invention out there that is made for you. It's pretty new, but I believe it's on the market. You can plug it into an outlet, and what it does is eavesdrops on your electrical use and it can actually sort out what's doing what. Wow. But the readout shows you how much electricity you're using, and I think you can convert it to like, a dollar amount, too, or something. And the whole point is if you see how much you're using, you'll want to decrease it. So you would love this thing because it would show a decreased amount every time you turned off a light or unplugged something. I would be stressed about that being plugged in, though. Yeah. We talked about vampire energy earlier. That's the things that you leave on standby power overnight or pretty much all the time. The average house uses $100 to power devices that are turned off each year, $100 to power things that aren't even on that's money that you can use on, and like your little smartphone plug, even if your phone is not plugged into it, it's sucking energy. Well, plus, it's a bad idea also to charge your phone overnight because it's bad for your battery, typically to overcharge it. Yeah, it's a good idea. And then annually in the US. Vampire power costs $10 billion all over the US. Each year. Yes. So that's pretty substantial. If you pull everyone together. Sure. If you divide by 300 million, that's a lot of money in your pocket. So what do you do? Set up a charging station, which is what I have at my house. Put that all in a power strip and turn that power strip off and unplug it even better. And then just shoot it with a gun. Shoot it with a gun. Like the TV on it. And I hate all those lights anyway. I like to sleep in darkness. And if you look in your room, you probably have, like, three or four lights that are just on, like, your cable box. They're probably affecting your brain in some way. At the very least, they're affecting my wallet. So household energy, that was pretty good stuff. Yeah. By Energy Star. Yeah. There's a lot of rebates out there right now. The government has put, like, a huge push behind getting people to have more energy efficient stuff. Yeah, it's got $150. If you just look for the Energy Star thing when you're buying an appliance or something and then go online before you buy it and see if there's a rebate. Because basically it's just like if you got it on sale, this is an extra $50, $100, whatever, that you'll get back in six, eight weeks just for mailing in a copy of your receipt. Why would you not do that? That's right now I think it's a good time for a break. Oh, yeah. Because after this, it's the home stretch, which includes health insurance, money saving tips, and then a few tips from your older buddies here about what you can do with that money you're saving for your future. Yeah. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right, really quickly, before we get into tips, I looked up insurance a little bit, because, like a dummy in my mid 20s, when I didn't have anything other than waiting tables jobs, I skipped on insurance because I didn't want to pay a couple of sure. So I got to thinking today, here's an older dude, how much it costs to stay in a hospital. The average cost of a hospital stay in the US. Is about $1,600. The average hospital, the median hospital stay in the USA, it's three times more than other industrialized countries, which is a whole different thing. But $18,000 is the average median stay in a hospital. The obamacare is coming out next month, and I think the average mid tier insurance policy will be about $325. So you would have to pay on that insurance policy 55 months, four and a half years to equal out one hospital stay. Wow. One bout of something. One bad car wreck. Point is, you're not doing yourself any favors if you think you're saving by not paying insurance. And I know when you're 23 and 25, you don't think anything's going to happen to you, but you are screwed if it does. Sure. So just be smart, get insurance, and you're covered. Yeah. Unless you're Ned Flanders, and then you consider it a form of gambling. Yeah. So insurance, that's a good one. Yeah. And like I said, if you don't have insurance I agree with you, Chuck. Health insurance is a good way to go if you already have insurance, car insurance, any kind of. Insurance, check out if you have a Svelte coverage, right. And then try to save some money without shooting yourself in the foot over time. But, yes, going without insurance is not a good way to save money. A good way to save money is to possibly look at your cell phone bill and say, do I need the plan that I have? Yeah. Do I need all those unlimited texts? Or see how many texts you send a month on average. Right. You might be able cut it back a little bit. Yeah. That's another good point. You keep raising, like, all these awesome points that deserve elaborating. But the first step to all of this is to write down your monthly expenses, track them for a little while, and you'll see where your money is going just right out of the gate. A lot of stuff will become obvious. That where you can turn. They totally will. Right. But the second step to that is to look at all the things you're currently paying for that you're like, okay, I need all this, and figure out ways to trim them individually. So whether it's car insurance, whether it's your cell phone bill, there's always a way to cut it down a little bit. That's right. Living debt free is something we believe in now. After incurring credit card debt for a number of years, we got rid of it all and haven't used credit cards in, like, eight years. Oh, yeah. We just can't afford it that month. We don't get it. Do you use the credit card to get it and then pay it off, though, just to keep your credit score up? We run everything through our American Express okay. Which we pay off each month. Right. Well, this article makes a really good point. Like, if you are having to pay interest on your credit card, that means you're buying things that you can't afford and you pay interest on your credit card. When you buy something and you can't pay it off at the end of the month, then it sounds like you have a very good policy going there. It's a good policy because when we looked at what we were spending on finance charges, it was ridiculously wasteful. Yeah. And it makes you angry when you really stop and look at it. Right. Because you work hard for money, you get taxed a lot anyway. The last thing you want to do is start throwing the man more money just because he said, oh, I got a little piece of plastic and go hog wild for a little while. Right. You don't have to wait for this. Just get it. Now, that's another good point that this article made. One of the things you can institute is a one month waiting period for all purchases, all major purchases. Any purchase you're excited about, you write it down instead of buying it, you just write down what you want. And then after a month, you go back to it and say, Do I still want this? Probably more often than not, you're going to be like, I don't even remember why I wanted that. Yes. Or wait for a good we do a lot of the financing deals. Like, I wanted a sound bar for the TV, and I waited like, a year to get it right. I waited till the right deal came along and a certain store had a 24 month no interest deal, and now I'm paying, like, $20 a month for it or something. But you got to be really careful. If you're bad about paying your bills, you can get jacked around on the finance charge, because at the end of 24 months, it's 500% interest. Yeah. Or if you miss a month or something, it's pretty ridiculous. Right. I recommend financing deals, but you just have to be really vigilant with your bills on time. Right. Another good reason to stop and wait a month, a week, whatever, if you just basically put a moratorium on any immediate spending, it will cause you to go poke around the Internet, and like you said, see if you can find a better financing deal. Maybe somebody else has it for less. If you do, use your credit cards. Some credit cards have deals with certain merchants to where you'll actually get some cash back, which is basically just like, money off, additional money off. There's a lot of reasons to stop and then figure out how you can get that thing you want for the least amount of money, which makes it even sweeter when you do get it. All right, dude. So we've given a lot of good little tips on how to save money. Yeah. You're saving some dough. Even if you're a millennial, pride yourself on saving a little money and not being wasteful. Yeah. Save what you can. Yeah. So what you want to think about next is, all right, I have a little extra change here. Now what do I do? Do I want to put it in a piggy bank or under the mattress or start investing in stocks or gambling on football? What should I do? Well, the first thing you want to do is to create a fund, basically an emergency fund. The rule of thumb is you have three to six months worth of expenses tucked away in a savings account that you can get to but you don't touch. Yeah. Just in case if you're laid off, something terrible happens, you have a significant amount of money that you can live on no matter what. You're not going to get kicked out of your home. You're not going to go hungry. That's right. That's pretty much the first thing you want to do when you're saving money. Like, as you're saving all this money and you're putting it away, that's the pot that you want it to go into. After that, you have a little more leeway to do things with, like you want to maybe pay off debt is a good second step. Yeah. Because if you're in debt, then you're wasting money big time and it's no fun to pay debt down, but it's super satisfying once you have it is. And it can be fun to pay debt down, especially if you're watching it climb down and get closer and closer to zero. And when you write that last check, you just like, I'll see you in hell, you're done. And from that point on, you've got an emergency fund, you're debt free, and then now you can do some fun stuff with your money. Yeah. You're on the right track at this point. Right. Hopefully by now you've got a budget that will work for you. The key with your budget is to do something that's reasonable for you that you can stick to. It's sort of like when I was reading about this, it's sort of like dieting. Like if you set yourself up for some stupid diet that you're not going to follow, I'm only going to have an apple and a can of tuna, like Kristen Bell and the machine. Yeah. Chances are you're not going to be successful. So it's really like dieting. It's more like a lifestyle change and finding whatever financial lifestyle works for you, where you're able to save some and still give yourself some things and have a little fun. Right. But the key here is to pay yourself first. If you're saving, the first thing you do is save when you get paid, the first thing, the first check you write, the first transfer you make, the first payment you make is to yourself. And you take whatever you budgeted for savings and take it from your checking account and put it in your savings account. Yeah. It doesn't exist. Exactly. That's the other aspect to it. Once you do that, that money does not exist. It's in your savings. It's not for you to play around with. It's not for you to be like, well, I went a little over on my credit card, so I'm going to use my savings. You went a little over on your credit card. That means you're going to have to pay interest on it that month because that money in savings does not exist. Yeah. And Josh will wrap your knuckles. He will come around. I'm getting very excited right now that the idea of going into your savings to pay off a credit card, you screwed up. That is true. So if you do have your budget working, you've got your emergency fund going, you're paying yourself every month, you're saving money, then you can start thinking about investments, things like maybe a CD, certificate of deposit. Nice low risk way to start if you're young. It's such a paltry amount right now. But still, I mean, you do get money back. Dip your toe in the water if you're reticent. And a CD is a good way to do it. So a CD is basically like you give some you loan money to a bank and it's for a set amount of time three months, a year, ten years, whatever. And basically the bank says, thanks for the money. At the end of the term, they give you back that money and then some interest for borrowing. So, like they put it in this article, your money goes away, and then when it comes back, it brings more money with it. It's pretty simple. Yeah. What if you're out there? All right? Josh, I'm a millennial. I just got through watching Girls. I'm drinking a Pim's cup on my sofa, okay? And I say, Josh and Chuck, this is great, but I've done these things. I don't make much money. I'm an artisan crafter of fine goods. I've only got $20 a week extra. There's actually a lot you can do with $20 a week. No, there's not. There is. Especially if you look at that $20 as part of a stream of $20 that you'll eventually have that you say want to invest. All right, what can you do with $20? Well, there's this cool thing called a Drip. It's a dividend reinvestment plan. You can also look into direct stock purchase plans, but basically you are going to a company that you believe in. You say, I have $20 and I want one share of your $20 stock. Right? And they say, okay, here you go. It's basically like a counter where you go and buy a stock from the company directly, which saves you on brokerage fees. So what you're saying is you can just invest a little bit into timing directly into these companies, which all adds up, and before you know it, you've got like a couple of grand invested in this company, right? There's supposedly about 1000 companies in the United States that sell stock directly. You don't have to go to an online brokerage. You don't have to go to your brick and mortar brokerage. The company's like, we're not going to charge any fees because you're giving us money for our stock. We're happy to sell it to you. And you are just kind of building up a portfolio on your own. It's a good investment if you're just going to sit on something. If you're day trading, that's the worst idea ever. I don't think you could do it like that. But if you just wanted to build up stock, if you say, I really believe in this company's future and I want to have this stock 50 years from now, why just say it's only $20. Instead, take that $20 and buy one share of stock. Yeah, that's one thing you could do. If you've got a few hundred bucks, maybe you could consider something called an index fund. Traditionally, an index that tracks the SRP 500 is going to return about 10% a year. That's pretty good. Not bad money. No. And you don't have to invest like, ten grand to do so. The other thing about an index fund is if you were buying compared to a mutual fund, it's an unmanaged fund. There are 500 stocks that you own, a percentage of in shares and the S Amp P 500 companies, and basically what you're doing is investing in the market itself. Right. So it's unmanaged, which means that the fees associated with it are next to nothing. If you have like, a mutual fund that's managed, they don't typically pay off as well, and you're paying a lot more in management fees. There's a really good, I think, frontline episode on index funds that came out this year that's definitely worth watching. And I'll bet you can get it for free online. If you have a little bit more. Let's say you got $500. What that's going to do is just open up your options a little bit. You're going to have a pick from different companies, some of which might require a minimum of, let's say, $500. So it just opens your investment options a little bit. You can shop around some. You might want to open what's called a discount brokerage account. Yeah, it's just basically like an online stock trading platform. And they're very cheap because they don't trade in microseconds or anything like that. It's just like this is where you buy stock for as cheap as it comes. Pretty easy. Yeah. If you've got a grand lying around, then, buddy, you are in the catbird seat. If you start with $1,000 and invest an additional 1000 each year, you earn about 10% annually. And when you retire, that money is going to turn into over half a million dollars. Yeah. And that's just a pretty standard, like IRA, right? Yes. Speaking of IRAs, if you work for a company and they match, if they do 401K matching, you want to do that because what that is, is your company giving you free money. There's no other way to put it. It's free money. Like whatever you contribute, they'll match like, say, 100%, up to a certain amount that you contribute. That is literally your company saying, here's some extra money for your retirement. It's what companies came up with to replace the old retirement plans that they used to have in the heydays of the unions. This is what we have today. So if you're not taking advantage of that, you should. And there's another reason to take advantage of a max it out, frankly, because it's deducted pre tax. It actually lowers your adjusted gross income, which means you'll pay less taxes the more you contribute to your 401K over the year. Boom. Yeah. You should be a financial planner. I am. For yourself? No, I've been doing it on the side. Oh, really? Yeah. There's this alley that I set up on a couple of garbage cans. People drop to the cans. I am fascinated by the stuff. Once you start to really get into it and think about it and look around at ways to save it's. Addictive. Well, I can say this. Warren Buffett didn't become Warren Buffett by being disinterested in finance. Right. Yeah. He probably thought it was pretty neat early on. Sure. And look at him now. That's where you're headed. I don't know about that. That's not, like, my primary interest. I just find it fascinating. Sure. What else, chuck, you got anything else? I have something else, actually. This is just a total overview, just some starter ideas that was definitely not like a full rundown of 401 KS and tax savings and that kind of stuff. Whatever perks your ears up, go look into it. Go do a little research. There's so much information online about this stuff that it's just basically a never ending supply. This, like, free financial information probably rivals cute kitten videos and just the sheer volume of stuff on the Internet. Yeah, sounds good to me. Yeah. Get into people. You'll thank us later. Okay, that's it for this one. Yeah. All right. If you want to learn more ways to save money, you can type in ten easy ways to save money in the search bar. Howstofworks.com? And we wish you the best of luck in becoming financially free and sticking it to the man. Yeah. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this one of our better emails about our Death podcast, dying Podcast. We heard from a lot of people that really got a lot out of this one, and it was very rewarding for us. So this is from one of them. Okay. Hey, guys. My mom passed away two years ago and was moved to hospice for the last two weeks. It was a very painful time for me, and I was nervous about listening to this podcast. In fact, I was in two minds about skipping it. However, I'm glad I did not skip it. My mom went through each stage as you described. This is the first time I've experienced anything like this, and it was horrible to watch. I thought she had died in a lot of pain, struggling to breathe and having to fight every step of the way. I now realize she was going through the normal steps, and I really wish I would have known this at the time. I can confirm that sound is the last thing that goes. About half an hour before she died, me and my sisters asked the nurse if there was anything we could do to help her, and she looked like she was struggling to breathe. The nurse suggested putting on some of her favorite music. Not only did this seem to calm her down, but after a while, we noticed that her breathing noises started to match the rhythm of the music. Was she trying to sing along? We think so. This is one of the good memories I have of her last week, so I'm glad we did it. I just thought I would email to say thank you for doing the show. Even after two years, it still distressed me how my mom died. And now I feel like I finally understand it and it's a big weight off my mind that she didn't feel as much pain as she looked like she was in. Well. So that is from Philippa Griggs in Norwich, England. Thank you very much for sending that in. That is very something else. Yeah. Or maybe it's pronounced norch. Norwick. Sometimes c H is a sound. I think it's Norwich. Norwich, England. Thanks, Philippa. That's a cool name, too. Yeah. Thank you very much for sending it in. Thanks to all of you who wrote in about our dying podcast. We really appreciate it. If you want to let us know something we taught you that meant a lot to you, we always like to hear that. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushenknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. You can come hang out with us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. The sun is shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music. My favorite murder from exactly right media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. 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42593db4-53a3-11e8-bdec-2bcee99f5895 | How Government Shutdowns Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-government-shutdowns-work | Every year Congress decides how the federal government will spend money. Simple enough, but in practice politics tend to mess it up. Sometimes it gets so messy the budget doesn’t get passed and parts of the government shut down. Then the hurting begins. | Every year Congress decides how the federal government will spend money. Simple enough, but in practice politics tend to mess it up. Sometimes it gets so messy the budget doesn’t get passed and parts of the government shut down. Then the hurting begins. | Tue, 10 Sep 2019 13:26:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=13, tm_min=26, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=253, tm_isdst=0) | 50548900 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? And when you decide it's time to find a meaningful relationship, eharmony is here for you. Eharmony is passionate about creating real love for all. Rooted it in compatibility. Eharmony's process reveals truths about yourself, like, I don't know what you want in a relationship. And it helps you connect with a uniquely compatible partner who is right for you. Don't believe it? See for yourself. So start for free today, because every 14 minutes, someone finds love on Eharmony. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Right now, there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb. I mean, there's no doubt it's a great way to earn extra income. But I've always wondered about their stuff, like what happens if somebody drops a wine glass? Well, now I know. Thanks to Air Cover for Hosts, people can welcome guests into their home with confidence. Air Cover for Hosts gives you damage protection for free every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts. Hello. Stuff you should know. Come and see us in Orlando or New Orleans because that's your last chance. Yes, Orlando. We're going to be at the Plaza Life, October 9. New Orleans. We're going to be at the Civic Theater October 10. Just go to Syssklive.com and you will find info and links to buy tickets. And then you can come see us because they won't let you in the door without them. I'm sorry. That's right. And if you want to come see me, I will be in Chicago at Lincoln Hall on September 12. And I will be in Austin, Texas, at the north door on October 2. Ticket links are weirdly hard to find, so just look up End of the world Josh Clark, austin or Chicago, and you will find what you're looking for. See you guys soon. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan. There's Jerry over there. And this is the podcast. Like I said. In particular. It's the stuff you should know, Podcast. So if that's not what you're here to listen to, you're in the wrong place. And if you don't want to listen to us talk about government shutdowns, then you're in the wrong place. But who doesn't want to know about government shutdowns? Yeah, I agree. Educate yourself, right? As a matter of fact, because it's going to happen again soon enough. That's exactly right. That is why I wanted to do this episode, because I've been meaning for us to do this for years now. And every time we do it and it's like every time I go to do it, say, let's do a government shutdown episode, I think, is what I'm trying to say. Sorry, I just drank a red bull because I was about to fall over and now I'm talking really fast. Good Lord. Just give me like ten minutes, okay? And you're drinking a Coca Cola. Well, we don't have Zero here anymore. This is all we have. You want that extra caffeine kick on top of the Red Bull? I think I have just this twelve ounce can. It's not even gone, and I think I've burned a hole in my stomach. It's crazy, but delicious. It is delicious, I'll give you that. But Coke Zero is really delicious, too, for being a diet cola. At any rate, government shutdowns, you were saying? Yeah. Every time we go to do this, the government shuts down, so it looks like we're chasing a trend, so we have to wait. And I'm like, finally the time is right because it wouldn't be cool to do one in the midst of one. Is that the deal? No, definitely not. Got you. No, that's like buying a T shirt at a concert and then putting that T shirt on and looking around like yeah, I know. At the concert. Right. That horrible. Smell that. Especially concert T shirts. They're printed out of straight chemicals out of Buffalo Bill's basement made of skin. Man, he's been on my mind a lot. Because of the egging episode. Well, because of that. And then I just saw on the Movie Crushers page, someone posted a funny little thing. That was a Buffalo Bill Tinder profile. Just really funny. I got to see that. And then there was something else from this past weekend. There was a lot of Buffalo Bill happening. He's everywhere. Yeah. Remember we used to send each other that one screenshot? Yeah. That was great. Back when we shared a cubicle wall. I know. And it was easy enough to do that back in the day. Now we have gold plated aeron chairs and no walls anywhere. I'd take a regular er on. I think that's what you're sitting here right now is it quite comfy. So anyway, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. We should edit all that other stuff out, don't you think? Or get money from Red Bull, Coca Cola and Aron. You're right. Buffalo Bill. Right. Or the Buffalo Bills football team. Dang, man, you just really pulled it together with that last one. So we've been through some shutdowns in our time, Chuck. Sure. In our day, yeah. As a matter of fact, you'd think based on how common they kind of seem. I mean, every few years there's like the federal government, I should say, for our fellow listeners outside of the United States, our government is broken. Right. We're talking about government shutdowns. And it's a lot like what it sounds like. I mean, we'll get to the nuts and bolts of it, obviously, but it's basically where the federal government, not state governments, but the federal, USA governments, parts of it just stop functioning. Right. And the reason they stopped functioning is because those agencies, those parts of the federal government, have not been funded. And since they haven't been funded by law, by congressional act from years back, they are not allowed to pay workers any longer. They're not even allowed to accept volunteer work from their workers. So with no workers, that means the agency shuts down. And that's a government shutdown. That's what we're talking about. Literally parts of the government shutdown. Yeah. And again, we will get into all the nuts and bolts, but it shuts down because of funding gaps. And those funding gaps happened almost always because of entrenched politics. Yeah. It's two sides playing chicken over the budget. Right. And when the government shutdown happens, neither side blinked. Right. And it's also very important to point out that a big part of government shutdowns is trying to get the other side to maybe not accept blame, because no one ever does, it seems like. Sure. But at least the perception in the general media that this person or this side is the one to blame. Yeah. And more often than not, public polling shows that it's Congress that almost always takes to blame. Oh, really? Until this last one, it was always Congress. Right. No matter what. Which is funny that they would try to pull us off because it's so politically risky, because it's so damaging on an individual level among federal employees or just average Americans, but also on a national level. Yeah. Our economy takes a huge hit. Huge hit that we just never regain. All right. That's a great set up. I think so, too. So, Chuck, to start, I think we should talk about how money moves around the federal government, don't you? Yeah. And this is, again, if you live outside the country, and even if you live in the United States, you may not understand what power of the purse means, but in the United States and in the US. Constitution, article one, section nine, clause seven yeah. Not even the bill of rights like the Constitution. This is one of the first things they thought about. It was Congress who was granted control over the money. So the President, the Senate can't just fund something. Everything has to be agreed on, and they can't spend a dime without Congress's express approval through this process we're going to get into called appropriations. Right. And so in the Constitution, it just said Congress is the one that approves all money. Everything comes through Congress. Right. Yeah. We should read that, though, because it does have one funny line. You go ahead. From the Constitution, no money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of the appropriations made by law, so far, so good. And a regular statement of account of receipts and expenditures of all money shall be published from time to time. It's very non specific whenever you get to it, why not, like, you know, in November of every year? I honestly don't know, because from time to time makes it seem unimportant. What's the word when you don't have to do something? Make it seem non? Mandatory. Yeah. Optional. Optional. Sure. That's the word. I know you so well after all these years. So that's from article One of the Constitution, and presidents from 1778 onward said, okay, I can work with that. There's a huge loophole here. Like, no, I can't spend money myself. Like, I can't pay anybody myself. I have to wait for Congress. Right. But that doesn't mean I can't get the work done first. And then when it comes time to pay, I can just direct this contractor, vendor, whoever, militiamen to Congress to go get money. Yeah. Which is really I mean, that is so United States government to be like, well, I'm technically not writing the check. Right. I've just engaged someone services, and now we owe them this money. Yeah. Congress pay this guy. He did what he's saying he did. And so there was this representative in Virginia who was not happy about this, this kind of precedent that had been adopted by the executive branch. This representative said in 18 six that presidents were acting like a saucy boy whose wealthy grandfather was going to cover his needs, and that was the case. So eventually Congress said, we got to close this loophole. And they did. In 1884, I think. Yeah. The Anti Deficiency Act basically said, no, you can't just pay the guy to paint your house and then stand there tapping your toes looking at the guy with the checkbook. Right? Exactly. As a matter of fact, they said, you can't spend a single dime that Congress hasn't already appropriated for that. That's right. You just can't do it. So much so that, again, you can't even accept volunteer work unless it is basically to protect life or public safety. Something really important. Right. But when we say we fund you, congress funds the executive branch, all the agencies in the federal government, we really mean it. And that's what the Anti Deficiency actually said. Yeah, but it would take until 1974, when Richard Nixon signed the Congress Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Barn burner. Yeah, but that's what really changed everything, and that's what kind of laid out this process that we still work with today or don't work with or sit on our hands and hold our breath. Right. Ideally, it functions kind of clunky, even in its best form, but purposefully. So it's to keep Congress from being profligate with its spending. Right. It's to say, this group over here and this group over here, we're taking the same task and making you guys do it twice separately and then come together and hammer out the details. Yeah. It's really discouraging to look at the history of our country. The idea should be that, like, all right, we know that in this country we have a lot of people that feel one way about a lot of stuff. A lot of people that feel the other way and the government's job should be to come together and negotiate and find nice middle grounds. Right. And it seems like it's more like the government just finds loopholes and is sneaky and underhanded to find workarounds from actually trying to work together and find the middle ground. Right. It stinks. Does stink. A little sick of it. I'm pretty fed up with government, too. I think most people in America and I would gather the UK too. All right. Oh, man. Especially right now. So here's how it happens. Every year, the two chambers of Congress, they have to agree on a budget for the discretionary spending, which is, I think, only 30% of the overall budget is discretionary. Everything else is mandatory or nondiscretionary. And that means stuff that you just can't not pay for. Right. And it's mostly things like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security entitlement programs right. To where these are mandatory programs that are created by an act of Congress that says whatever these programs need to run and operate, that's how much Congress gives them. There's no spending levels. What about this? You can go in and monkey with the operation by congressional act, but as far as spending and budget goes, whatever they need, they get that's. Right. The other stuff, the discretionary stuff, that's what did you say about 30% of the budget? It's 30%, but that's still like, in 2018, that was $1.2 trillion. And it's really important stuff. It's not like the mandatory spending is the only important stuff. We're talking about the FDA, Homeland Security, TSA, the NIH National Parks, the IRS, the Department of Defense. Yeah, big time stuff. Basically everything except Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Oh, really? Is that 70%? Essentially. Jeez. I know. All right, so this all starts this appropriations process. It's laid out for the first Monday in February, and this is the deadline. It lines up with the deadline for the President to submit their budget to Congress, which you always hear, this is a president's budget. The President oversees stuff and approves stuff. But the president's not in there with a calculator crunching numbers. No, it's the Office of Management and Budget that does it for the president. That's right. But it's under the President's direction. The President says, I really want to do this. I don't want to do this anymore. Right. But the thing is, it's almost like a little kid going through the Montgomery Ward wish book and then writing their list in crayon that has about the same polling power as the President's budget. It really is saying, this is what the President wants to do. And then Congress either says, these are good ideas, or they say, we're not listening to that at all because it's not legally binding in any way. There's probably, in fact, party line templates that they just throw down like a mad lib. Right. And they tweak it a little bit, but they say, here's the Republican style budget and here's the Democratic style budget. Obama or Trump and now do your minor tweaks. Right? I think that is kind of it's got to be, because it's a huge, massive document. Yeah, they can't start from scratch every time, can they? No, it's got to be like the first few pages are what really count, you know what I mean? It's got to be. But again, this is like they call it in this article, like the wish list of funding priorities. And that's a good way to put it. The Montgomery award wish book. Wishlist I was Sears kid. I didn't discriminate. I went through all of them to make sure I had all my basic coverage. Yeah, we didn't even have Montgomery Ward, so I've never laid eyes upon that catalog. It was good when I put it up against the Sears one. Yes, we had Sears. And then I guess service merchandise was another. Oh, I remember that. Didn't they sell everything from, like, diamond Rings, the Casio, keyboards? They sold everything. I think I bought my very first guitar from Service Merchandise. Oh, nice. And returned it, like a week later because it was cruddy broken. And I went to a real guitar store. Sam Ash. No, actually, I remember I went to Dirt Cheap Music on Memorial Drive. It's not there anymore. Good. Shop local. Yeah, dirt Cheap. Buzz marketing for a business that is no longer around. So they've got this wish list, then it goes on to Congress and they have to pass what's called a concurrent budget resolution. Right. And Congress can totally ignore the President's budget. They're taking into consideration if Congress is controlled by the same party the President is, the President's wishes are probably going to be taken into consideration. But ultimately, Congress says, this is what we want to do. And from what I can tell when they come up with this concurrent budget right? Yeah, concurrent budget, CBSR current budget resolution, it's basically just setting the spending for the year. Right. That's all that is, isn't it? Like the cap on what the federal government can spend entirely? I think so. It's just that broad agreement of the total amount of spending. Okay. And then it starts to get divvied up. Yes. They're not in the weeds at this point. No, but they're supposed to pass that by mid April, and that's where they set the spending levels for 20 categories. And this is where it starts to break down or not break down, but, like, in a bad way. But they start to break it down because it's such a massive thing, you got to break it down into smaller departments. Right. So Congress says, here's the total amount of money that we're going to spend this year, and it goes to the Appropriations Committee in the Senate and the Appropriations Committee in the House. And then each of them says, okay, we've got this whole let's divvy it up into twelve slices, not necessarily equal slices, I think that probably be pretty lazy. But they say Agriculture and Rural Development, you're going to get this much this year. Commerce, justice and Science, you're going to get this much, like this slice of the pie. And they do that over twelve departments that roughly correspond to the different cabinet posts in the federal government. That's right. And it's up to those subcommittees, those twelve different ones, once they get their little slice of pie, to then decide how to eat that pie or eat that piece of the pie. There's an appropriation subcommittee that says, this is how you're going to spend this. That's right. And they have hearings and stuff like that where the heads of these departments come and say, we really need this. We've got some really exciting stuff coming up, give us some more money. We figured out how to ride sharks and hunt dolphins with spear guns and we really want to get into that this year. Or we really need to build this thing, or the military really needs to upgrade that thing. Right. Stuff like that. And then these appropriations subcommittees, each one dedicated to a group of agencies or an agency, just a single one, say, okay, this is how we're going to spend this money. And then once that happens in the House and the same thing happens in the Senate, those two groups, the appropriations subcommittees for each of these twelve slices of pie, come together, ideally, and they say, well, we came up with this. What did you guys come up with? And they say, well, we came up with this and we're off by $7 billion. How are we going to figure this out? That's great. Only $7 billion, right. That's nothing these days. Well, they negotiate with each other to come up with a joint spending bill. I imagine those meetings are contentious and tough. Sure. And eventually, though, ideally, they negotiate that spending bill. Then that gets sent to the President, and they can veto that or sign that. Right. So remember, there's actually 24 of these going on over twelve different slices of pie. And when they come back together and form twelve different appropriations resolutions, they can say, we're done, this is good, let's send it to the President. And the President can sign that. If things are going along really smoothly and Congress wants to show off, they'll say, we want to get all these together in one package. We're going to present all twelve to the President. And the President can either sign or veto them. The President can sign or veto each one separately, in small groups or as a whole. As a whole is called omnibus. Yeah. If you ever heard the term omnibus spending bill and you're like, what in the world is that? That just means it's everything grouped together. Right. And so one reason that you would go through the headache of trying to put all twelve of those appropriations bills into one package is that if there's something in one of those appropriations bills that you want out, you got a lot more leverage in the other eleven that you can trade from the budget as a whole to get that thing out or get this thing in. If it's one appropriations bill, you have much less leverage. So that's why they would go to that trouble. But that's fairly rare, I believe. Yes. And this is all due by October 1, because that is the beginning of the federal government's fiscal year is October 1. And since we've been doing this in modern times, I believe 1977 was when we started this process, congress has passed all twelve by October 1 by that deadline. Only four times. Four times, that's right. So we'll take a break and we'll discuss what happens all of the other times right after this. Okay. Congress comes along also. Big shout out to Dave Rus. This is his first article that we're doing an episode on. Yeah, dave is one of the great writers from Houseoffworks.com that we long admired over the years and tapped him to do some stuff for us. Tapping him. We're tapping him and he's tapping back. We've got a pretty great little stable going here. We got Dave Russ, Julia Layton and the Grabster, all writing for stuff you should know right now. That's right. And I think if they keep up the good work, then that's all we need. Sure. Yeah, I think so, too, because we still put together our own stuff, too. Yes, we do. I want to give us a pat on the back as well. All right, that's fine. All right. I just pulled the muscle in my arm. I can't write this week. So like we said before the break, this has only happened four times since 1077. That all twelve appropriations bills were passed by that October 1 deadline. So funny. So when it comes to October 2, it doesn't mean if we haven't passed those appropriations bills, it's like everything just stops working. Right. Because if you pay attention to the news, you will notice that there's something called a continuing resolution. So this can happen for a lot of reasons. One good and sort of non offensive reason could be that, man, we were really close and we're almost there, we just need another week or the weekend. We'll work through the weekend even to get this done. Right. A good but offensive reason is because someone farted and everyone cleared out of the chamber and missed the deadline, so they had to do a continuing resolution. No, if they're close and they just need a few more days to work it out, then that can happen. They'll pass a continuing resolution, which means everything stays the same. You don't get any more money or you don't get money taken away. Just keep like operate as usual. Right. You can't increase spending, you can spend differently or whatever, but you can't spend above the levels of the previous fiscal year no. That you're currently in, right? That's right. Okay, I'm with you. I think a continuing resolution, whether it's one for a day or for a year, and there have been ones that have been, like year long continuing resolutions. Yeah. There's no limit. You can pass them forever long you think you need. Right. It does show that negotiations are still ongoing. They haven't broken down. They just haven't reached the point where they're in agreement yet. That's right. The problem comes when they stop issuing continuing resolutions. That's right. A few pretty cool facts here. 186 continuing resolutions have been passed since 1977, and 117 of those or those have been since 1998. Yes. So it's taken them 117 times that they could not work it out since 1998. That's a lot. Yeah, it is. But if you think about it well, no, it's not evenly split. It's like seven, I think, 69 to 117 over 220 year periods. Oh, yeah. And it does seem to be getting worse. But that's kind of lopsided because in 2001, there were 21 of that 117. 21 of them all came in 2001. Yeah. So I'm not quite sure about this, but I wonder, is the number an increase in continuing resolutions, is that like a barometer for government or how government is working? I don't know. Because I wonder because ideally they would get all this done by the October 1 deadline every time. Well, it depends because as this points out, sometimes it is over the weekend and it's just a few days, and they're like, really close to having it worked out. So to me, that's not the biggest deal in the world. That doesn't mean the government isn't functioning well, right? I mean, as well as it ever does. Sure. Am I right? Yeah. But like in 2000 and 711 and 13, they were all year long. There were no appropriations bills. Right. They just said, we're just going to repeat last year, or no real appropriations bills, I guess. Right. They just said, Remember the spending levels from before? Go with God. That's what you got again this year. Yeah, that's when things are bad. So continuing resolutions, too, like it doesn't affect spending levels or it doesn't increase them. It can't I don't know if it can decrease them or not. It just basically says same spending levels last year, so maybe it can't decrease them either. I think you can't decrease I think it's just your current funding is locked. Right. But you can't attach riders on the continuing resolution. Yeah. These policy riders, those can be like the make or break. And if it's clean, which I don't know how often that happens, I'd be curious to see a stat. But if it's a clean policy writer, that means it has nothing else or a clean cr. It doesn't have any policy writer. That's right. So a lot of times, though, if there's a policy writer on a cr, it might be like, okay, we can't come to an agreement about Medicaid funding abortion. That was a big one in the 1970s. Yeah. But in this same appropriations bill that we're haggling over, there's this other thing that's super critical. It's like local hospitals aren't going to get any knee cure funding, and it's about to run out. Right. So we need to increase the knee queue funding for local hospitals, and we'll attach that as a policy writer to this continuing resolution, because this is kind of an emergency and it doesn't really have anything to do with the contentious part that's keeping the policy or the appropriations bill from being passed. Right. So that's, I think, usually what happens with that, you know, what show really nails the stuff is veep. Oh, my gosh. For all it's, like, comedy and funny stuff. It seems like they really nail kind of what it's like in Washington. Sure. Because there's a lot of talk of this kind of stuff. Clean bills and writers and who's on whose side, and can we sway this one person over to our side? Yeah, a lot of just dirty, dirty language. Oh, yeah, man. Julie Louis Dreyfus. She's an international treasure. Totally. I had one interaction with her briefly when in La. In my friend's building in Los Fields. The Hollymont building? He lived there. Scotty, you know Scotty. Sure. And we had a case of beer and a pizza and some snacks, and we were going she showed up. It's like, where's the party? Well, that's sort of what happened. We were going up in the front of the building, and she was shooting New Adventures of Old Christine right there at the entrance. And we literally walked by her, and they were, like, putting on her makeup, like, right in front of they were right about to go. And she said, who are those guys? I want to go with them. Where are you guys going? And of course, we're like, Come on up. That's cool. And then an electrician knocked on her door and asked to put a light in his apartment shining out the window. How much did you charge him? No, we didn't. We were just like, Come on in. That's nice. And then Eric Estrada showed up and arrested you. All right, so where are we here? So I'll tell you where we left off, Chuck. We left off with Continuing Resolutions temporary funding. Yeah. Eventually, if a position is contentious enough about some part of the budget right. And very rarely is it something financial, necessarily. Like, it has to do with finances because it's in the budget, but typically it's something more political than that. Like the idea of Medicaid funding abortions impasses were reached where they could not come to an agreement on using Medicaid to fund abortions. Federal dollars to fund abortions. Right. That's right. Very contentious issue. Yes. It had. To do with money. It had to do with finances, Medicaid funding. But really it was about the social issue, this cultural issue, abortion. That's usually the kind of political impasse or divide that it takes to really reach a point where one side says, you know what? I don't even agree to this continuing resolution anymore. Just forget it. We're done. Yeah. It seems like it's usually something that is so important to that either president or party or both, that they feel like it's worth digging in. And a lot of times that has to do sometimes that has to do with the thing itself, but sometimes it has to do with the perception of that thing to your voting base. Sure, that's part of it, too, but I mean, we're talking politicians here. I think you could have just said the last part. That's true. Yeah. So what happens when they fail to pass that appropriations bill and they're not talking? You're going to get a funding gap, and that doesn't necessarily lead to a shutdown either. Can we please get to the shutdown? Well, since 1981, more than half of the funding gaps lasted just a few days. When I talked about solving it over the weekend, a lot of times that will happen over the weekend. And if it's less than a few days, that means no one had to sit at work or whatever it was for a load. Right. So technically, the government was shut down, but no one noticed because it happened on days when the federal government isn't open anyway. Yeah. And until 1981, they were actually allowed to keep operating. But the Reagan administration changed all that. Yeah. What was the name? Benjamin Civil. Technically, an Italian would be because a C followed by a vowel makes a ch sound. Did you know that? I do. And I don't remember this guy. I don't either. I mean, we were young and probably too young to really know about Attorney General's. Young and reckless. Like I knew the president. The Vice President. Sure. And maybe the speaker of the House or something. First attorney General. I was cognizant of was Edwin Meese, wasn't he? Or was he State? I don't even know. He was the first Cabinet member I was aware of. Edwin Meese. Yeah, I know. Ed Meese, because I think they made foam in Mad magazine. It showed him, like, getting hit by a mouse trap or something because he was a Me. That's kind of how I was exposed to politics, too. Mad? I think so. Sure. Yeah. I knew all about Spiro agnew. Even though I really knew who he was, I still don't really know who he was. There's this great Simpsons quote where Millhouse and Barter looking at a bad magazine. They're like, they're making fun of that Spiro Agnew guy again. He must work there or something. And I remember thinking, like, I guess Spiro Agnew works there because they used to skewer, like, the publisher, too. So I just thought, Spiro Agnew is one of them. I think it's a funny name, too, in comedy circles. Yeah, that's a good one. Yes. Attorney General Benjamin Chibaleti, he was Reagan's age, and he said, it is not constitutional to keep spending money without congressional approval. Which is what's happening when you say, we'll go ahead and keep working federal government. They kind of made shutdowns happen. Yeah. It was like, okay, we're shut down. Haha. We're still discontinuing on, like, normal. Right. Until Chevalti said, well, remember that anti deficiency act? That's actually for real. And I saw somewhere that they actually enforced that. And federal agencies are frequently fined for violating these things, like going into contracts or hiring people when they don't really have the money for it. I saw somewhere the SEC got an $800 million fine once for it. Wow. Couldn't find it anywhere else, but it was a spectacular enough number to at least mention it. Yeah. So Chevrolet really changed the rules for shutdowns because before, if the government shut down but the government still functioned, it was almost more of like a what's the word I'm looking for? Ceremonial kind of thing. I know what you mean. It didn't really mean anything. It was symbolic. Yes. Once civiletti said, no, we actually can't stay open during a shutdown. That made the whole thing way more politically risky. And so they stopped happening nearly as frequently from that point on. That's right. Things have changed since then tremendously. And there have been four times sort of recently where people really dug in and there were what we would call major shutdowns. The winner of 95 96. There were two shutdowns because of Bill Clinton being a Democrat and Newt Gingrich hating his guts. He was the House Speaker at the time, and the Republican controlled Congress. And Newt was all about the Contract for America, which basically was small government lowering taxes, really sticking it to the poor. Yeah, like really higher restrictions or more strict restrictions on welfare recipients. So he and Bill Clinton went at it for a long time. They really did. Each side was dug in and Gingrich was trying to shove that Contract with America down Clinton's throat. It's not what Clinton's policies were. And Clinton said no. And neither side would give. And finally, and this is how shutdowns usually get resolved, they start doing polls of the American public and who do you blame for this? And almost invariably the public says, Congress. This is Congress's fault that the country is just being weakened right now by this government shut down. And then Congress reliance. And that's what happened for those two. Both of the shutdowns were combined 26 days. And Republicans in the Congress were to blame, according to American people and polling numbers at least. So they said, Sorry, fine, we'll try to get you impeached instead. Should we talk about 2013? Yeah, I remember this one really clearly. That's right. President Barack Obama. Republicans in Congress again, ted Cruz, like, almost single handedly shut the government down, if I remember it correctly. Yeah. He passed a bill that Republicans were very upset about, the Affordable Care Act, and he did all he could to basically defund what was later to be known as Obamacare. And he was, like, leading a kind of a rogue faction of Tea Party Republicans, because John Boehner was the speaker at the time, and he was a traditional conservative Republican. Right. And I believe he was on board, at least with continuing resolutions to keep the negotiations going. Right. And I remember Ted Cruz just being like, no, I'm shutting the government down. And it was a ballsy move, I'll tell you that. That's right. And that lasted 16 days. 800,000 federal workers were furloughed, which we'll talk about what that means here in a minute. But again, public polling and public outcry was against the Republicans at the time, and they said, all right, we'll pass a Cr, and let's change some things about the Affordable Care Act, but we will pass the Cr. Right. They basically got some minor changes. I think the biggest concession they got was that there would be income verification for people who were applying for Obamacare. That's right. We should talk about the most recent shutdown as well. 2018 19. I remember this one, too, like, it was yesterday. Basically, it was yesterday. And this was obviously when Donald Trump said, I want a border wall and I want $5 billion to get this thing going. And Democrats said, no, you're not. And they had a meeting on TV, which was really weird. And Chuck Schumer tricked Donald Trump into taking responsibility for the shutdown. Did Schumer do it? I thought he just, like, out of nowhere asserted it, I thought. I remember Schumer sort of tricking him in the room into sort of claiming ownership, almost like a dare. And Trump was sort of like, yeah, it's my shutdown. Oh, really? Because this is important. Yeah. And you could see Schumer kind of laughing, like, oh, I don't think he even understands what he just said. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans were like, I can't believe he just said that. That's right. And there was a partial shutdown on December 22 that ran for a historically long 35 days. Yeah. The previous one in 2013 was 16 days. The previous record was the 95, 96 one combined with 26 days. Yeah, those are two. This is 35 days over Christmas and New Year's, which was a tough time to do that. Yeah. Because, again, the deadline is October 1. So they had created continuing resolutions from October 1 through September 30 on to December 22, and then finally on December 22. I remember this trump had been signaling that he was willing to give, and I guess at least keep negotiating continued resolutions. And Ann Coulter. That's right. Expressed on Trump's behalf that he would not be giving on this position. Forgot about that. And that the government shutdown would go on. And Coulter basically single handedly forced this government shutdown because she said, if you give on this like we're done, I will vote against you at the poll to make sure everybody else does. And that's when Trump's will was bolstered tremendously. And that's when the government shutdown happened. That's right. You want to take a break? Yeah. How many people are still listening to this, do you think? Roughly 70%. We'll be right back. Okay, Chuck. Well, we left a cliffhanger. The government was shut down when we left. Oh, yeah. It came back. It came back after how long again? 35 days later, on January 25, trump called off that shutdown without that funding for the border wall, again, because public perception was swayed not in his favor. Right. Which is rare. Again, every single one of these shutdowns, everyone said it was Congress fault. With this one, they said it was the President's fault. Surely that at least partially had to do with him claiming on TV that it was his responsibility for shutting down the government. That didn't last long, though, because I remember and it gets so just childlike and snippy, but with the tweets from both sides calling it the Trump shutdown, trump calling it the Schumer pelosi shutdown, trying to hashtag these things, see what's trending, it's all just so ridiculous. It is Twitter, really. So the shutdown ended, and like you said, Trump didn't get that $5 billion for the wall. I think they ultimately added, like, 1.6 billion for border security, but nothing specifically for that wall. Right. And the Democrats started saying, well, let's really define wall. Right? Yeah, I remember that. But what people like to point out is not only did Trump not get that $5 billion, but America lost at least $11 billion right. During this shutdown. Yes. Income. Right. So there's a real economic cost of government shutdowns. Basically, everyone, I don't care whether you're a Republican, stuff you should know listener, a Democrat stuff you should know, listener, an anarchist, stuff you should know, listener, a centrist stuff you should know, listener, doesn't matter. You should be really mad at your government whenever there's a shutdown. That's right. Because it is holding people's jobs hostage. Yes. Millions of people depend directly on the federal government for their paycheck. And during a shutdown, you don't get a paycheck. Some people even have to work. But the people who don't have to work not only don't get a paycheck, they will never get that money for the work that they missed against their own will during that shutdown. Yeah. Like, you can apply for back pay. Is that right? No, you can't. No. For who? No one can. No. If you worked during the shutdown, you can get retroactive pay. Congress has to approve it. But you had to have been working. It had to have been an essential so you can't get back pay for furlough time? No. Okay. It's just gone forever. So people who were out of work, who are federal workers, I think about 800,000 of them during the 2018 19 shutdown, the Trump Schumer Pelosi shutdown, they went without pay for 35 days. Yes. 380,000 of the 800,000 federal workers actually had to stop working. Right. That's almost every bit of NASA HUD, housing Urban Development staff, 80% of National Park Service, 50,000 workers at the IRS, and then the other 420,000 that they deemed essential. They still worked. And I believe they're the ones that could apply. But they aren't guaranteed that money, though, right? No. Again, Congress has to vote, and usually as part of a shutdown, just to kind of like get public perception in Congress's favor, congress will hold a vote. Right. And almost every time, nearly unanimously, they'll pay the vote for retroactive pay when this thing is over. The problem is, again, those people who aren't working during that time, whose jobs are deemed nonessential, they'll never get that money. They just don't get it. And if you project it to your future retirement, like that's money that you're not investing a you're not buying things with it. Right. So you're not helping the American economy, especially during the holidays this last time. Yeah. You're not investing in the stock market, you're not taking care of your retirement. So it has these ripple effects that last months and years. Right. Just to get a little bit back to the nuts and bolts of all this, it's not like every time there's a government shutdown, the same agency, the same people are affected in exactly the same way. Right. Each shutdown is different because do you remember how there's twelve different appropriations bills that have to go to the President? Some of those can be passed and signed sure. Before the shutdown ever happened. If that happens and your agency was in one of those appropriations bills, it's like every other Tuesday or Wednesday for you during the shutdown. Right. But you can straddle those agencies and they can be split. And that can get weird. It can. Well, like a good example of it getting weird is when this past one happened. The Coast Guard, which falls under the Homeland Security slice of the pie, homeland Security hadn't been funded yet, so the Coast Guard had to keep its operations going without pay, while the rest of the military, the other four branches, were just operating as normally because the Defense Appropriations bill had already been passed before the shutdown. That's right. So depending on which bills have already been passed, some groups are working, some groups aren't. And even in each agency where the funding hasn't been appropriated for this coming year, there will be some people who will be working and others who aren't. And it's up to each agency during a shutdown to say, this is how we're going to function during this. These are the jobs that have to be carried out whether the government is open or not. And these are the people who can be sent home without any hopes of ever be getting paid. Yeah, you see the thing coming, so it's not like a big surprise, but B, you have this sort of plan already in place. You submit it, actually to the Office of Management and Budget, and you coordinate with them, rather, and that's where you got to lay out your plan. What do they say? They know it's coming, and so they got to plan accordingly. And like, I remember I have friends who work for the federal government, the CDC and places like that, and they watch this stuff really closely. Sure. Some of them were furloughed and went 35 days without a paycheck. Right. So there's that personal level where you missed rent that month. I can't remember. Who was it? Wilbur Ross, one of the cabinet members, was like, go pick up a craft or a hobby and turn that into, like, money to pay your rent, or just something some unsolicited advice that no one wanted to hear. Yeah, get on Etsy. If you are in that position, like, yes, you missed rent, you missed your car payment, like, all sorts of stuff. Even if you're not a federal employee, you're still probably affected in one way or another. And the longer that a shutdown goes on, the more and more people are affected. Everybody from people who are trying to get their passport application pushed through to people who are supplemental Nutrition Program recipients, welfare recipients, stamps, children's morning breakfast programs, like all these things start to run out of funding, and they get affected, and more and more people start to be directly impacted by these shutdowns the longer they go on. Sure. The FDA food inspections can be curtailed, and in fact, during long shutdowns, there are safety experts that say, you might want to steer clear of fresh food right now. Yeah, don't eat like that bag of romaine lettuce, especially if you're pregnant or something. Or let me see. The National Park Service. This was a big one during the last shutdown. I think some parks were closed altogether. That's how they did it in 2013. Yes, that was a big one. They lost $76 million a day and lost revenue for the National Park Service. But this most recently, some of them were shut down. Some of them were kept open but not staffed. Right. So very famously, there was I think it was at Joshua Tree, where they damaged irreparable damage to some of the Joshua trees. Somebody cut down at least one Joshua tree, which takes centuries to grow. Yeah. So that they could drive their off road vehicle in an area where you're not supposed to drive an off road vehicle so they could get to it. They cut down a Joshua tree, and that became kind of symbolic for that last shutdown. I mean, there's a range of problems that range from inconveniences to not getting paid. But imagine coming from another country and planning this thing for a year. You put all this money into a trip to come see the greatest places in the United States. Sure. I'm from wherever. I'm German. Germany. I was going to say Germany. And I want to go see the most beautiful things in America. I want to go to the Grand Canyon in Yellowstone, and I've had this trip paid for and planned, and it's not refundable. Right. What do you mean? Mount Rushmore is closed? I can see it right there. It's closed. Yeah. Sorry, Franz. Sorry. Go see I don't know what else is around. There not much. Nothing. That's kind of the point. Yeah. Go see Van. Nostrils. Childhood. Birthplace. Right. And again, these are seemingly like if you ask the federal government, they're like, who cares about that minor inconvenience? Well, there is one thing that I came across that I found particularly scummy, Chuck, during government shutdowns, when other people who are working are not getting paychecks. Oh, yeah, here we go. Some Congress people still get theirs, all Congresspeople do. But some have the wherewithal to be like, I'm not taking any pay during this shutdown. Right. Maybe I'll get it retroactively, that's fine, but you just hang on to my paycheck. Other kinds of people are like, yeah, keep the money coming, I need it, which is that's super scummy to me. Other people are out of work or working and not getting paid. Like, the TSA famously had to work whether they wanted to or not, and they didn't get paid or they're calling in sick. Yeah. Congress should not be getting a paycheck during that time. I think Congress's fault. I know. I think they said that TSA employees about 10% at one point, we're calling in sick every day after a little while. You remember that? Yeah. It was not a good time to travel. And that's an inconvenience. People flying. Yes. Taking longer. When is the next one coming, Chuck? That's what everyone wants to know. October 2. We'll keep an eye out for it. In the meantime, now you know everything there is to know about government shutdowns. There's more little interesting details, but if you want to know about them, you can be a saucy boy or girl and look it up on the Internet. And since I said saucy, it's time for listener mail. We have a couple of corrections. We haven't done this in a while. We haven't made mistakes in years. That's right. These are both yours not to pile on. Hey, guys, I want to point out that Donald Trump spoke to the Prime Minister of Sweden, Stefan Levin, about the arrest of ASAP Rocky, not the king. Yeah, everybody was really making a lot of noise about that over here because I got it wrong. And he said, I would not have even sent this email if josh hadn't finished that story with this is reality. What I just said is actual facts. It's close enough. Yeah. It was just a slip of the tongue. Facts are the lowercase f. And that is from Humpus Buffjourg. What? Try that again. Humpus Buff. Jurg. Let me see. There's a lot of confidence in there. I'm sure some of those are quite silent. Wow. I think you nailed it. But you forgot the grip. Is that his last name? I think Bob Jurge is the middle name of Compass, so Compass grip. And I love that he put swede in parentheses as if I had to see that. And then the other one was a math thing, and I'm kind of curious about this one. Nuclear symbiotics. Josh said 9000 seconds is 446 days. He said it's 104 days. And he said, I know you guys are busy in recording and performing calculations. He said, but I'm really curious just where that number came from. He said, because no combination of multiplying dividing 9 million by 60 or 24 yield 466. And I'm really just curious. You guys do a great job. Thanks for everything. Joey Russo. Thanks, Joey. I think that that number was where my fat thumb and siri got together and had a baby. That's where I think that 446 came from. Got you. And I'm sure right after you said that, I went, that's right. Yeah. So I'm equally to blame. Thank you, Chuck, for taking that for the team. Sure. Team. Josh, if you want to get in touch with us to let us know what kind of mistakes I've been making left and right and Chuck has been abiding. We love that stuff. Love it. Can't get enough of it. So get in touch with us. You can go on to Stuffyshireknow.com and check out our social links. And as always, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun's shining, the daylight's longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing pool site, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music My Favorite Murder from exactly right media, My Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgara and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
757ab8e1-ef86-468c-bfa5-ae92012d8e2a | Rhinoplasty, aka Nose Jobs | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/rhinoplasty-aka-nose-jobs | Nose jobs have been around a lot longer than you think. And the process is pretty interesting. Tune in for all things rhinoplasty.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Nose jobs have been around a lot longer than you think. And the process is pretty interesting. Tune in for all things rhinoplasty.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 12 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=132, tm_isdst=0) | 55653433 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. If you have extra space or maybe you travel a lot, you should consider hosting on Airbnb. Just think about all that extra income. You could contribute more to your retirement or pay for a big trip. And if the thing that's holding you back is that you're worried about your stuff, we don't. Airbnb gives you air cover for hosts, damage protection that's free every time you host. Learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb comaircoverforhosts. Hey, everybody, if you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comcysk, and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. The schnaz edition. Such a great word. It is, man. And it's such a great descriptor, too. I consider my nose a schnaz. There's a big difference between schnaze and a nose, and I've got a schnaz. Yeah. And what I think is even funnier and this goes back to the Saturday Night Live. Which one was it? It was a Martin short season. Okay. And it was one of the Martin Short sketches where he's doing I think Nathan Therm was the attorney that he did occasionally, and he said the word schnaz like snaze without this sh, and it just made it even funnier. He said, we don't make snazzes. He's talking about fake noses. So did he get it wrong, or did he mess up a line or what was the deal? Oh, I think it was just the comedic genius of Martin Short. Yeah, he's pretty good. And speaking of which, this has nothing to do with that, but we're teasing out listener mail today early, because we have collected I knew we'd get some good grilled cheese tips. Yeah. And we collected a little small compendium, so it's going to be a bit of an extended listener mail where we go over the listener mail tips for grilled cheese sandwiches. We're really going to wear out that background music. Stick around. So we're talking nose jobs today, Chuck, also called rhinoplasty. You would think rhinoplasty is the clinical term, and I guess technically it is. But if you are a plastic surgeon or cosmetic surgeon, you would probably not call it that any longer. You'd call it nose sculpting instead, which to me really kind of underscores the vibe about nose jobs today that is a little bit here a little bit there nothing too ridiculously radical. And that's a far cry from the rhinoplasty of the past, from what I understand. Yeah, I've heard it called nose reshaping as well. And rhinoplasty itself comes from Greek, of course. Rhino meaning nose or schnauzch snazz. We're snaz and Plasticos. P-A-L-A-S-I-K-O-S which looks so so greek means to shape and mold. And that's what plastic surgery comes from, of course. So rhinoplasty is just reshaping the snaz. Man, you are on fire in 2022, man. Really? No, you've been on fire, but I'm saying you really just stepped it up in the last this past year. I don't know what the deal is, but I love it. I'm loving it. I'm here for it and I want more and more. Alright, nowhere to go but down. That's right. That's what they call a set up. You're going to do great, Chuck. What kind of snot thank you for that, by the way, Demure. And try to move on very quickly when given a compliment. Yeah, so let's do that here. That's fine, that's fine. But I also want to add something to that. That is now the last time I'm going to drag one of your great jokes out and beat it with a rug beater until it's totally not funny anymore. Now I'm fully on board, so I'm just going to play along. Okay. Act like it's just normal. Yeah. What kind of nose job would someone get? Why would someone want a nose job? There's all sorts of reasons you could want a nose job. You could be a 7th century BCE Indian thief or adulterer and have had your nose lopped off as punishment. Okay? Bring it forward. You could have been in one of the world wars and been facially injured by a mine. Bring it forward. You could have been born with a kind of nose that is characteristic of your ethnicity and want to have changed it to fit in with wasp mid century America getting closer. And then lastly, you can also want to reshape your nose for medical reasons as well. Right. The only thing you left out, which and we're going to get to all this stuff in greater detail, is you may have had syphilis, which at a time in our history that left you with kind of a hole in the front of your face. And just big tip for people, do not Google syphilis nose and look for images. Because while you will see that and that is alarming in and of itself, you will see lots of nastiness that you won't be able to forget anytime soon. Yeah, because apparently syphilis causes necrosis of your soft tissues and soft tissues combined to kind of give us a characteristic appearance. And when that soft tissue is missing, it can be disarming at first or alarming at first, until you just stop and think, like, let's the person that's right so as far as cosmetic stuff goes, and this is purely like, hey, I just don't really like the way my nose looks, and I would like to get it to look the way I want it to look. Some of the reasons are just facial balance, like how big your face is in relation to the size of your nose. You might have trouble with the width of your nose, or it might have something to do with a visible hump or bump, which I love. Oh, yeah, I think it's called a Roman nose. Yes. That has sort of the hump. Yeah. I find it to be a very attractive feature on a lady. Got you. Okay, cool. So I'm a fan. So that would be something you would see more in profile, or it might be the tip of your nose might droop or be turned up in a more I guess they call it technically, they call it a pug fashion, or it might be hooked, or you might not like your nostrils. They may not be symmetrical. They can kind of do whatever you want done these days. Yeah, that's definitely true. And one of the things that has evolved as far as nose jobs goes that I kind of touched on earlier is it used to be, especially in the heyday of the mid century, fifty s and sixty s, when those jobs really started to take off for cosmetic reasons, especially among people of Jewish ancestry in America, there was like, I want this nose. You go in with a magazine picture, or you go in with your friend and be like, Give me her nose. You did her nose. I want the same nose. And there was just this kind of general idea that you just got exactly the nose you wanted without any regard to whether that nose actually looked natural on your face. Right. And it's evolved over time. And one of the reasons why is because there was, like, a perfect nose, an American nose, a Caucasian nose, that was an ideal version of beauty. And over time, especially in the last ten or so years, it seems like there's been a huge sea change in the way people who get those jobs approach it, and that they're like, can you just take the more extreme features of my nose? Like, you just went over on that list and just kind of tone them down a little bit. Don't give me a different nose. I want a slightly more idealized version of my nose. I want to look like myself. I don't want somebody else's nose. I just want it tamed a little bit. And that's kind of where it stands today from everything I saw as far as nose jobs go. Yeah. And it sort of reminds me of that great scene from the movie Singles when Bridget Fonda goes in for breast augmentation surgery and Bill Pullman is the surgeon. Yeah, Bill Pullman. And I wasn't thinking. Bill Paxton. I just couldn't remember if it was Bill Pullman. Sure. And they have the little weird science program where they make the breasts larger or smaller by just hitting up or down on the computer, and she goes way big, and he's like, Why don't we fit your frame a little more? He's sort of trying to talk her into just a more reasonable form of that surgery. And that was a long time ago, and I think you're right. I think these days and of course, people get all kinds of extreme body surgery done, but I think these days it is a little bit more common for someone to say, like, hey, I'm not trying to look like a completely different version, but this one thing has always bothered me. Yeah. And then one other thing I want to say, too, that seems to be a common part of the discussion around those jobs, is a lot of people who get them tend to view them as not so much like a physical operation, or it is a physical operation, but it's to correct a psychological issue that the person doesn't actually like. There's nothing wrong with their nose. They just don't like their nose. And they've come to dislike their nose so much that they have trouble living their life because they're so self conscious about it. And to them, people who get nose jobs say, this is just smart. There's no reason for me not to do this. It's going to help. And apparently it does help sometimes. So I don't encourage it one way or the other. I certainly don't judge or criticize anybody who does get a nose job if they feel like it's the right thing for them. But it just seems chucked very much in step with the 21st century, and the people in their late teens and even early 30s are just so aware, more aware than we were when we were their age. That kind of has to do with nose jobs, too. It's translated and transferred over to nose jobs that people are just thinking more about it rather than, I hate my nose, I want this nose. Yeah. I think it falls under the general umbrella of, like, now, there's a lot more sort of shunning of this idealized beauty notion than there has been in a long time. And I'm not weighing in one or the other either, because it's a very personal choice. But I will say that I do love the idea of this idealized form of beauty being kind of kicked to the curb to say something more modern. Indeed, there are a few things that have been more harmful that didn't involve, like, guns or explosions than a single idealized form of beauty. All right, so I agree. Let's go over some statistics right out of the gate. Most of these are from the United States. We do have a few international statistics, but it seems like those are a little harder to trust just based on how they're gathered, but about 2.3 million. I think this is complete cosmetic surgical procedures in the US. In 2020. And I think nose reshaping is and was the most common about 352,000 nose jobs in 2020. In the US. Far more women, 287,000, compared to 650 men and teens make up about 13%. Of those, 20 to 29 year olds make up 31%. If you live out west, you're more likely about a third of the nose jobs are performed out west. I don't know if that means Los Angeles County, probably. And then Caucasian white people get way more nose jobs than anyone else by a long shot. 71% of nose jobs in 2020 were on Caucasians African Americans with just 5%, hispanic, 10%, and Asian Pacific Islander 11%. So if you're a white American, 25 year old woman living in Los Angeles, there's basically 100% chance that you're going to get a nose job. I think you have to from what I'm seeing here. What about internationally? Well, like you said, the stats are a little wobbly compared to the USA stats, but apparently Brazil is number one. They're the leader, followed by Turkey and America and then Argentina and Russia. This list I've seen reference elsewhere that Iran is actually number four behind Brazil, Mexico, and America. So it's just up for grabs. Apparently the rhinoplasty reporting standards around the world have something to be desired. Sure. But let's just say in the top five, six, seven, you could definitely have Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Iran, Turkey, that kind of thing, right. I think that's because the way they count rhinoplasty around the world is they just have a little, like a suggestion box type thing on the way out. And they say, we like to keep track of who does this. So just write your real name on a piece of paper and just stick it in there. Sure. We'll just trust you to do that. There is a big mistranslation, and they accidentally translated, not schnauz, but snazz and confused everybody else. That's good. Should we take a break here and then dive into the history? Sure. All right, let's do it. 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But Sushi De is considered the father of cosmetic surgery and that this guy was not only performing cosmetic surgery like rebuilding noses from nothing, he was documenting it, too, in medical text that survived, and he created a technique called the Indian flap that was still in use into the 20th century. Is that how it's pronounced, his name? Sushrida? That's what I'm going or sushrida. I mean, it's a you I guess I'm in the mood for a margarita. I'm in the mood to do a little dance called the Indian flap because that sounds like a lot of fun at a party. The surgical procedure. Not so fun. No, I mean, should we read part of this? I guess, or should we read all of it? I think it's worthwhile yeah. All right. So this is a description of the Indian flap technique from Self. The portion of the nose to be covered should be first measured with a leaf, as you do. Then a piece of skin of the required size should be dissected from the living skin of the cheek, which is super advanced. I mean scrafting. Right, right. And it's leaving a blood supply coming from the cheek still. Yeah. Very smart. Very good. So we're approving of these surgical methods, but 600 year old surgical methods. We're in a position to do that. We live in the 21st century, baby. Yeah, exactly. Let me see. Dissected from leaving the skin on the cheek and turned back to cover the nose. Keeping a small pedestal attached to the cheek. Which is what you referenced. The physician should then place the skin on the nose and stitch the two parts swiftly. Keeping the skin properly elevated by inserting two tubes of erroneous. Which is a castor oil plant. And the position of the nostrils so that the new nose gets proper shape when the skin has united and granulated. If the nose is too short or too long, the middle of the flap should be divided and an endeavor made to enlarge or shorten it. So it sounds like they're just taking part of the cheek, folding it back over into itself to meet the other part with a tube in the middle and then having it grow together. Right. Yeah. Two tubes. Two tubes, yeah. And they still do that today. They use stents to have the procedure hold its place or shape afterward, and they leave it in there until it heals. So, like, this guy was basically it's like that saying. I can't remember where it came up, but somebody was describing how advanced this development was or whatever development it was right out of the gate where they said that they basically invented the airplane fully functioning with tray tables for inflight meals and everything. Totally. This guy just figured it out from the out. And it's not like we're taking the skin from your cheek today and using that to build a brand new nose that would probably actually be more likely to take it from other parts of your body. But the concepts are still very much the same. And it's weird to think that rhinoplasty has been around kind of unchanged for almost 3000 years. Yeah. And just to reiterate, so it's clear, this is the procedure when there was no more nose because it had been completely cut off. So they're really starting from zero and forming a new nose and yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I'm sure compared to what I mean, no matter the result, it probably looks better than what they had going on before. It would be my guess. Yeah. So this technique made its way through Egypt or out from India into Egypt over to Europe, finally, where they were dealing with syphilis outbreaks in the 15th and 16th century. Like you were mentioning, there's an Italian surgeon that made his contribution, gaspar. Actually, I think you should take this Gaspari taglia. Cozy. Very nice. And back in 1597, he said, I'm really going to advance this. Instead of that skin from your cheek, I'm going to take it from your upper arm. So he just kind of did a modified Indian flap. And I guess you call that the Italian flap. But then finally in the 19th century, there were a couple of surgeons in the late 19th century who really kind of duke it out for the title of father of Plastic Surgery, or at least aesthetic plastic surgery. Because we got really good at doing things like rebuilding noses, using rhinoplasty, and we got so good at people started saying, like, hey, your nose is perfectly fine and it functions, but would you like to take a little off the top? And cosmetic surgery was born. That's right. I believe the first gentleman you're referring to is a Michigan. Or is that what they call themselves? I think it's actually Gander. I'm not kidding. Michigander. Yes, because I saw an interview with I can't remember the governor's name, but she had a sign that said, like, Proud Michigander. Yeah, I know the governor. Okay. Michigander. I like that. 1887. His name was John or Landor Row. And this was, I think, technically the first paper about cosmetic nose jobs called Correction of the Pug Deformity. And then the next guy had some fun nicknames. He was a Jewish German surgeon named Doctor Jacques Joseph. And his nickname was Nose Joseph. Pretty good. Yeah. He actually kind of ties into our episode on World War I, soldier masks. Do you remember that? That's right. Yeah. I knew this ring a bell. I get the impression that he was probably working in maybe the same campus that the guy who led that mask department to build masks for soldiers, who came back with facial differences from bombs and bullets and stuff. This guy was actually doing cosmetic surgery to help repair those injuries. And he got interested eventually in making changes to help Jewish Europeans fit in better. And we'll talk a little more about that later when we talk about ethnic cosmetic surgery. But that was kind of like his evolution. He went from helping soldiers to kind of helping wealthy citizenry in Europe. And because of that, because this guy showed that there was a huge demand that no one realized was actually there before a huge explosion of charlatans nerdy wells, shiftless slackers, snake oil salesman sure. Who figured out, like, hey, I'll just give this a shot. How hard can it be? And the rise of the beauty doctor came along. Yeah, the beauty doctor is sort of a contradictory name, I would imagine, because these were the unlicensed practitioners outpatient nose jobs, like, hey, I've got some paraffin wax. Let me inject. That in there, because that's a great idea. Just don't go out in the sun. Right. And it's also carcinogenic. So this was a very sort of cut rate job that you didn't have to pay a lot of money for. And the expectation was not great. But it was at a time where, I guess, legitimate plastic surgery was just entering the fray, so people didn't know any better. And so there were a lot of bad outcomes, I think, from these beauty doctors. What's? Nice to meet Chuck. Is this still going on today? With butt augmentation? There's a lot of underground, like, unlicensed people who use non medical stuff like silicone and pump it into people's Bots to make your butt bigger. And it's cheaper, as you said, it's much cheaper because they are unlicensed and they kind of know what they're doing from experience, but they also have no way of getting you to the hospital. They're not doing this in the hospital. And some people have died. I read about a mother daughter team who killed a woman because they injected silicone. They accidentally got it into her muscle, which introduced it to the bloodstream and killed her within an hour. So it's really sad. And apparently there have been other people who died like this. So it's still going on. But as far as rhinoplasty is concerned, I'm pretty sure it's widespread enough and just affordable enough that people aren't going to underground surgeons like they were in the 19th century for it. Yeah. I mean, it's sad that that still exists and that people can get away with doing this stuff, like, out of their houses. So things boomed in the 1950s in the US. Like, you were talking, and I guess now comes the time where we talk a little bit about the procedure itself and the nose itself. What really helps is if you're not driving a car or something, if you can just look up sort of a profile of the nose that's labeled for the different parts, which Dave Bruce put this together for us. Right? Yeah. He did a great job, too. Yeah. Dave was kind enough to actually include a picture like this, which really helps kind of break it all down. You've got your upper third of the nose, which is the nasal bone, and that's where the bone is. That's where if you get your if you get popped in the square in the nose with somebody's fist and you break your nose, you're breaking that nasal bone because almost all of the rest is what's known as cartilage, which is just the shape that you're seeing. And that's why you can squish on the front of your nose and your nostrils, and it just feels like what does it feel like? Help me out. It feels more rubbery than the top part of it. Rubbery. There you go. And also, even if you don't have a phone or you can't look at pictures right now, you can feel the difference. Like, if you pinch the bridge of your nose and just kind of slide it down past about a third of the way down toward the tip and just kind of move it, wiggle it back and forth, you can feel that's bone. It's not moving that's cartilage. That's going to move. It's going to do the Indian flap if you move on. Don't make me sneeze. Just put your roof in your mouth. Is that supposed to work? Actually, yeah. It also works for ice cream headaches, too. Okay, man, we're just slinging the knowledge today. So then you've got your radix. R-A-D IX. This is the built up cartilage over the ridge of your nose. And this is where you might get, like if you have a hump on your nose, it's probably going to be on that radix. And this might be something that people choose to get flattened out. Yes. You also have one of the more interesting pieces of your body that I didn't realize the name of it, but I love it now that I know. It the Columela, which is the little skin between your two nostrils, the little kind of vertical strip of skin. It separates your nostrils. I thought that was the septum. I learned all kinds of stuff when I did that. The septum is inside your nose. The coumella is the part you can actually touch. Yeah. So just touch the little piece of skin between your nose. And, my friend, you're touching your coumella. That's right. The septum up inside your nose, above that, and it actually continues the separation of your nostrils in your nose. Yeah. And see, I always thought because I never knew much about this stuff or looked into it because I have a great nose, but I do. I always thought a deviated septum meant that the septum was actually, like, had a hole in it. It can that's perforated. Really, though, that can happen to habitual cocaine use. Well, yeah. You always heard that story about Mick Jagger, which is probably not even true. Well, his system fell out or something. Yeah, it was completely dissolved. At some point. No, that can't happen. I saw a study where out of, like, 104 cocaine users who used like, ten or more times a month, just a pretty heavy cocaine user, like ten of them, 10% had a perforated septum. And that eventually gets so perforated that your septum can just kind of fall in and your actual nose can collapse. Yeah, I think I wasn't saying that that's not possible. I just doubted that it was Mick Jagger because it just seemed like one of those far out celebrity rumor things. But who knows? He certainly was familiar with that drug at one point. Right. It's like the time Reggie Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Lionel Richie told that lady in the elevator to sit down, but it was actually his dog he was talking to. Yeah. Referred to our episode on Urban Legends from a gazillion years ago. And then wait, we're missing one more piece. Oh, just the tip. Yeah, the allar alar cartilage is the tip there, and that's where if your tip turns up a little bit, they call that the pug deformity, or they did back then. Right. I'm not sure what they would call it now. A cute button knows, a cute button knows, or if it has a little tiny hook at the end, you might want to get that done. Who knows? Who knows? There's a few more personal decisions to whether you get a nose job or not. I almost can't think of one, and by almost I can't. Right, so you've got all these different parts of the nose and we went over them because they all kind of come into play depending on what you're going to do. But one of the leading reasons people go in for rhinoplasty is to get their nose reduced in size in some way, shape or form. You can also increase the size of your nose. One very common type of rhinoplasty is where you actually elongate the nose to have it come further off of your face, so that in relation to your face, your nose appears narrower. Even though they haven't sized down your nose, they just made it longer, which makes it seem narrower. A lot of this is kind of optical illusion. Yeah. That's called projection rhinoplasty, and that obviously is going to require you to grab something from another body part or from a cadaver. That happens as well. Yeah, I'm not sure why they would do that instead of one of your own, unless you didn't want any of the rest of your body being removed. I don't know. Who knows? But yeah, they definitely do. They'll use that from cadavers. They can use it from rib cartilage, septum cartilage, ear cartilage. There's a lot of places they can harvest cartilage from and you don't need a lot. I get the very distinct impression that a little bit of rhinoplasty goes a very long way, and I think that's true. I don't know if we really kind of harped on this or not, chuck but remember when you said Plasticos means plastic or the shape or to mold in that sense? That's something I think we should point out because for a very long time, I always thought plastic surgery meant that they were inserting, like plastic stuff in there. Yeah, I think a lot of people thought that. Yeah. Interesting. All right. They mean plastic in the term of something being able to be molded or bend or changed or shaped. That's what they're using the term plastic for. There's no plastic use. They're using cartilage, using bone. They're removing cartilage. They're removing bone. And depending on where you remove cartilage or where you remove bone, it has a huge effect on the overall appearance and shape and size of your nose. That's right. It's a bit of a misnomer that you have to have your nose broken to have rhinoplasty. That is usually not true, although it can be. They've really come a long way over the years, kind of like with every surgery. It's as non invasive as it can get these days. And there are a couple of different types. There are open and closed rhinoplasties and they each have their advantages. But with the open type, you're going to make that incision. And the Columela, I think columla, man, I really messed that up. And that is that thin strip of skin that you talked about between your nostrils. Yeah. So little incision there. And then you can access the cartilage from that point and the bone through that single incision. They like this when it takes a little longer for the swelling to go down, I think. And you might have a little bit of a scar, but I think this is the one that they prefer to use when you need a little more work done than usual, a little more cartilage. Right. Because cutting that colonela allows them to lift the skin off of your nose and access it more readily. So if they're doing extensive work, this is just going to make it easier for them, which just the thought of that makes me want to faint. But that's what they do. The closed version makes me want to faint only slightly less. But they actually go into your nostrils and up to a certain point, depending on where they're going to be doing work. And they make an incision at each nostril, which then that allows them access to the cartilage and the bone along the nose. And that has a much quicker recovery time compared to the open rhinoplasty, like you were saying. Right. And you're not going to have a visible scar because it's up in your little mastress. Right. That is something like even though you're not getting your nose broken, if you get an open rhinoplasty, and probably just about any type of cosmetic rhinoplasty, you are going to have a recovery time where you basically want to set aside two weeks to where you can just take care of yourself at home because you're going to look very much beaten up with black eyes. Your nose is going to be extremely sensitive. One of the things I saw that you're supposed to do during recovery is to avoid blowing your nose. The thought of that makes me want to faint, too. Blowing your nose totally. After rhinoplasty, you want to eat soft foods, brush your teeth gently. Yeah. You don't want to sneeze because again, you're going to have stents in your nose that are holding the shape, that are keeping the sutures from coming out. And you basically have to mouth breathe that's from the cosmetic rhinoplasty. But there are actually other reasons to get rinoplasty, too, that are medical reasons. And here's where your insurance kicks in. That's right. I mentioned the deviated septum. I thought it meant that it was completely like, worn away or there was a hole, which can be the case. But usually deviated septum, more commonly, that is, is when the internal wall, instead of straight vertically down the center, which you have to sort of clear airways for the nasal passages, it's moved over to one side a little more. So you've got one nasal passage that has very little room, and I would assume the other has more room. Right. Not to an advantageous way, but I guess it can it depends on what's going on with the septum, but yeah, I guess it's like a three car garage. I'm with you. So I'm actually getting this done, right? Yeah, that was the idea that sparked this episode, actually. Okay. So I went in for a consult, Chuck, and I saw my septum, and one of them, the PA, was like, I can't even get the camera back there. Your septum is so pressed up against the inside of your nose. She didn't say the other one was wide open, although I can tell, I can actually breathe through it. So I went in and got a CT scan, and now I'm waiting for them to go over the results with me, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to beginning it. And I'm scared to death because it turns out a friend of mine didn't know this. West. His name is west. He just got it done and he said that recovery was like some of the worst days of his entire life. Oh, no. He said it was so rotten. He said his throat was like gravel for mouth breathing. His nose was in pain. He had the stents in his nose. And apparently his doctor didn't tell him he'd put stents in. So west had no idea what was wrong. He just knew his nose felt all screwed up and then finally went in for the week later follow up. And the doctor pulled the stents out and he said it was just this whoosh of air through his nose like he's never experienced before. He said he almost fainted from hyperventilating breathing through his nose. So I'm like, that's what I want. I'm willing to go through this for that. So west scared me, and then another one of our listeners wrote in when I was talking about getting it done, who is like, you should get it done, but you should also go into it knowing how rough the recovery is because everybody downplays it. I guess hopefully it's going to help me a little bit knowing to expect it. I think maybe it was so bad for them because they were caught off guard, and now if I'm expecting the worst, it might not be as bad, but I'm going to go get it done. Good. Yeah. And good luck. Thanks. I'm sure it'll be fine. Let me ask you a couple of follow up. Sure. So if you, like, hold the good side. If you pinch the good side down, can you breathe at all through the other side? A little? Not much. Man, that must be frustrating to live with. It is. Yes, it is. But I just thought it was normal until I got diagnosed with the deviated septum. And then I was like, oh, okay. And I actually asked the doctor who diagnosed me, like, Dude, how did I get that? He's like, I don't know. Maybe your mom dropped you in the head. You got in a fight when you were little. And I was like, I know the fight he's talking about. Really? My friend saw me in 6th grade and I got into a fight, and the only time I've ever been punched in the nose, he punched me in the nose. And I guarantee that's when I got a deviated septum. Sami, we got to track that guy. Yeah. Make him pay for this. Yeah, he should at least cover that financially, not rough him up right now. Of course we got to make them pay, right? I'm like Kanye and Sami's. Pete Davidson. All right, so let me ask you this, and this may be too personal, but they talk about two birds, 1 st. If you go in, insurance will cover the medical portion, the actual DVD, septum. But while people are in there, sometimes they will choose to get a little work done that you have to put the bill for. But I think the thinking is, while you're in there, I never liked X about my nose. I know you talk about not liking your nose. You're going to do anything, or do you even want to talk about that? Well, I was looking at my nose as recently as today just to ask myself that question, honestly, because it's not like I don't like my nose. It just kind of took me many years to finally be like, I'm fine with my nose. It's fine. It's my nose. I'm cool with it. This is what I look like. I like your nose. Thank you. If you look at it a certain way in profile, it looked like a cartoon gangster, like from a Dick Tracy strip. It kind of looks a little bit like that, but yeah. So I actually was like, no, I'm not going to It's fine. I like my notes. I'm probably less opposed to it than I was before I researched this episode, but yeah, I don't think I'm going I'm definitely not this time around, but I don't think I probably ever will. Well, here's what you do as you're going under, you just slip a little sticky note into the surgeon's hand. They'll unfold it, and it just says, if you happen to get rid of a little extra while you're in there by accident, I won't be mad at you. Are you telling me that I should get a nose job? Is that what I'm hearing from you? No, I was just joking around. I never thought your nose was, quote unquote, big until you started talking about it, and then people look how they look. You don't have any prominent nose features, like a hump or anything, so I never thought you had a big nose. I don't know where I got that idea. I think people look at themselves, obviously more critically. Like I look? How I look. I see myself in a picture, and I'm sometimes horrified at the kind of shape I'm in right now. But your friends and family walk around and they're just like, oh, that's what you look like right now. Well, that's funny, because I think I traced my awareness of my nose back to Valentine's Day when I was eight. My family always made a big deal out of Valentine's Day. We'd put cards on one another's chairs at dinner and then have dinner, and we get to open our Valentine's Day cards. I remember one from my mom and dad that said, your nose is really big, but we love you anyway. Happy Valentine's Day, mom and dad. What? I'm just kidding. Okay, that was good. You got me. I don't know where I got the idea of my nose is big, but it's pretty well seated in my idea of myself. All right, well, that's very wonderful for you to be open like this, because this is the kind of stuff that people don't talk about a lot. I think it's true. That's true. I guess not, although I think people are starting to talk about it more and more. Yeah. All right, so before we take a break and finish up about this whole idea of what's called racial passing, we will just quickly mention how much these things cost. All in, generally about five to $9,000 is what I've seen. For rhinoplasty, it depends on where you are. Yes. In Atlanta, it's $6500 to $8500. In La. The same thing is going to cost you ten grand to 15 grand. And that's an average cost, definitely much higher. But from what I'm seeing, it's one of those things where you do your research and you find the doctor that you feel comfortable with, and you go to them. Like, if you're spending ten grand on your nose, you probably can swing a couple of $100, maybe twice, to go fly out to somewhere else in the United States or somewhere else in Europe to go to the doctor that you feel is going to do the best job. That's right. All right, so let's take that break and we'll talk a little bit about ethnic rhinoplasty right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Okay, friends, so imagine you're in an accident and your injuries are extensive enough that not only do you have to spend time in the hospital, but you're going to need rehab, too. Well, you have insurance, so no problem, right? Well, not entirely. You get back from the hospital and notice there's a gap and that your insurance is only covering part of your bill. And it's a big bill. Yeah. And until you get back on your feet, you can't get to work. And now you have this financial burden hanging over your head like some dark rain cloud. So what do you do, Chuck? Well, if you have Aflac, you can worry less knowing they can help with the expenses health insurance doesn't cover. Afflac pays cash, which can be put toward expenses, which may be impacted by a covered medical event. Things like your medical bill, copays, or even routine things like rent, groceries, childcare and more. Yeah, that's Aflac in a nutshell. They care about what health insurance doesn't cover so those they insure can care about everything else. And care has always been part of Aflac's DNA. It's the foundation that the company was built on more than 65 years ago, and it's at the core of who they are still today. That's right. They believe the cost of health care shouldn't come at the expense of peace of mind, which is why they are on a mission to help close health and wealth gaps for Americans everywhere. So when the unexpected threatens your peace of mind, let Aflac stand in the gap to help you. To learn how Aflac can help with expenses health insurance doesn't cover, visit aflac.com. That's Aflac.com. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? Well, you better dig it up, because adventure is around the corner and there's a card that's going to get you closer. With the city advantage. Platinum Select Card. Every swipe earns you advantage miles and loyalty points and two times advantage miles at restaurants and gas stations. So your everyday purchases can take your travel to new heights. Plus, card members get access to built in travel benefits. For example, your first check bag is free on domestic travel, so you and your family have room to pack for every possibility, like coming home with extra souvenirs and with preferred boarding, you'll be in your seat sooner, ready for takeoff into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you earn 50,000 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on. So fasten your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantage. Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. All right, this is something we have to talk about. It's sort of one of the uglier parts of this podcast episode, but we have to cover things in full. And there are surgeons who specialize in what's known as ethnic rhinoplasty with the idea that and there's really no other way to say it, then they will augment your nose to look more European or Caucasian, if that's something that you're looking for. Yeah, today it's just kind of I think in some ways it still ties into this idea of I could look more beautiful than I do if I have this. It's definitely a far cry from I need to pass or fit in so I can get a job or marry a husband, like it was in America in the as a big driver for nose jobs. But then I think if we trace it back to the 19th century with Jacques Joseph, there was this idea that you could judge a person's moral character based on their nose, right? Oh, absolutely. If you had just a very sort of smallish, straight nose, it was sort of a sign of a higher class. If you had any sort of like bumps or hooks to your nose, you were maybe someone to not be trusted. And these all come from the oldest dirty ethnic stereotypes that have been around since time and memorial and knows Joseph was one, like you said, he was one of those doctors. And these are their words that they're using, but they call it the defect of Jewish nostrility, which is an actual word. Is it? And it would help people pass at a time when being Jewish was either looked down upon or could threaten your life, or, like you said, maybe lead you to not getting a job as easily as you should based on your qualifications. Yes. Drop the burger, the steam from your last name and all of a sudden you're just a plain Jane. Average American mid century. Joe or Jane. That's right. So that was actually like Jacques Joseph. And then the advent of readily available plastic surgery was hugely helped along by this idea that Jewish people just kind of needed to do this. And apparently it became such a rite of passage. Chuck that by the it was a pretty routine sweet 16 gift for Jewish girls in America to get their parents would buy them a nose job. That was just kind of how it went, which is extraordinarily sad, but if you can take that and hold it for a second, it kind of highlights just how far the younger generations of today have come in relation to that. Because moms whose parents bought their nose job when they were 16 are going to offer it to their kids, their daughters in particular now. And their daughters are like, what, are you crazy? No, I'm fine with my nose. I love my nose. Why do you not like my nose? Leave me alone. That seems to be, like, getting more increasingly prevalent. Yeah, I mean, I think Generation Z is leading the charge on accepting who you are and what you look like and what you're shaped like, and it's great. I mean, we're Generation X, so we see that underneath us, and we came from seeing boomers above us that had the moms and the dads were like, hey, why don't you get a nose job, honey? That kind of thing. So we're just sort of caught in the middle in a no man's land almost, of this generational shift, it seems like. Yeah, but I think there are plenty of Gen Xers that followed in that tradition of getting the nose job around age 16 or something like that. Well, yeah, I think because of the influence of the boomers. I'm not blaming boomers for everything, but, you know, that article about the actress Jennifer Gray and very famously had a larger nose that I thought looked great and then had a surgery where she had a very different nose, completely changed the way she looked. And she said in that article, she's talking about it a lot more now that her mom, who was an actor, said she was the one that encouraged her and said, honey, why don't you go get this done? You'll be more easily cast in roles. And she did. And I think she feels like and I think she's probably right suffered from her new nose about not being cast. Yeah, the opposite happened of the intended effect, where her roles dried up. Like, she went from, I'm a successful movie star with my nose to changing her nose to kind of falling out of limelight and not getting work like before. She said she regretted her nose job. Actually, two of them. She got two of them because she wasn't happy with the first one. And I don't know if she's ever toyed with the idea. I'm sure she has, but I didn't read it. But there's a trend among people who are dissatisfied with having gotten a nose job who are going back to basically get what's called a reverse nose job, which is as one, I think, cosmetic surgeon putting the bump back in yeah, and I don't think that's something that Jennifer Gray is considering anymore because she's kind of closed the loop on that. But I think it's a pretty cool thing that people are saying, go back and give me like embracing themselves now. As far as Jennifer Greg goes, she was the crush of a lot of dudes our age, thanks to Dirty Dancing and Jeannie Bueller. And I remember when that happened, the news cycle wasn't as invasive back then in a lot of ways. So I think I didn't even know Jennifer Gray just kind of went away. And then when I saw pictures of yours, when I finally saw a photo of her with a new nose, it's like, oh my God, is that even Jennifer Gray? Right? Because it was just such a signature look for her. And anyway, I loved Jeannie Bueller, is what I'm saying. It is startling the difference that a nose job can make. Like if you look at there is a lot of before and after pictures on the internet of rhinoplasty. It's incredible the difference that it makes, the effect that just slight changes to the nose have on the entire look, the entire face of the person, it very frequently makes them look like an entirely different person. Jennifer Gray is definitely one of those people. She looks just like she looks like a different person and not like she looks like a different person because she had a bunch of work done. She looks like a different person because she has a different nose now. And yeah, I think it was just so characteristic of her. She's not the only one who regretted getting a nose job. Famous person. I believe Bella hadid did as well. I read that she was quoted as saying that she wishes she kept the nose of her ancestors because she thinks she probably would have grown into it or grown to like it. Right. And so, I mean, at least there are options of going back and getting it redone the way it was before. But it definitely gives you pause to say like, okay, if you're going to do this, ask yourself, is somebody pressuring you to do this? Are you old enough to really kind of make a decision like this? Has your nose grown? Are you old enough so that your nose has taken what's probably going to be its final shape for your face? There's a lot of questions for you to really consider and if you go to a decent plastic surgery, they should be helping you consider these questions. And then lastly, you got anything else? Well, I do think we should mention Iranian women because you kind of tease that out at the beginning. They have some of the highest rates of rhinoplasty in the world at 180 cases per every 1000 people. I don't know if that's just people and not women, but either way a very high rate. And there was an article in the La. Times, and a woman from Tehran said, women do nose jobs in Iran because it's the only part of their body they can show in society. We have to wear a scarf over our hair, so we get a nose job to make ourselves beautiful. And it starts in high school. Right. But apparently even there, there were much more severe rhinoplasties performed in Iran in previous generations, much more dramatic reshapings, and now there are more subtle changes that still embrace the ethnic look of Iranian and Persian women. And that seems to be the trend sort of happening everywhere. So what I was hoping to bring up, at least to finish on is that because of all those questions that you need to ask yourself, like, there's a lot of concern about how young should you be before you start thinking about getting a nose job or any kind of plastic surgery? And there's apparently a big problem on TikTok where there's plastic surgery targeting, like, ads for plastic surgeons, targeting users as young as 14. I think Business Insider set up, like, a fake profile and set their age to 14, and they scrolled for eight minutes before they started getting plastic surgery videos served to them. And I guess TikTok banned outright plastic surgeon ads, but the plastic surgeons have figured out, like, okay, well, I'll just make a video talking about how great plastic surgery is, and it's all basically the same. So it's a huge problem. And you can understand, like, if you're 14 years old, that's probably not a good time for you to be thinking solo about whether you want a nose job or something like that. Yeah, it's certainly a lot to weigh, for sure. Without the help of a social media giant pushing you one way or another. That's right. Well, Chuck said that's right. And he already said he doesn't have anything else. So if you want to know more about rhinoplasty, go read up on it, especially if you're considering getting it yourself, inform yourself. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. That's right, the listener mail. We teased, I think do you have it pulled up? We should both kind of go through these. Okay. Yes. Since it's a long win, we got a lot of great grilled cheese tips from listeners. And the first one we got was from Pablo Quintana, who said, when I do grilled cheeses, I make them using manchego cheese or Wahhawkin cheese, grilled olive oil, tomato with butter on rye or sourdough, paired with either tomato soup, clam chowder oh, my God. Lentil soup, or even chili, depending on the occasion. Pablo, you're doing it right. Yeah, Pablo knows where he's doing so after Pablo, we have Robin Russo, who labels themselves a Wisconsin cheese lover. They say, try spreading pure maple syrup on the bread and use Colby cheese. Coby melts very evenly, so it's perfect. The syrup gives a nice sweetness balanced by. The salt and the cheese and then as an aside, just to show off. Also, if you ever eat fresh squeaky cheese curds, get them in cocktail shrimp sauce first. It's so good. You'll thank me later. So there's two tips from Robin Russo. That sounds really good. That sounds like something you could cut into quarters and serve at a cocktail party. Yeah, it sounds so delicious. Canapes Erica Tyler says, use brioche bread if you're living your best life, but normal bread will also work. Cover the outside with butter, then dip that buttered side in parmesan. Nice. The cheese inside is Gouda or monster. Both are delicious. I learned this method from that dude can cook on YouTube. Hats off to both. Ruth Ann El says, make your grilled cheese, but add deja mustard to the inside takes it to an awesome level of unctuousness. Yeah, I'm not into the mustard, but I bet mustard lovers would love that for sure. Bear Swedman says, press a couple of garlic cloves into a small bowl of cream cheese and mix. There you go. Use that as your cheese filler and a grilled cheese and you, my friends, have entered flavor country. You can think Allison, who is Bear's wife, who introduced Baird to the podcast and the recipe. That sounds really, really awesome. I love cream cheese. It doesn't. It ties into what a couple of other people have sent in, including Virginia Bestwick of Alberta, Canada. She says, I like my grilled cheese with old cheddar and garlic Borson. And I think garlic Borson is like a cream cheese spread with garlic in it. So that's kind of like Alice is doing the deconstructed version. That makes me so hungry. Mike Frank says, this mayo on one side, butter on the other. White cheese, cream cheese spread, or better yet, Borson. Is it Porsche or Borson? All right. Creamy and tangy without throwing off the bread. The bread cheese ratio. Boom. There you have it. Good old grilled cheese. Also love truff. Truff hot sauce on the grilled cheese. It's unique hot sauce made with truffles and truffle oil. Although we know that synthetic Mike into our episode of Truffles. He said it's pretty niche, but really great on grilled cheese. Thanks for that, Mike. And here's one from Jesse Lee of Taos, New Mexico, who, over the deafening home, said, one of my favorite things to dip a grilled cheese in is salsa. Try it out with your next one and thank me later. Nice. Simple but awesome. I bet that's really good. This is a professional chef, and I'm going to go to this restaurant when I go to Savannah. The Bellwether House in Savannah, Georgia. And Chef Ryan white Buck explains why mayo is better. This is a little bit of a J. Kenji Lopez Alt food science explanation, which I always love. Butter contains dissolved milk solids that, when melted, separate and can soak up a slice of bread. Mayo, however, is oil emulsified with a very small amount of egg yolk, mustard and vinegar. Using mayo for grilled cheese will crisp the bread without sogging it up, and the mustard and vinegar will season the sandwich with spicy and tart elements. These flavors, paired with the hints of sweet from the bread and the unctuous savory quality of cheese, paints a complete taste profile for the palate in a fashion similar to how complimentary colors work. Very nice. I know the Bellwether house in Savannah. Yeah. First check out the food. And then the last one is from Kayla Rohr, and she does not have a tip, but she has a recollection from playing The Sims. She said starting in early 2008, The Sims added a secret grilled cheese aspiration to their little virtual lives. If you played The Sims, you could create a secondary aspiration in life, which made your SIM obsess over grilled cheese. If they cooked, they cooked that. If they painted, they painted grilled cheese. And in their backlog of precious memories, you'd see where they finally remembered a time where they ate grilled cheese, and the comment underneath would read, grilled cheese, my favorite. Too funny. Agreed, kayla, that is too funny and pretty interesting. I never knew that. And she actually said she's not sure if it's related to that 2007 craft money. Remember, craft spent like a billion plus on grilled cheeses? Yeah. The astute listener, by the way, unless Jerry cuts it out, will literally hear my stomach growl right then during that. Very jerry, I hope you don't cut that out. That's it. If you want to be like Kayla Ryan, Jessie, Mike, Virginia Baird, Ruth Anne, Erica, Robin and Pablo and write to us with whatever you have to say. You can send it via email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that, we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs. Better than leaving brands? Find Halo elevate as Pepco Pet supplies plus and select Neighborhood Pet stores." | |
a665027e-5462-11e8-b449-13413cedbd94 | Pterosaurs: Not Flying Dinosaurs | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/pterosaurs-not-flying-dinosaurs | Almost everything you know about pterosaurs is wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't flying dinosaurs and they weren't all pterodactyls. Which makes this a great episode for you to learn some new and amazing stuff about terrifying prehistoric beasts! | Almost everything you know about pterosaurs is wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't flying dinosaurs and they weren't all pterodactyls. Which makes this a great episode for you to learn some new and amazing stuff about terrifying prehistoric beasts! | Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:36:42 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=13, tm_min=36, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=235, tm_isdst=0) | 36535150 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and the Disney Nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss, turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to Squarespace.com SYSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Just the two of us batching it today? Yeah, that's what my dad used to say. If he had to take care of me while my mom was working, we're just batching it. Was that what he said? Yeah. I thought that was a relatively new term. No, I mean, at least the early 80s. All right, maybe my dad was, like, way ahead of his time. Why hasn't there been a movie called Batch in it? I don't know. Pretty obvious. The fact that it was around as a word in the 80s makes me even more surprised that there's not a movie called Batch in it that the protagonist has to put on, like, a car wash to save their business or something like that. Yeah. Owen Wilson. What did he do? Well, he would just be the star batching it, I imagine, right? I guess so. Could that guy be any more charming than he is? He's pretty charming. Speaking of charming, Chuck, let me introduce you to a wonderful little beast named Ketzle Coladas Northrop. Are you familiar? Sure. So Ketzle Colada is named after the Aztec flying serpent god Quetzalcoatl. Right? So it makes sense. But this guy was a real thing. Not to put down the Aztecs beliefs or anything like that, but this is a verifiable beast at one point, particularly in the late Cretaceous period, and it's what you would probably call a pterodactyl. But if you call it a pterodactyl, you'd be dead wrong, pal. Yeah, what it really is is a pterosaur. And there's a lot of misunderstandings that we're going to sort through. But the most important point is that this beast right here is 20ft tall, as tall as a giraffe, and it had a wingspan akin to about F 16 fighter jet. And it was a bad mamma JAMA. What's that for? A lead. That's good. I like it. I didn't even use the way back machine. Just trimmed the fat. Gone. You don't even need that old clunky thing anymore. We just use our imaginations. We're not actually in the Cretaceous period like we would be if we had used the way back machine. Okay. Yeah. These terra starts with the P, of course, the silent P. That is from Greek, meaning winged lizards. And that's pretty on point, because they were reptiles. They were not dinosaurs. Yes. Big distinction here. They're close. It's like a sister to a dinosaur. Perhaps they're from the same Claude, which is archosaurs, but it's a really wide Claude. And all that means is that they have in the very remote past, some single common ancestor with dinosaurs. Yeah. And they were around roughly the same time period and went away in the same fashion. So it's normal, I think, for people to say, look at that pterodactyl. Look at that flying dinosaur, even though neither one of those is necessarily correct. Yeah. So just to get this across one more time, pterosaurs were not flying dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles, but they weren't dinosaurs. They weren't birds, either. And to confuse things even further, there were birds around at the time of the dinosaurs and the time of the pterosaurs. And to confuse things even further, there were such things as actual flying dinosaurs. We call them velociraptors. Right. And these vertebrates actually were flying long before birds and bats by millions and millions of years. Yes. I think this has to do for workers article. This is a good one. I got to give big ups to Clint pumpfree. Yeah, pretty good. The pump. It sounds like an action, how stuff works. Right? Pumpfree, chest beef, rock. But he said, I think, 80 million years difference. 80 million years before? Yeah. That's a lot of years. It is. So there's a lot of, like, confusing stuff flying around. And I think there's one other thing we should probably address right out of the gate, is that you shouldn't call them pterodactyls, even though a lot of people do. Pterodactyls are actually a specific genus of pterosaurs. So to call all pterosaurs pterodactyls would be incorrect. But you could call all pterodactyls pterosaurus. Okay. Yeah. And technically, if you have seen this thing in movies a lot, that they say that's a pterodactyl, what you've probably been looking at this whole time, is one of the species, and they're potentially up to 200 of these species right now. I think they've identified about 130 ish. But a terranodone is that how you say it, taranadon. That's what I would have gone with. I like terranodone. That's probably what you've been seeing in movies all this time that you've been saying that's a pterodactyl like, if you look up an image search of the Toronto Dawn, you'll say, that's a pterodactyl. Because I saw it in King Kong. Yeah, it's like this giant winged beast with kind of short stubby legs and a huge wing span and, like, a weird crest on its head and a long pointy beak. A pterodactyl. Everybody knows what a pterodactyl is. Don't be an idiot. Yeah, you saw in King Kong saw the same thing in Jurassic Park Three in 2001. Right. Things hadn't changed all that much. But in that time span, it's actually kind of surprising because our understanding of terrace, ours had increased dramatically, and yet we were still just basically thinking of them exclusively as pterodactyls, which isn't the case. Yeah. There was a paleontologist named OC. Marsh. It's a pretty good name for a paleontologist. Sure. He collected these first fossils in what is now and was then western Kansas in the late 1870. And they've been well, I was about to say they've been digging up lots of these since then. They sort of have, but not nearly as many as other types of fossils, because these fossils are really highly breakable and dissolvable, and they're tough to get a hold of and keep in one piece throughout the process. Yeah, we should talk about that. One of the reasons there is so little understanding of pterosaurs is because they don't fossilize very well, because their bones were not designed to be fossilized. They were designed to allow these giant reptiles to fly. Yeah, they didn't say, like, oh, we need to be designed to leave our mark later. No, it's like, we want to fly. Right, exactly. So early on, I think the first terrace specimen was found in the late 18th century in Germany, and by the time OC. Mars was digging them up 100 years later in Kansas, they'd been discovered, but they'd also just kind of been abandoned because there were very few follow up fossils that were identified. Right. Yeah. So when OC. Marsh started to dig them up, this is a big deal. And because he was finding virtually all of the same species, the tyrannos, that became the common conception of what the terracer is. But it was coupled with an earlier name, pterodactyl, that had been given to the entire species or the entire group, by George Cuvier in, I think, 1812. Yeah. In that first fossil you're talking about. No one got credit for that, for digging that thing up. But like you said, it was in Germany in limestone, like 150,000,000 year old limestone late in the 18th century that eventually found its way to a man with a great name, cosimo Alessandro Calini. That's a great one. When I first came across this in this article, I was like, I'm looking forward to hearing Chuck say that guy's name. That's him. He was Italian. Go figure. And he was a natural scientist, and he, like many others, to follow for a long time. Didn't really know what it was since they found that in an ancient lagoon with all kinds of seafaring creatures. He understandably. Thought it was a seafaring creature. Yeah. And some of the best preserved fossils that we have of these things are found in things like lagoons, where something happened to them. They died suddenly, quickly, fell into, like, a body of water, which probably broke their fall a little bit. They landed at the muck, then were covered up, potentially in some anaerobic state, and eventually became fossilized very gently. That's what it takes to fossilize a terrorist. Yeah. And Cuvier, who kind of got it all wrong by calling it a pterodactyl for everyone in the future. He was actually the same dude, though, who did say, actually, I think those are wings, not paddles. Right. And that was a big breakthrough. Yeah. And the reason he called them pterodactyl is it means wing finger in the Greek. Right. So terasar means winged lizard, and pterodactyl means winged finger, because, as we'll see, the front edge of the wing, the leading edge of the wing is actually an extraordinarily long pinky. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. I think so, too. That's a good way to lead up to a break, too, don't you think? Agreed. Let's go. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? 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No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off Ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck stuff you should know. All right. Okay, we're back. I feel like we kind of jumbled things up like a bunch of terrace our bones. Sure. So let's reset here, shall we? Should we reset with the head? Let's. The head crests. If you've seen a movie like Jurassic Park and you saw what you thought was a pterodactyl and he had that beautiful looking he or she well, maybe he, because now they think that maybe only the males have these head crests. These things were sort of one of the staples of many, if not all, of these species. But they were all really different and some fantastic looking, and they're not exactly sure. There's still a lot of debate over what they use these big crest for. Yeah, they thought maybe they use them as a rudder in the air to steer with as they're flying around. It does make sense. Some people thought that they may be used them as a Marine rudder. Maybe they used them for defense because they were, like, made of horn and bone covered with skin. And they think possibly they had coloring to them. Maybe they had feathers or light fur. They're not quite sure. But because there's just such a lack of understanding and because pterosaur fossils are so few and far between, it's still basically anybody's guess what they were used for. But then, I think in Germany, and I'm not exactly certain when this was discovered, but a female pterosaur was discovered, and I should say she had an egg in her oviduct still. So it was the only pterosaur to ever be positively identified by sex in the history of the world. And she lacked that head crest. So it really lent support to the idea that it was males only. Kind of like how a peacock has the very bright feathers and the pee hen does not. They think that maybe it's the same thing or more kin to, like, antlers in deer or moose. The males are the ones that have the antlers, and they think they use it maybe a little bit for defense, but mostly to say, hey, I'm a dude, and I'm looking for some action. Check out the sides of my antlers. They think it was probably the same with Tyrasars now. Yeah. And these things, like it's amazing. When you look at these pictures, some of them are just really fantastically colored. Some of them are really big, like that tapahara imperator. Yeah. If you look up one terracear during this episode, make it this guy. Yeah, this is cool. This thing looks like it literally has a sailboat sale on top of its head. If the coloring is anywhere remotely like what the artist's conceptions are, it just must have been something to see. Yeah, that Nicknasaurus is pretty interesting, too. This one didn't seem to have any sort of it looked like a sale without the sale. Like, what do you call the frame of the sale? I'm sure there's some great name for it, the Timber. Sure. But they like it in this article the pump does to television antennae and they are really big and look only clunky to me. Yeah, it'd be good for skewering, I guess. But it could also be terrible for skiing. Like if you were hunting or spearing fish with it, you could probably catch a lot of fish, but you couldn't get the fish off because these antenna were just way too tall and long. Yeah. And then this terra dustro is really you should look that one up too. It's pretty amazing. This one looks like if a dinosaur mated with a pelican and a toothbrush. Yeah, I saw one person described it as a toothbrush with wings. Yeah, like the lower jaw has like 1000 really long, small, needle like teeth. And it looks like this big toothbrushy under bite. Yeah. And it does like when you look at it, you're like, oh, it's clearly got to be related to a pelican. Again, it's not pelicans. A bird. And birds were around during the time of dinosaurs. And if birds or anything, they're actually the real flying dinosaurs. But it does look a lot like it. And it makes sense that it would because from what we're learning about terrace ours now these days is that a lot of them were ocean going that they had the goods to fly across an entire ocean over the course of a few days. Like maybe an albatross would and that they would fly low. Some of them. And skim the surface of these ancient oceans on Earth and scoop up marine life with their jaws. With their lower jaw. Just like a pelican would. So what's even more interesting about that, besides the idea that this is going on 100 million years ago, is that pelicans are not related to these things. So that this trait, this behavior, this characteristic evolved more than one time. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I find that fascinating. Rather than saying, oh, pelicans descended from that. Actually, they didn't. That's just two different branches of the same tree developing into something very similar. Evolution and isolation. Is that what they call that? Convergent evolution? Okay, I think yes, it is. It's convergent evolution when, like a trader behavior characteristic develops separately among different branches of the tree rather than developing once and then descendants all have that same trait. Yeah. And although they did certainly love a good seafood meal, they used to think that was sort of all they ate. And now new research suggests that they do eat, or did eat all kinds of things. Even tiny dinosaurs. Yes. The way that they describe them now is that it's just like birds, right? You've got birds that eat all sorts of different things that fill all sorts of different ecological niches. That's what they're coming to the conclusion about with pterosaurs, which I mean, Chuck, this is like a huge sea change from what it was even back in the or 60s or seventy s. And we thought there were just a few species, and it turns out there were a ton of different ones and a lot of variety and a lot of diversity. And now we're starting to kind of get a handle on that. Yeah, and they think they were probably able, after they hatched, to fly pretty quickly, to take care of themselves pretty quickly. And like you mentioned, they're flying, they believe now was they were kind of built for the long haul that weren't super fast, but like a long distance jetliner. Right, but some of them are small, some of them are smaller songbirds. And I imagine they were flitty. Yeah, I can't remember the name of one, but there's one that was extremely tiny. A very tiny little flying pterosaur. Could you imagine anything more frightening than what you would call a pterodactyl the size of a robin? Yeah, or imagine 100 of those. Or it could look kind of cool, like the little UFOs and batteries not included. Remember those? I didn't see that movie. Do you remember the ads or anything from it, though? No. It was basically Cocoon, but set in a tenement and with UFOs rather than the actual aliens. Okay. It was very similar, though. I think Donna Michael was in both, maybe. Why not? He had that market cornered. If you can get your hands on Donna Michael, you put him in your movie, buddy. Yeah, for sure. Okay, where are we at, Chuck? Well, I think we can go we can hop over to the fact that for many years people thought we've already mentioned birds, but bats was the other thing that people confuse them with. There was an anatomy professor named Samuel Thomas von Summering, and in the 1800s he incorrectly suggested that these were bats. Another paleontologist named Harry Sealy even wrote a book called Dragons of the sky in which he said birds were the descendants of these. And it's understandable why these dudes were wrong. They were doing the best they could. And when you look at those wings, that membrane, it looks like it would be a bat swing. But there are some differences. Yeah, there's some big differences. A bat in particular, I could see confusing it with. Right. Like an ancient bat. Because with a bat, you have four digits, and three of those digits form the bones in the wing, and you got one little digit wiggling free. So a back can climb around with its index fingers, right? Yes. With a terracer, you have three digits that are free. And then the pinky, the fourth digit, is the one that forms that long, sometimes 20 ft long bone. That's the front end of the wing. Yeah. That's crazy. But they had three fingers free. And this is really significant because before they used to think and if you go back and you look at how Pterodactyls were drawn in, like, the middle of the 20th century, when they weren't in flight, they were probably standing on their back legs, and they realized that this is probably not how Pterosaurs stood. That instead, because their forearms were far more powerful than their back legs, they were probably quadruped, which meant that they walked on all four legs, putting most of their weight on their front legs with their front forearms, with their three free digits and their wings tucked off to the side. And they look kind of like a cartoon bulldog walks, is what I'm seeing. That's what they think. Now, like a cartoon bulldog, not a real one, right? Well, I mean, a real bulldog doesn't walk quite like a cartoon bulldog. Cartoon bulldog is more exaggerated and pronounced. You know what I mean? Sure. It's a cartoon. Should we take another break? Sure. All right. We'll do that, and then we'll talk a little bit about how they fly and other good stuff right after this. Pterosaurs. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa lined jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own sleeves. IBM. Let's create. Learn more@ibm.com It automation. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office when you could be using Stamps.com? Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses because Stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and Ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with Stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and chuck it's up? You should know. All right. All right. So you mentioned they were quadripedal footed, and initially they thought that they would like birds, because we see birds do it, and it's probably especially back in the 1800s. Maybe they're all working off the notion of the easiest solution is probably correct. Yeah. Because they would see a bird hop off those back legs and think, well, this is clearly what pterodactyls did. Yeah, and I never thought about that. But that's exactly what a bird does. It jumps up in the air from its back legs and flaps its wings and then provides lift from that point on using its wings. Yeah. I never really thought about that. But that's how birds fly. Yeah. They hop around. And it's funny. One of the other articles you sent, one of those guys believed, the paleontologist believes that it even evolved into flying, that they used to hop around on four legs, and eventually they started jumping higher and higher and then started flapping, and then before you knew it, they were flying. Yeah. Maybe they went from leaping to gliding to flying, and they don't know. Again, they haven't found what you would call a prototype, like, whatever was the link between ancient reptiles and pterosaurs. But that's kind of the current guess right now, is that they evolved from some small, light lizard that was good at jumping. Yeah. And one of the big keys in finding out and I don't think you said this how strong their arms were. Yeah, that sort of was a big breakthrough, because when you think of you think it all comes from the legs because they're jumping, but because they found more fossils, they realized they were quadrupedal, and they said, man, they actually have incredibly strong arms and shoulders and these little tiny feet. So not only are they quadrapedal, but a lot of that initial hopping lift may come from the arms and not the legs at all. So they think now what they do is basically push themselves off their front arms and legs to an extent, and just basically hop up into the air and then start flapping their wings rather than like, a bird jumping off of their back legs. Is that what you mean? Yes, but most of that comes from the arms and shoulders rather than the feet. Right. And the feet, I think, just sort of drag behind and perhaps maybe help with steering. Is that right? Yeah, you can actually divide terrace source into two groups, depending on when they were around. One started around 150,000,000 years ago, and then one came later, and the first groups had long tails. So if you look at old drawings of pterodactyls, you'll frequently see them with kind of like a long forked devil's tail. And it's actually kind of accurate. They think that the original ones had longer tails to learn to steer in the air, but then as they got more and more adapted to flying gracefully, they lost their tails. So the later ones, the ones that were around when the Cretaceous period ended suddenly, mostly called Ozdar kids, which is not an easy word to pronounce. No, it's not that they had lost their tails because they had developed other methods of changing how they fly mid flight. Right. So because the wing membrane was connected to their ankle from their shoulder with their finger kind of providing the front of the wing. If they altered the angle of their wrist bone. Or they move their ankle in and out. It would change the actual dynamics of their wing and they could dive and lift and do all sorts of other things. Which is this is a big change in our understanding of pterosaurs. Too. Because they used to think that they basically had to run and jump off of a cliff to gain flight or hang like that. Yeah. Because they were so weird looking and so weirdly developed in different ways. Huge heads, enormous beaks, big head crests, small puny little withered feet. Mr. Burns hands. Yeah, that's a good one. Or David Cross in the Titanica segment on Mr. Show. You're like that, right? That's like a terrace or his leg. So it didn't make any sense how they flew. But now that we're starting to learn more and more about them, we're like, oh, actually, they had a lot of really interesting adaptations, not the least of which was their bones. Yeah. Are all of their bones hollow or just those wing bones? All of them. Wow. That made them incredibly light, obviously. But that also ended up being one of the problems in trying to get fossils of these guys because they were very highly destructible. Non fossilizable. Non fossilizable. Do you remember our fossil episode? That was, like, one of the better old ones, if you ask me. Yes, I agree. I learned a lot on that. Yeah. We should try that out in the selects soon. That's a great idea. That'd be a good one. They also thought if they were on water, like they just had a little snack on a lake, that they would use those wings as paddles and just get going that way, pushing off the surface and then flapping until they were shaking it off 20ft above the water. Right, exactly. A lot like marine birds do today. Right. So those bones, like, you kind of hit it on the head. They were extremely light. Right. They were about a millimeter thick. Something like the thickness of a playing card. I saw that's. But nuts. It is super nuts. Especially considering that these things were holding up like a bird that was up to 20ft tall. Right. Or not a bird. A pterosaur. Yeah, not a pterodactyl. Man, I just averted so much email, Chuck. Like a millimeter thick bone wall. But the way that their bones were made, they were made of cross sections of basically, like, plywood, so they were really strong. And then if you cut their bone in two and look down the hollow tube, you would see that there are little Struts. Chris crossing to provide even more internal support. For those bones. Amazing. So you could have a 20 foot tall terracer that could actually fly because it was that light. I saw one of them as dark as was something like had a 20 foot wing span, but it probably didn't weigh any more than \u00a320. Yeah. And some of these what were the largest ones? Like 35, 40ft in wingspan? Yeah. So about like ten to 15 meters in wingspan. Like the size of like a jet plane. Like a fighter jet. I just flew on my first private jet. Oh, yeah? How was it? You know what? First of all, I've always wanted to fly on a private jet, but never thought I would have caused to, because unless you're extremely wealthy, you only do that if you get invited to for some strange reason. Like, you don't just book it. You should be on high alert if some wealthy person invites you on their private jet. And it was as awesome as you think. And the most awesome part of it was just the sheer lack of hassle. Yeah. Like, I parked my car at the little tiny airport here in De Cab County, walked across the parking lot and into the lobby, and there's literally a guy standing there, a captain. And he was like, Are you Chuck? And I said, yes. And he said, Right this way. And he walked out the back door and there's a plane. And they say, Watch your head, you get on it. And he says, Are you ready to go? Was it just you? No, there was like five of us on an eight seater. Everybody was waiting for you? Yeah, I was the last person to get there and I was a little stressed, but then I thought, wait a minute, that's the other perk is they don't leave you. Yeah, I mean, there's a schedule, but it's really late. But it was cool. The one we were on was it's not roomy. So it's not like Air Force One or anything. Like, you feel like you can just walk around, but like, when I was standing, I'm five foot ten, and if I said completely straight, my head would brush the ceiling a little bit and you're just like, private GS, but no TSA. Like, you just walk on. They fly you there and then you get off and you're right there. It's like this just the lack of hassle. And all I could think of was like, man, it must be great to be a billionaire sure. And never have to deal with an airport again. Yeah. But yeah, it was kind of cool. But then also, once you're up there, you're kind of like, well, it's not like life changing. Yeah, I've never flown on one. Yumi, flew on one. And she said basically the exact same thing you did. That just the lack of hassle and how fast you get somewhere is just beyond amazing. Yeah. I mean, it takes away hours and hours of airport crap. I know. You start to develop like that terrible sensation where your eyes hurt for some weird reason, even though you haven't even gotten on a plane yet. There's a lot of stuff that I'd be happy to leave behind. Yeah. And also when you're going to take off because it's small, it feels like you're going as fast as you're going, whereas in a jumbo jet, it really doesn't. Right. I was kind of like, man, we're going fast. Speaking of Yuumi and flying, I have an update. Okay. Do you remember the story about the Russia visas that we failed to get? Sure. I told her that I told that story and she was like, you said we forgot. And I was like, yeah, we did. Right? She's like, no, we asked like, five different people five different times and we're told we didn't need visas. So I wanted to let you know, Chuck, that we actually are as buttoned up as you think. We were just misinformed. We got that great email from a new listener that was like, listen to some dumb story about some guy in his dumb visa. I was like, oh, welcome to the show, brother. Yeah, you should probably there's the exit door. Was that guy. That one guy. Okay. Yeah, he's very turned off by your side about your visa story. Yeah, whatever. So, anyway, thanks for indulging the private jet convo. Yeah, I'll bet that guy loved the private jet aside, it will probably never happen again, but it was basically like riding around on a terracer. So that's how I wedged it in there. Nice work. That's nice. So I'm trying to think of what else, like terrace hards. Kind of bring out the little entertain year old to me. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm wearing my little outdoor archaeologist boots. I see that. And white pull up crew socks, and I'm just a total little nerd. You keep dusting everything in here, too. I'm not even like one of those dinosaur nerds. But just getting into researching dinosaurs, does it do that to you, too? It just kind of draws out like the little kid? I think so. And I think probably because at least when I was in you and I were growing up, I feel like public schools just, like, did such a poor job of talking about these periods. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah, I remember that. But I also remember dinosaurs being kind of huge in the eighties. Yeah. At least they were in Ohio. Is that an Ohio thing? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I mean, Jurassic Park obviously changed everything as far as but when was that? 90s? Yeah, early 90s. Yeah. But I feel like dinosaurs are pretty popular among the kids before that. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I hit my head and don't realize it. I don't know. I know kids. I mean, my daughter loves dinosaurs, so it's a thing. Yeah, it definitely is a thing. And it's getting to be even more of a thing the more we learn about Pterosaurs, too, which is somebody called the 21st century, the golden age of terracer research. So they're expecting big things from the field. Yeah, and like you said, hopefully they can find that prototype. That's when the community really gets all excited, when they can make those links. Hey, speaking of the community, I read this article in National Geographic, and God bless him, I can't remember the guy who wrote it, but it's called Why Terrace? Ours were the weirdest wonders on Wings. Yeah, it was a good one. It's a great article. And the guy basically just got into all, like, the dirty laundry of the Pterosaur paleontology community. And apparently they're very well known among paleontologists for just despising each other, like the Terrace are paleontologists don't like each other, talk smack about each other publicly, and just snipe at one another a lot, which just makes the whole thing even that much more fascinating. Like, they're real competitive and real back biting interesting. Yeah. And in this case, it's a good thing. Yeah, because they keep pushing one another. Agreed. You got anything else? No. Are we done with territory? I don't have anything else, I don't think. Okay, well, if you want to know more about Pterosaurs, go to your local natural history museum and say, hey, tell me about that Pterodactyl. See if you can stump them. And since I said stump, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this one. Which one is this one? Oh, footbinding. I believe we did this in a select episode. It's one of our older ones, but a really good one, I think. Agreed. And this goes like this. Hey, guys, I'm a soon to be grad student from Guangdong, China, and have been a listener for a couple of years now. This is my first time riding in, and it's about footbinding. I talked to my grandmother after listening, remembering, she told me that her grandmother had bound her feet. I asked if great grandma had trouble walking, and she said she had never even wobbled a little bit, because it turns out she never made her own little shoes. She just bought toddler shoes for herself. Not that's called making lemons. No, that's called making lemonade out of lemons with your feet. That's right. She said Great great grandma came from a wealthy family and bound feet for more of a symbol of your family wealth, meaning you don't have to do farming chores and catering to the male foot fetish at that time. We are not exactly sure when she was born, but we do know that when her daughter, my great grandmother, was born in 1914, she made sure that her feet were never bound. She also put all of her kids through high school, which is very remarkable back then. Oh, yeah. Footbinding is certainly not something that I am proud of. To think that I'm just five generations away from having to get my own feet bound as opposed to sitting here writing you guys right now. It just says to me how far we've gone. Thanks for the show. By the way, in the draft podcast, Josh was having trouble pronouncing Q-I-N-G dynasty. Q may be roughly pronounced as T S. Not exactly the same. So just say sing next time. That would do. I don't even think I tried that one. I tried every other phone name except for Singh, and this is Best regards from Ruoi. Thank you very much. Ruoi. That's pretty cool. And like, nice sense of perspective, too. If you want to get in touch with us with an awesome story like Row We did, you can catch up with us on social media. Just go to our website, stuffyturno.com, and you'll find all of our social media links there. And if you want, send us a good oldfashioned email, wrap it up, smack it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
c3121260-5460-11e8-b38c-276a4ed1cfc3 | SYSK Selects: How Wildfires Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-wildfires-work | Wildfires consume an annual average of 5 million acres in the US. But what causes wildfires? How do they become so powerful? More importantly, how do we fight them? Join Josh and Chuck as they take you to the frontlines of the fight against wildfires. | Wildfires consume an annual average of 5 million acres in the US. But what causes wildfires? How do they become so powerful? More importantly, how do we fight them? Join Josh and Chuck as they take you to the frontlines of the fight against wildfires. | Sat, 09 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=68, tm_isdst=0) | 31562271 | audio/mpeg | "Good morning, everyone. It's July 26, 2011. What? No, it's Modern Times, but this dates back to July 26, 2011, and it is my select pick of the Week. How wildfires work. This one's important. That's why I picked, like, this one, everybody. Wildfires are still happening all over the place. Every year. It seems like they're getting worse and worse because they are. So this is a good podcast to educate yourself on wildfires and how to prevent them, how to fight them, and how to get started in the first place. So enjoy how wildfires work right now. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant right over there. And this is stuff you should know. That was my shatter. I told you I worked with him, I think, on a podcast, right? Yeah. He was puffy and stuffed in a suit. He's nice, though, right? He was super nice. And heck, every time I wear a suit, I'm puffy and stuffed in a suit I'm poured into my suits, poured in liquid. That's great. And that's absolutely not true, by the way. Okay, Chuck. Yes. I have a couple of stories for you. I have a specific story for you, but you have this, too, right? Did I give you this? Yes, I do. Okay, so in 2002, right? There is a guy who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he was a firefighter for them. Right. He went on to the Arizona Apache Reservation, and he started a wildfire intentionally. Okay, so he's an arsonist. Yes. He's not an arsonist for fun or because he's crazy or what was it? He was curious. Highly curious. Remember? That was trade curiosity, right. Just setting fires. He wanted work. Right. Leonard. Greg was his name. He set this fire, and unbeknownst to him, same times. Now you do. Yeah. There's a woman who had run out of gas not too far away, right. And she saw that there was a news helicopter covering the fire that Leonard Greg had just said she didn't know about, either, but she didn't feel like walking, or she felt like she couldn't walk, so she set a fire to try to get the attention of the new helicopter so that it would come rescue her so she didn't have to walk to go get gas. That's pretty amazingly awful. So I guess her last name was Chetisky. Yes, because the rodeo Fire, which is what they called the fire that Leonard Gregg started, collided with the Citizens Fire, and it was a conflagration. Ultimately, 467,000 acres burned, including 491 houses, and it was the largest fire in Arizona's history, and this is 2002. So Greg I don't know what happened to the woman, but Greg was found guilty of arson since the ten years in order to pay $28 million, which as an occasional firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I would imagine he didn't have. Yes. And that never happens. You always see that their award, so and so this and they just don't pay. It's just like a symbolic award, I guess. Right. You'll never make more than 50% of your wages again, kind of thing. Yeah. But what's crazy is not just that this lady set this fire because she wanted to get the attention of a news copter. That's great. Or that this guy set a fire because of a desire to get work as a fire to put the fire out, but because they're not the only people who have done stupid stuff like this. Right. They follow in a long, grand tradition of people who have set wildfires for all sorts of different reasons, and a lot of them to get work. Yeah. You have a list here. And of course, we're going to praise the firefighters. Not like we're saying a lot of these firefighters are starting fires, but it does happen more than you would think. Yeah. I imagine we'll probably throw some more out later on. But first, checkers. Right. Let's get to wildfires, how they work, what affects them. The fire triangle. We should probably start with the fire triangle because it relates to not just forest fires or wildfires, but all fires. All fire, Josh, requires three things. Fuel, obviously, to burn air, to get oxygen to the fire, because we all know that makes the fire burn hotter and bigger, and then the heat source to bring the fuel to the ignition temperature to begin with. And they call that the fire triangle. And the goal of a wild firefighter, and I guess probably more so a wildfirefighter is to remove one of those three components from the scene and that will give them a better chance of extinguishing the fire. Yeah. If you can bring the temperature down or starve the fire of oxygen or get rid of the fuel. Right. All three of those things have to exist. And the reason why, if you look at wood as a fuel, wood, as it pertains to fire, is just a solid store of hydrocarbons that are released when the wood is heated to the flashpoint, to the flash point. And those hydrocarbons at the flash point bind with oxygen in the air and it combusts thanks to the spark. Thanks to the heat. Yeah. And the flashpoint. Everything has a flash point. Apparently, everything will burst into flames at some point. Like Fahrenheit 451 is supposed to be the flashpoint of book. Yes. Right? Yes. Which is a very cool title. Wood's flashpoint is 572 degrees Fahrenheit, 300 if you're into Celsius, if you're into that kind of thing. And that's when wood will burst into flames. Yes. I've got a couple of just quick stats here. About 5 million acres of woodland burn every year in the United States. And I got a different stat that was 1.2 million. But then I looked I saw that stat, too. Yeah. I looked at the past decade? 5.9 million, 5.29.39 .88.68,473, and seven. So that's about five. Yeah. So I trust that one. And that is dude, in 2009 I'm sorry. Let's go to 2006. There were 96,385 wildfires in the US. It's a lot of wildfires. Isn't that crazy? And what's crazy is that four fifths of those are started by human activity. Yeah. A little more than four fifths. That's nuts. There's a whole thing called lightning season, right? Yeah. That when combined with this type of weather called fire weather, which is very, very dry, maybe drought like conditions during warm summer months when it's very hot out and all it takes is apparently like a train wheel causing a spark off of the rail into some tender, and then bam, you've got wildfire. But even all those don't account for more than a fifth of wildfires. The rest are like people throwing cigarettes out or looking for work as firefighters or not putting out fires when they're camping. Yes, that's a big one, too. I have another couple of stats from FEMA. Total, there are 176,000 intentionally set outdoor fires every year in the United States. And a lot of those, I think they're prescribed burns, right? No, that's like people. You mean axe of arson. Yeah. But a certain amount of those are wow. I think 63% are outdoor fires, vegetation fires. So the others are like trash fires, rubbish fires. Fires. Yeah, exactly. All of them make Smokey the Bear weep. Yeah, true. So there's fire weather, there's lightning season. Four fifths of fires are started by humans. More than four fifths, he said. We know about the fire triangle. Right. So once combustion is started from whatever the source is, there's a lot of factors. Not necessarily. There's three large factors that combine to, I guess, give us an idea of what's going to happen with this forest fire right now. Are these the fuel characteristics or how fast it will spread? No, it's fuel weather and topography. Okay. Yeah. Those are the big three. And then each of those kind of has a few subcategories. Yes. But the amount and the type of fuel, the type of weather that's going on, like, is it fire weather? Is it not? And then topography, the lay of the land, like if it's a lake, that's not good. Topography for a forest fire. Right. And I'm going to use forest fire and wildfire interchangeably. I didn't see anything that says that they're not one in the same. Well, they are today, at least. Force fire just kind of rolls out the tongue a little more. Okay. For me. Yeah. My thick tongue said wildfire. And I keep saying wildflower to Jerry. Is it wildflower or wildfire? See, wide firestyle. It could be a wildfire. That's true. So fuel. You need a fuel, obviously, to get the wildfire burning in what they call they call it a fuel load, is the amount and it's a measured amount of fuel available per unit area, and it's usually tons per acre. So they can actually get enough to estimate that. Yes. Like the biomass of all this dry grass. Yes. They know, like, man, this is going to be a bad one because we've got I don't have any numbers, but whatever fuel load in this area of the Colorado National Forest. And what's interesting is you would think that the fuel load, if you do it in weight because it's tons per acre right. That depending on the type of fuel. Like if it's grass, if it's lighter, that it's going to burn more quickly because it has less water. Yeah, right, true. Because that's a characteristic of the type of fuel, is how much moisture it has in it. Yeah. And the density, like twigs, obviously will burn faster for two reasons. One is because it's not as densely packed. Because which will give it more oxygen. Yeah. There's less surface area. Yeah. And the second is it's smaller and it dries out more quickly. Yeah. It's not like drying a tree or a log. It's going to take a long time to dry out. Right. And then the same goes for density with like, say, tufts of pine straw. Right. If it's very densely packed, it's going to retain moisture in the middle, which makes it harder to burn. Anytime you've ever set pinestra on fire as a kid, it smokes a lot if you throw a big mess on your fire. Right. But if it's kind of spread out, it dries more easily and it lets more oxygen in between it. Which is another need for fuel. Yeah. In a small fuel material they call flashy fuels, they weren't four fingered ring. Right. And on a chemical level, it varies on how long it takes these things to ignite as well, beyond the fact that it's just like more dense or bigger or more spread out. Right. Like when I go camping, I will dry out Camp Firewood beside the fire. And you can hear it says you can see it, you can see the moisture sizzling from the log, and then you just inch it closer and it'll just boom, flash point. Yeah. That's how it happens. Oh, another thing, Josh. As the fire pushes forward, it's what it's going to be doing because there's so much heat associated with it and smoke, it's going to dry out the stuff, the fuel in front of it. Yes. So by the time it gets there, potentially, I mean, that's why wildfire happens. By the time it gets there, it's already dry and ripe for the picking. Yeah. And it's just going to keep burning and keep burning. There's nothing to stop it, basically. That's right. It feeds itself. Something else that feeds it. So that was fuel. Right. Yeah. The second category factor that really determines how wildfire is going to go is weather. Yeah, big time. And when you think of weather, you think, oh, well, rain or snow. If it's raining, then of course the wildfire is going to go out. They point that out in here, too, but yeah. Okay. I thought Kevin went to a great sponsor. Yeah, he definitely dotted his eye on that one. He did, because yes, obviously, if it's pouring down rain, it's going to keep everything moist or if it's been raining for a while. Yeah, humidity helps. Yeah, big time. But the aspect of weather that probably has more of an effect than any is wind. Oh, yeah. So you've got wind outside of the fire, which is going to push it along, push it in one direction or another. Well, it's very unpredictable. That's one of the things. The winds, especially the dry Santa Anas in California, it's already hot and dry wind. So it might as well be fuel. Right. Or I guess it's sort of as fuel. Well, not traditionally, but it's not necessarily fuel. But it brings more oxygen to the fuel, too. Yeah, exactly. Right. So it pushes fire along. It's an oxygen delivery system. Wind is. And there's a guy who's interviewed in this article. His name is Dr. Terry Clark at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And he's created this model called coupled fire atmospheric dynamics. Pretty cool. And basically what he's doing is figuring out how fire interacts with the surrounding atmosphere and vice versa, because apparently they feed off of each other. Yeah. Fire can create its own weather system and weather pattern. Yes. Have you seen it before? Like in a really hot fire, these little tornadoes come up. It's a Fireworld, right. Those can be enormous. It's basically like the heat from the fire creates a vortex, and the vortex is customarily horizontal, but if something gets under it, it can stand upright and it becomes a fire tornado that can throw whole logs. Yeah, it can throw a burning tree like a mile. It's a monster. And it can throw it a mile into where there previously was no fire. And that's why forest fires are so hard to fight. One reason why they are, because all of a sudden you're fighting in on one front and you've seen them too, leap from the tree tops, and all of a sudden, dude, it's on this side of the mountain now. Right. It's scary stuff. And treetops specifically, by the way, that's a type of fire onto itself. That's a crown fire is what it's called. That's right. These fireworks. Right. The fire tornadoes, they don't necessarily have to follow that process of starting out horizontally and standing up and then moving like a tornado. There's another thing called a hairpin Fireworld. Is this the forward burst? Yeah. This is amazing. Basically, it's like the fire develops so much, I guess heat, it's vortex is due. It's vortices due that it shoots forward like a flamethrower. And apparently these things, they get up to like 66ft wide, right? Yeah. They can shoot 300 plus feet at 100 miles an hour. All of a sudden the fire just shot 100ft forward at 100 miles an hour. And then in an instant, all of a sudden your fire is going in not a different direction, in additional direction. Right. Because tracking these things, predicting these things, we figured out, or Dr. Terry Clark has figured out that it's not just the atmospheric conditions, it's the fire creating its own stuff, its own wind, and just moving from both of these now. It's a living thing. Yeah. And they call that spotting. If it tosses embers to another spot, they call that spotting. And if it starts a fire, obviously. Right. And then temperature also is another factor. If it's warm out hot. Yeah. Obviously that's an extra 6000 degrees that the sun doesn't have to heat something up to. Yeah. That's why they burn most hot and wild during the day, during the afternoon. California. I had to get used to camping in California because in Georgia georgia is like a rainforest, man. It's like there's never any fire threat. No. Plus it's so muggy. Yeah, it is so muggy all the time. There's no way you couldn't start a fire if you want to. You can't even strike a match outside right now. But I'm just used to camping with a great big awesome campfire. But once I headed west into Colorado and New Mexico and California, they have every state park and national park you go to. And National Forest have signs that say fire risk high, no fires at all. Or you have to apply for a fire permit with the camp rangers. Forest rangers. Sure. And I had to get used to either sneaking my fire, which is not right, and risking fine, or not having one at all, which stinks. Why don't you just go apply for a permit? Well, sometimes the fire risk was so high you're not supposed to have one at all. Got you. And I would still have one. And I probably shouldn't be saying that, but I'm super careful. When I was living in the van for a little while, I camped on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon and I started a fire, but I didn't see any signs it said no fire or anything. But I could have totally missed it. Probably no one said anything, though. Yeah. And you know what? I was completely irresponsible for doing that. Just let me go on record and say that it was not the right thing to do. Right. Even though I was super careful because accidents happen. And I could have easily been that jerk that didn't see the Ember getaway that starts a forest fire from a trains wheel. Can start a forest fire, then yes, very easily. A fire that you started could start a forest fire. Right. That was very good, Chuck. Way to see away. Well, I didn't want to sound like I was bragging about it, like, oh, I was super careful. So it was cool. It was not cool. There's this guy on yeah, I didn't take your bragging. Okay. Did you ever watch Malcolm in the middle? Oh, yeah. There was this one scene where the mom was telling the dad he was saying that she was giving him grief about the stories that he was telling his kids. And he's like, they're cautionary tales. And she goes, Cautionary tales to him. It was so cool. I enjoyed that show for a long time, a good one. But like all shows, when it's about kids, when they got a little too old, all of a sudden his voice is down. Well, no, he's the same. He cashed out, like right about that time I did. He's like I'm out Malcolm himself. He's like, I've got 15 Porsches and I'm very happy I'm done well. Yeah, he went on to this big movie career. Yeah, that's right. Sorry. Thank you. I wonder if you live cranston, though. I haven't seen Breaking Bad, but they're supposed to be amazing. Yeah. All right. The last thing, Josh, is topography. What? We talked about a steep slope. It's going to spread faster. Usually spreads uphill, even though leave it to Australia to do something weird. Dr. Terry Clarke says he has a case study in Australia where the fire actually burned down a sloped mountain, which is pretty unusual. Yes. Normally it burns up for a couple of reasons. The ambient wind usually blows uphill. The steeper the slope, the better, because the fire the smoke and the heat, the worse. Well, for the fire, as far as concerned, it's like, give me a steep mountain. Yeah. Because the fire would be standing almost upright then, and the smoke and the heat coming off the fire is really drying out the fuel load ahead. So most of the time they burn upward up amount, and then they reach the crest and they're like, I should have thought this through because now I have to go down and I can't. Yeah. Which is good for fighting the fire. Not good for the fire. No. Besides burning all the vegetation, which can be really bad, it can lead to things like erosion and mudslides later on because you mess with the ground like that and it's not stable like it once was. Yeah. I mean, one of the roles that a root system plays is holding the ground in place. And if you burn the tree and the root system out, it's just soil and nice heavy rain comes. And that very thing happened, Josh, in 1994, in Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, 2000 acre forest burned and the underbrush burned on the steep slopes. And two months later, they got a lot of heavy rain, and it literally poured tons of mud and rock onto a stretch of Interstate 70 like Engulfing cars, sweeping them into the Colorado River. Yeah. All because of the fire months ago. And we've seen west sides before. Remember Guatemala? Yeah, man. Remember, like, down the mountain, there was still that path. You could see where the path came from standing on this village where they never unearthed the people and people's kids were running around. Yeah, it was so sad. Where we were standing was, like, 6ft higher than it once was, right? Yeah. Six at least, I would say. That's awful. So, Chuck, if you want to put out a fire well, first of all, they're beneficial, though we should say that at times. Okay. Burning the underbrush of a forest can prevent a larger fire later on. So they do have, like, prescribed burns. Like you were talking about, Chuck. I inadvertently started a book club by mentioning 1491 again recently. Have you noticed a lot of people have been writing and saying, like, thanks, man. Yeah. And they're like, what about 1421? Yes. It's another book. That's a fake book, though. Oh, is it? Yeah. That's the one where the guys, like, the Chinese made it to South America or Mexico. So there's that long story. You wrote an article about it, and I pilloried the guy. Okay. Yeah. He has very shaky, shaky evidence. That's fascinating stuff. But have we not broadcasted on that? No, let's do it. All right. I read that today and I was like, Why haven't we done this yet? Oh, we can totally do it. Okay. I think it took a little while for me for the bitterness to leave my mouth after I wrote that one because the guy was getting tons of press at the time. Really? But anyway, anyone who's read 1491 knows that North America was basically a managed forest. And one of the ways that it was managed prior to Columbus was through prescribed burns. It is very beneficial. It burns away the underbrush so you have less potential for accidental fires. Remember we talked about recessions are kind of like that. And it gets rid of disease, provides nutrients in the soil. That's right. Plant disease. Awesome show. After you hit the peace pipe, just kick back and watch a forest fire go. So let's talk about putting these things out. Joshua's, they have a couple of categories of these elite firefighters. They're called hotshots and smokejumpers. The Hot Shots. What's so funny? It's the names they give them. Yeah. I'd say that's pretty bad. A, you know? Sure. All right. Hotshots. They work in 20 person teams, and they are trained. They're on the ground, and they're trained to build mainly to build fire breaks. Right. And that is when they strip the land of fuel ahead of the fire or they will burn it ahead of the fire to stop it there. Have you ever seen the gods? Must be crazy too. No. The main dude, I can't remember his name. There's a brush fire coming, like a prairie fire, savannah fire coming at the main characters, and they're about to be engulfed in it. And the main bushman runs and grabs, like, a piece of grass or whatever and sets fire to the grass behind them that they are running into right. And burns it and then basically creates a circle. It's a backfire fire break, and they're all standing in a circle where there's no more fuel any longer. It's completely, entirely genius. Well, it is. And you have to really know what you're doing. You have to put it in the exact right spot. I know that sometimes they'll do the fire break and the fire will leap over that. That's going to make you feel like there's nothing we can do. Well, in a lot of cases, I remember was it two years ago or maybe it was three years ago when they had all those wildfires. And I remember thinking, like, what we can do medically and we can put a man on the moon, but we can't stop a fire. And it's that out of control because it's so huge and overwhelming. Very deep, Chuck. Thank you. Not deep at all, actually. There's smoke jumpers, which are hotshots that jump out of airplanes. Right? Yeah. And there's only a couple of hundred of them in the US. Which I can imagine. That's a really specialized job, and you have to be a tough mug to do that. That would be how he long is that what he did in firestorm? I think he was a small navy. I didn't see it. Not many people saw it, actually. But I did copy the description from IMDb. I thought it was just about, like a firefighter and like, forest fires. But of course, because it's Hollywood, they added some plot to it. Yeah. Firefighter Jesse Graves has to save ornithologist Jennifer and other people in a forest fire. I thought that was it, but no, it was set up by the lawyer of a convicted killer, Earl Shea, who escaped from prison with several of his inmates, posing his firefighters to recover 37 million in Stash. Loot. So they started the fire on purpose. It was sort of like the guys who posed as ambulance drivers to get the dude out of prison. That sounds awesome, actually. I mean, the plot description sounds pretty awesome. You can tell you hear Howie Long, it's going to be awful. But I'm sure the writer of that was like, okay, I'm on the site. Yeah. And then he hears it's going to be firestorm during how he long, and he's like, I'm sure that the writer, Alan Smithy was pretty psyched about this project for a little while. So, Chuck, you can fight a fire using an air core, right? Oh, yeah. The drop fire retardant on the fire. You've seen the news footage, the red stuff. Yes. Or they can drop tons of water and have you ever heard that urban legend? Oh, yeah, but what is it? So there is a forest fire somewhere. We'll say California, and they put it out and like, six months later, whatever, some hikers walking through this area and looks up and notices that there's a scuba diver stuck in a tree. That's right. With the rebreather on and the mask on and the flippers and everything, and he's dead. And the hiker can't figure out what's going on and leaves the forest and tells somebody about it. And they start doing some research and they figure out that he was scooped up by one of these planes that goes out to the ocean and keeps up a bunch of water and comes and dumps it on the totally not true. Right? Wildfire. Now, the fire, that's a good one, though. Yeah, it is a good one. I hate it when you burst urban legends, though, because it bursts so many bubbles. There's people out there right now going, oh, man, it's so beneficial. Yes. I know it's things right now, but in about 45 seconds, you're going to feel like a smarter person. Right? That's true. We mentioned the fire retardant. That is not just red stuff. It is a chemical retardant containing phosphate fertilizer, and it cools down the fire, slows it down. Its main ingredient is water, though. So it's like super water. Got you. As far as I understand. You know, I was thinking about when I was reading about smoke jumpers, the human cannonball thing that DARPA came up with would be perfect for that. You could just be, like, to shoot a bunch of smoke jumpers into the, like, over the fire and to where you want them. You don't need a parachute or something. Sure. Yeah. I can't imagine a smoke jumper's job, like landing in the middle of that stuff. Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Amazing. And we also want to give a shout out to Always. Great movie starring Richard Dreyfus. No, always. I thought you said we always want to give a shot. No, always. Remember? Yeah, that was a good movie. John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfus, and that handsome dude who I don't know. Yeah, that's right. The guy that played the handsome guy. Yeah. And it was a remake of, I think, a guy named Joe or something. And also, I believe, Audrey Hepburn's final film. Was it Calvin? She was darling in it. She was. She was pretty till the very end. Is that it? That is it. Okay. If you want to know more about forest fires, you should go into the beloved, venerable website that we work for, howstepworks.com, and type in Wildfires. And we have it as one word, right? Yes. And if you type it in, it's going to bring up a very cool article with some really great photography, too. I think the page one or page zero pick is just awesome looking. And since I said hey in the search bar, that means it's time for a listener mail. No, it's not. Oh, yeah, that's right. I don't have a listener mail for this one, Josh. And I was trying. To think of what we could do instead. What did you come up with? Well, I thought about a Call to Action saying that would be great if you could go to itunes and leave us a rating and a review. Good or bad. Some people hate it when we do that. Like we're just begging for it or whatever. It beats a pledge drive. Yeah. Yes, it does. Chuck, do we ask that much from you guys? Really? No. Great. I'm glad we finally worked it out. Call to action. Or how about some love for Jerry via email too? That would be great. Well, that's nice. Some Jerry questions or both? We'll tell you all about Jerry. Yes, ask us really personal questions about her life. We'll answer anything. Totally. We've just been waiting for everyone to ask. Yeah, you can ask those questions all sorts of ways. First, if you want to go, give us a rating, a review on itunes. That's very nice of you. Thank you. But if you want to ask us a question about Jerry, you can tweet to us. We have our own Twitter feed, up to 15,000 followers. Did you know that? Really? Yes. S-Y-S-K podcast. One word. And then, of course, we have a great Facebook page that's facebook. Comstepydnow. And you can send us a regular old email and you can listen to us on WFMU. If you're in New York or New Jersey. 911 fridays between seven and 08:00. P.m.. Yeah. The stuff you should know radio public radio version. Yes. Or 901 in the Hudson Valley. Hudson Valley. And is that not New York? New York's, down the Hudson Valley. Where's the Hudson Valley? New York State. So that's upstate. Yeah. Is that where Albany is? I keep hearing, like, everybody in Law and Order talk about when they mentioned the governor. I get stuff. Or you can send us a regular email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right media, my Favorite Murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it's. 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How Chess Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-chess-works | Despite its knights, bishops and castles, the game of chess has been around a lot longer since the Medieval Age. And it wasn't even invented in Europe - chess comes from 2nd-century India, when some unknown inventor created what has come to be considered | Despite its knights, bishops and castles, the game of chess has been around a lot longer since the Medieval Age. And it wasn't even invented in Europe - chess comes from 2nd-century India, when some unknown inventor created what has come to be considered | Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=309, tm_isdst=0) | 45041856 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Murray Head. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Mary had. He was the guy who did One Night in Bangkok. Oh, I know. I just don't get the reference. Oh. It's about Bobby Fischer from the musical Chess. What? We talked about this before. I have no idea what you're talking about. In an episode, Jerry. Did we not? I'm almost positive we did. Jerry doesn't listen. Yeah, I think I have a faint memory. One Night in Bangkok is from the musical Chess, which I didn't know existed. Right. And it's based loosely on the story of Bobby Fischer. Okay, I do remember that now, and I think I was just a surprise back then, but it's the truth. I know. Tell me in another couple of years. Delighted all over again. What's with Murray Head? That can't be the guy's real name. And why would that be a name you adopted? Although it's perfect for, like I bet that's his name. Murray Head. We'll look into it. What parents name their kid Murray Head. Well, his last name was Head. Right? I'm saying Head. Yeah, but no. Doctor and Mrs. Head, maybe. Doctor and Doctor Head. Maybe. So maybe his parents are both doctors. But don't you think that probably then if his last name really was Head, it was actually, like, Headowski or something like that? Yeah, maybe Murray Hadowki. I can live with Murray head. Yeah, it's terrible. That is weird. Chuck's checking his watch, which is the universal sign for me to hurry things along. No, I'm not. And I need to apologize to you because it's a busy week for me, and I said, hey, let's do one that is not super tough. And I sent you chess, and you were like, today, you're like, I've never played chess before. Not in my life. Yeah, I had no idea. I apologize. For some reason, I don't even know how to play checkers. Yeah, and now that I think about it, I don't see you as a chess player until now. I don't know. You view it more as the type of person who would walk in and, like, drop a bowling ball on the chess board and say, I went, you got me away. Wrong. You're not, like, super strategic and tactical. What? You use a big stick. Oh, I can be both ways. You're just talking about your own experience with me. Oh, yeah. I can play chess, and I intend to. Are you going to play? Yeah, after researching this, I emailed you. Me. I was like, we have to start playing chess. She said her dad taught her, like, the basic moves when she was a kid, but she never really got into it. So we're going to start playing chess. Well, I never got into it got into it. But I did learn when I was probably a young teenager, and my brother and I played for a little while. Who won? I think he always won, but I never, ever learned strategy. I was like, I learned how the pieces moved and then as a dumb little 13 year old, kind of went about my way trying to get the king and check me. Right. You sold your detective comics, number one, and stopped playing the piano and started drinking beer. By the way, I looked at Murray head. I rarely do this. His name is Murray Seafield st. George Head. So his name really is Murray Head? Yeah. Why didn't he go by Murray? St. George or Seafield st. George. That's awesome. Yeah, it is. It sounds like you should be wearing a crevot anytime you say that. All right, so let's play some chess. Okay. So you were just saying that you stopped playing chess and you really never got strategy. No, but I remember, like, I could sit down and play right now. Okay. Poorly. I probably could, too, after reading this article 18 times. So sorry. But the thing that I gathered from this article is that had you kept playing, you would have eventually stopped thinking about how you can move your pieces and started thinking strategically. That just kind of comes with time and practice. It's a natural result of playing chess. Yeah, probably so. And I think I remember probably getting a little better. But unless, you know, like, the bona fide strategies, there's a ceiling to how good you can get. So we're going to get email about this. It's bona fide as, like, a descriptor. But if it is your bona fide, like a noun, like your credentials, then that's how it pronounced. Bona fide can be correct. Yeah, bona fide is right. My bona fides are that I'm great, but I'm bona fide great. Got you. I think that's right. I was just mispronouncing as a joke like I normally do. Let's talk chess. All right. Chess. For me, one of my favorite things about the game is that it is, as pointed out in this article, is the great equalizer. And sitting in chess, it is very cool to me that the brainiest nerds in a classroom or a library might play. Or you can walk by Washington Square Park and seeing these old codgers playing chess that have been, like, battling it out for years. Or the kid from Fresh play chess speed chess. Did he? I think so. It really just spans ages and races and social and economic groups. It's really kind of cool. It's not like just like some snooty game, right? Yeah. I mean, everybody can play it. And it's old. Yes, it is. The Indians. India can claim chess. The invention of chess. Those are Indians. I know. If it wasn't for Christopher Columbus, we wouldn't have to make that distinction. That's the second appearance today. Yes, it does. Is rooted in India, believed to have been born in about 8300 by the name Cataranga. Yeah. And it was a four person game. Kataranga was with 64 squares on the board. But the moves are similar to the modern game. And the chess we all know and love is most closely tied to that original Indian game and not some of these other ones. We actually don't know the rules of Cataranga. It was lost to the ages, but we do know that it did exist. I think we have our hands on Cataronder boards and it's obviously the predecessor of chess. But there's a guy who read this article called Big Game Hunter from 2008 Time magazine. Yeah. It's about this guy named Irving Finkel. Isn't that a great name? Ivan Finkel. Yeah. And he works at the British Museum and he's a game expert. And basically his job is to find old games and to figure out the rules. Man, that is cool. Do you know how smart that guy has to be? So I don't know if he's worked on cateringa or what, but I guarantee that's on his bucket list is to figure out exactly how Cateranga was played. Wow. That's pretty awesome. Is it a job or is it it's a job. Good for you. So Karanga originated about 300 Ad in India, and a couple of hundred years later, it made its way out to Persia. Yeah. It's Chaterang. Yeah. And the Persians were firmly planted onto the Silk Road. And the Silk Road spread everything. It really did. Yeah. And one of the things that did spread was Chatrang or Chaturang, and it made it into Arabia. And the Arabians are also referred to as the Moors when they invaded Spain or the Moops, depending on whether you like Seinfeld or not. And from there, it spread all through Europe. Yes. And then, of course, eventually the Americas and the rest of the continents, it spread like everything else spread. Really, it did. So our modern chess that we play today is traced back to Cheetrang, and that diaspora is Chitrang. But of course, the Chinese and the Japanese were like, we'll just come up with our own, but we'll base it on Chaturanga. Yeah. It seems like most cultures had similar slight variations, including Germany and the Byzantines, who played on a circular board. Germans had three extra pieces that we don't use in China and Japan, like you mentioned, which they still play today, their own versions in China. It's called Siang Kai. Nice. You sounded like the guy from NPR. And the board is a five by nine grid, and it's green and red. Two five by nine grids. Oh, it is. It's expensive. Yeah, they're two five by nine grids separated by a moat. Well, that's the part that I love best, the moat. Yeah, it would it be cool if you had a really great board that had water in it, like a mini sea monster swimming around? That'd be awesome. And the goal there. Instead of a king, you are supposed to topple the general. Right. The general is the top dog. Not a big difference in that place. No, but the Japanese have one called shigo. I got it backwards. And that's a nine by nine grid, 20 game pieces, which is four more than chess. Yeah. 20 game pieces for each player. The big difference is that they're all the same color. Yeah. You think that's confusing, but apparently they face in a certain direction, and that's how you tell what piece belongs to whom. Yeah, but I guess if you know the game, it's not super confusing. Right. So, like I said, modern chess that we play now is basically closely resembles the original Indian game. I said that. Did you say that? And then the 15th and 16th century is when the queen basically became the most powerful piece on the board, which is very surprising. Is it? Yes, the 15th and 16th centuries, the age of misogyny, that's when witches were created. The idea of women being powerful was a bad thing, like the continuation of just women being held down at the same time. In chess, in this universally enjoyed game, the one obviously female piece was given the most power. Yeah. But that was also, like, some pretty powerful queens at that time. Right? That's a good point. I don't know. So there were some difference, though, between the pieces, of course, in the Western game, like, they had elephants in the Indian version, whereas we had knights. Right. So just kind of character differences. And then until the mid 19th century, there were class differences as well. So, like, if you were a wealthy person, you have these big, heavy chest pieces that would flood and stay in place if you're poor. You just had, like, chunks of wood that represented the pieces. And then in the mid 19 century, jean Jacques of Jacques of London created the design that we see in chess boards today. Yeah. Which is a symbol denoting what piece it is on top of a pedestal. Yeah. And did you know, you know the pawn, it's like, basically like a ball on top of, like, a base or something like that. It's supposedly supposed to represent the compass and square of the masons. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Oh, and the pedal stars of different heights, too. That's important to know. Yes. This is all come into play. It will. What else? Well, these days, you can just play with each other. You can play on the computer. They have computers that play people. I know we all remember when Deep Blue Too beat Gary Casper off in the 90s. That was a big deal. Like, one of the few times chess makes front page news these days. It's got to be a big deal. That was a huge deal, because they've been trying to build computers that could beat humans at chess for decades, and they finally did it, and I mean, Casparv was the undisputed champ. He was the best chess player walking the planet, like everyone agreed. And he got beat by a computer. I bet he was pissed. I bet he was, too. Can't you imagine? At the very least, you have a nightmare that night. All right, so if you've never played before, let's talk a little bit about the game itself. It's a two person game, not the four person game like it was originally. Right. The goal is to attack the king, put the king in check. Meaning it cannot move without being captured. Which would be a checkmate. Yes. If you can get out of check, you can keep playing. If there is no possible move the king can make, then you are in checkmate. Game over. Which is a really odd little quirk of chess. The king actually is never captured. It ends just before his capture, when his capture becomes inevitable. Yeah. And it's captured, meaning, like, you don't take it off the board and rub it in. I guess it's the one piece that can never leave the board. It's an illegal move. Yeah. And I've seen people knock over the king. I don't know if that's just a legit move or if that's a jerk move, but I've seen it happen. Yeah. I have two movies. You have? Yeah. I'm not sure about that. Fresh. The board is half white. The pieces are half white, half black. The board is half white and half black or white and dark. I'd like to quote the article. What to say? The rules of the game are based on the pieces, half of which are black and half of which are white. True. Game manufacturers who are in the business of fun create games with nontraditional colors and replace typical game pieces with other characters. But for the purpose of this article, we will use the standard colors because we're talking about chess. I thought that was a great COA. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Game makers who are in the business of fun, I've never seen those. I wonder what other characters I'm sure like everybody who plays D and D or Star Trek or you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Had their own version. Yeah. Like Star Wars chest made by game manufacturers. And they're in the business of fun. I do have a Star Wars Monopoly, which is pretty fun. So the chess board itself has 64 squares that alternate in color, like we said, across eight different rows. You've got horizontal rows called ranks, which are numbered one through eight. Yes. Then you've got the vertical rows called files, rank and file lettered A through H. Yeah. So any square has a number letter designation. That's right. And the four squares in the center are really the most important. Those are e. Four E. Yeah. And they're the most important for controlling the game. Correct me if I'm wrong. It doesn't actually explicitly say in the article, but that's because it's the easiest place to block and defend and attack from. So if you control the center, you can move easily throughout anywhere on the rest of the board. Is that why controlling the center is important? I think so. And I think just in terms of if you were to look at chess, is like a military invasion. You don't want to be trapped in a corner or against a wall. Right. You know what I'm saying? You're probably the most dangerous, like, in the middle. That's just a guess. Yeah. Especially if you got four guys in the middle with all their backs together and their guns pointed outward, and then you just be like, this is exactly how I thought this would go. So each player has 16 starts with 16 game pieces. You have either all the black ones or all the white ones. And those consist of eight ponds, two rooks that look like little castles, two knights that look like little horses. Right. Two bishops, which I guess they're sort of hard to describe. They have a meter on top, and a meter is the headware of the maybe Episcopalian definitely the Catholic Church, from the bishop on up. I think cardinals may basically, you know, the funky headwear that the Pope wears, that's a meter. That's what's on top of the bishops piece. Yeah. And they vary greatly, like, between manufacturers. I've seen bishops that weren't quite as ornate yeah. But the ones that were originally manufactured by Jean Jacques, and then I think they're called the Eastman pieces. Oh, yeah. They have a meter on top. Okay. And then you've got your king and your queen. I believe the king usually has a well, like I said, it all depends. The king's tallest. It is tallest. And that's how you remember what goes where. Yeah. Starting and the board has to be a certain way as well. White is right. White is right. So there should always be the white square on your right corner. When you've got that set up, then you can start putting your pieces up, starting in the first rank, which is the horizontal road closest to you. That's right. You want to put your rooks right. The little castle on the far left and the far right inside one, inside of the rooks are the knights, then the bishops, and then you have two squares left, and the queen goes on the square that is the same color as her. That's right. What's the phrase? The carpet matches the drapes. Oh, my God, no. Oh, no. The queen's dress must always match her shoes. Right, right. That's that's how you remember. Yeah. And then the king goes in the remaining square. That's right. Then in the rank in front of that, you've got your pawns. That's right. All lined up on those eight squares. Yeah. So like we said, the goal is to put the king in checkmate, and it helps to think of it like I said, as a game of war, almost, you want to use all your little soldiers and we'll talk about how they can be moved to capture and remove pieces to eventually make the other king vulnerable while also protecting your own king. Yeah, that's a big thing. Like, if you overextend yourself in an attack, you make your king vulnerable. So it's not quite as simple as going on the offensive. No, strategic. And I think it bears repeating again, since the point of the whole game, when your opponent places your king in a vulnerable situation where the king cannot get out of without being checked or without being checkmated, that's checkmate and the game is over. Yes. And the king in check must make a move to get out of check, meaning either move the king or block or capture the piece that has the king in check. Yeah. That's the only move you can make at that point. Yeah. So, Chuck, in a second, let's talk about the individual pieces themselves. But first, let's do a message break real quick. Okay. So you want to look a little closer at the individual pieces. Yes. And this is something I did not know. Each piece is assigned a point value. Yeah. But you don't keep score. No, basically just how much power it has. Yeah. And it's basically for you, when you're thinking strategically, you can very quickly say, well, this move would cost me this many points because I could lose this piece. So it's a good way of just using shorthand for figuring out the value of a particular strategic move. Yeah. And once you know it, you don't even think of the points. You just innately kind of know this is queen is the most valuable. Yeah. I think it comes in most handy for programming computers that play tests, too. Oh, yeah, I bet. But let's start with the Rook, which comes from the Persian word rock, R-U-K-H which means chariot, which is what the Rook, which is now a castle, originally was. And I think the castle is actually a siege tower. Yeah, it looks like a little is it called Turret? Yeah, turret. Is that right? I believe so, yeah. It's a turret. Okay. But yes. So the Rook is the castle. That's right. It's worth five points, and it can move along the ranks and files only in a straight line, but it can move as far as you want. If you have an open path from one end of the board to the other, you can slide that sucker all the way across. And if you do that, something happens, which we'll talk about in a minute. That's right. Something magical. You can't jump over any pieces, and it says that for each piece. Let's just go ahead and say you can never jump over a piece. No, it's not checkers. No, it's not checkers. The only one that can kind of jump over a piece is a night, which we'll see, but that one doesn't even actually jump. It makes a normal, standard move. Well, we're there. Go ahead and say it. Okay. Well, the night makes an L move. The knight is capable of moving forward two spaces and then to the left or the right, one space. So it makes a little hook or crowbar or L movement with each move. Yeah. Or it can move over to an up one. Yeah, that's what I said. Right. Well, you said forward to and over one. It can also be to the left to. Okay. So it's always a combination of two and one. Right. They basically can make a turn, which is the only piece that can make a turn. And if you look at a chess board and see where your night ends up, it looks like it left over a piece, but ultimately it's just making a left or right. Yeah, that's true. Or an up or down. And that makes the night pretty unique as far as strategy goes. Yes. The nights always screw me. Oh, yeah. They always would sneak up on me and I would kind of forget that they could move that. Crayon. Turnover. Cray. Cray. Cray. Cray. And another good thing to remember, first of all, it's a three point piece, but if it starts on a light square, it's going to end up on a dark square and vice versa. I think it's just so basic that the article just didn't even think it was important to mention. But I want to make sure I have this right. You want to get to a square where your opponents pieces, and when you move to that square, you take them out of play. They're off the board, right? Yes. Essentially, when you can land on another opponent's space where there is a piece, you just knock it out and they're out of play. They can't come back in. Can't come back in. And what you've just done by doing that is weakening the defenses against your opposing king. Yes. Okay. Exactly. Onto the bishop, topped with the meter, like you said. It's also worth a three spot. It goes diagonally, cannot go left and right. It can only attack diagonally right. So it makes an X across the board. Yeah, but like the rook, you can go and however far you can go with it. But when you move it, you have to go or else you lose a turn. That's right. Then you've got your queen. It's worth nine points. She's a little shorter, but, man, the queen is a tough broad because she can go in any direction, however far she wants to. Yeah. All eight directions on the board, basically. No restrictions. As long as it's in a straight line, she can't turn right. That makes her the most strategically valuable piece. Yeah. And the queens, man, they'll sneak up on you, too, because she can be all the way across the board. And you'll make a move and not even realize that you just put a knight in the path ten spaces away until the jerk across from you captures your night. And you're like, oh, man, I cannot wait to play. I hate that lady. I am so excited about playing, thanks to this article. It's really fun. I'm going to start playing again, I think. Okay. I don't know who we could always play here. I guess I'll bring my bowling ball. I bet Ben Bowen plays chess. I'm sure he probably speaks Chinese bally plays chess. He probably, like, shook his head when he heard you pronounce the Chinese version of chess. He probably plays that. Sure. Dressed as a bunny. He dressed up in my gremlin outfit today when I was walking around. Oh, today again. Oh, did he do it already? Yeah. I thought you tweeted a picture facebook the picture of him wearing the gremlin outfit. No, I mean, that happened today. It happened, like, weeks before, too. No, wouldn't me ben Bowen, you should support his awesome show. Two of them. Stuff they don't want you to know and car stuff. Yes. One of our colleagues. Yeah. So finally onto the king. The king can also move in any direction, but just one at a time, which is good for getting out of the way. But the king is generally not like much of an attacker. He's kind of a milk toast, really? Yes. Like the queen wears the pants in this relationship. She's the bad dude. And like we said, if the king is threatened and in check, he has to move to save himself. Yeah. And if he goes, well, if I moved here, I'm screwed. If I move here, I'm screwed. Wait, there's nowhere for me to move to get out of being attacked. That's checkmate, baby. That's when the guy across from me is very smug and just sitting there waiting for you to realize it. Yeah. Or actually, traditionally, you would call out if you're in checkmate. Yes, checkmate. Or actually I would say check and mate. I don't understand the and it's probably super obnoxious and wrong, I'm sure. And then you have your little pawns, the eight little guys up front, the foot soldiers, they're basically cannon fodder, pretty much, but ponds, some say they're in lice. The key, if you play your pawns right, then you're in good shape. Did you know pawns originally in the, I think, 12th or 13th century? Just to make them more interesting? Each pond, depending on its place on the rank, had a name. Like, there was the Gambler, there was the Doctor, the Coward of the county. Probably were the Alkene Rogers song. Yeah, exactly. What else was there? A couple of others that were pretty interesting, but apparently it didn't stick. The innkeeper, the islands in the stream. So the ponds, they're only worth one point. They are defenders, basically. They only move one square at a time. They can't go backwards, they can only go forwards and they can only attack diagonally right. So I can't just move upon. Like, let's say you're upon and I'm upon. I can't just come at you from straight ahead and knock you out. We're basically just kind of staring at each other. But if I was to the left or right in front of you, I could go diagonally and get a hold of you. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. It does. I'm trying to visualize it. Chess is hard to visualize. Yeah. And it's the kind of game it sounds complicated, but once you play it once you're like, okay, this isn't so hard. So then the pawn can move five directions, left or right, forward, and then diagonally forward to the left or diagonally forward to the right. Right. No, it cannot move left or right. Okay. So it can only move forward diagonally to the left or diagonally to the right. Correct. So three directions? Yes. Okay. And when you start the game is the only time you can move your pond two spaces. So you can move out upon two spaces on the front row only. After that it can only move one space at a time. Gotcha. Alright, so let's talk about some rules. Yeah. Like we haven't been already. Yes. The timer thing is I never realized what the timer was all about. I can't imagine how stressful that is. Yes. I thought you had like each player has 60 seconds to complete a move or something. That is not true. No. Like those clocks with the two faces and the buttons on top of each face, they keep a predetermined amount of time. Yeah. A total time. So say like an hour. Say you have an hour for this game. Yeah. You each have an hour. Okay. So you each have an hour. So there's 2 hours for the whole game. You divide the 2 hours into 1 hour for each and then when it's your turn, your clock is running and when you're done with your move, you hit the button on top of your side and it stops your clock and starts your opponent's clock. So now they're eating away from that 2 hours. And then if your opponent's time runs out, then you win. Just based on that. Yes. Which is way cooler than I thought. Which was like you each have like two minutes to complete a move right. In this way, towards the end of the game, you might have ten minutes left on your clock and your opponent might have 30 minutes because you took way too much time at the beginning and then you're forced into playing like, way faster toward the end. Right. Pretty cool. So the impression I have is that this is something that you take up once you've mastered chess, so well, that's kind of boring. Playing normally you have never played with it because I imagine it changes everything. Yeah. All. Right. So let's play with these rules here why it always goes first. Why it always goes first. You cannot skip a turn. No. And therefore, no player can move twice in a row. Yeah. You can't, like, say I passed. Right? You got to move. Yeah. You can take back a move, but only under a very specific circumstance. We said that capturing the king is an illegal move. So if you move your king into a place where he will inevitably be captured, you moved him into check. Yeah. That's an illegal move. And the opponent is supposed to tell you, and then you can take that move back. That's the only move you can take back. So I think the rule of thumb is once you take your hand off of your piece, your move is but that's how I always played. Yeah. It seems legitimate. And also, now that I have not played it and I'm a little older, I bet you that it's better to try and do this stuff in your head, then move your pieces all around with your finger on it. Yeah. Because I would imagine that would sort of tip off your strategy somewhat, I bet. Like real pros oh, yeah. Do this in their head. They don't go right. No. What? My fingers still on it. And I think they played with a clock, too, don't they? Probably, yeah. And you want to say part of strategy. You want to be thinking at least three moves ahead anyway. Yeah. I imagine that's very tough. Good luck with that. Beginner. What else? You said that you can't move upon more than one square at a time except for to start. Yeah. Each pond's first move can either be one or two. Got you. It's not necessarily like at the beginning of the game. Oh, I like this one. You know the word stalemate? Yes. Stalemate is a chess term. It happens when if the king isn't under attack, but any direction that you move him in would place him in check. Yeah. So there's no checkmate going or coming. It's just you just happened to end up making a terrible move. That's a stalemate. No one wins. Sorry. Everybody goes home a loser. That's no fun. All right, here's some other rules which I did not know about. I have never played with these rules, and they were really confusing to me. Yeah. I had to do some supplemental research. I did, too. Yeah. Like YouTube videos and stuff, where Englishman explains exactly what castle is. Right. I think I have a decent hand on it, but go ahead. Well, Castling, in this article, it says that it has to be done at the beginning of the game. I didn't see that anywhere else. I think it can only be done once again. Well, here's the deal. I got to the bottom of this. Okay. It can be done as long as the king and the rook that you're going to use to castle with has not moved yet. Right. So as long as they are still in their original positions, you can castle. Yes. But that doesn't necessarily have to happen at the beginning of the game. No. But you can move your king two pieces and then move the rook that hasn't moved. That's your castle right. To the last space the king passed. So that means basically what you're doing is you're moving your king over and you're moving your rook next to it so that your rook can protect your king more better. Yeah. And you can only do this if there's nothing in between the two. And you can do it on either side. You can do on the king side or the queen side. And it's the only move where you can move two pieces at once. Right. You don't have to, but strategically, it's a very smart move to cancel anytime you can. Yeah. I still don't fully get it or the benefits. I know. It's a defensive move. I don't understand why you have to move the king. Why not just move the rook next to the king? That seems like that would be the same thing. Yeah. I think someone will be able to explain this in a dummy fashion via email, and we're going to get a good one, but I think that is what it amounts to. It's a defensive move to make the rook, put it in a better position to protect the king. Yeah. There's pond promotion. Never heard of that until today. So there is pawn promotion where you said, like, if the pond just makes it all the way across the board under your opposing rank, either the first rank or the 8th rank, depending on where your opponent is, you could promote your pawn. Never heard of this. Most people choose to promote their pawn to queen, sure. But in certain instances, I have no idea what they are. But I just saw that in certain instances, it might be better to promote it to something else other than queen, and that would be a different type of promotion. It's like not a full promotion. I can't have title only promotion. I can't remember what the name of it is, but yes. So typically you'd want to promote it to the queen because it's the best piece, and then you have two queens on the board. If you still have your queen, that is. Yes, and I've never heard of these, so I don't know if they're just seldom used or if it's just really rare that a pond actually makes it to the other side, because that would seem pretty rare to me. I think they're fairly well used or frequently used subaru. Okay. I know this last one is not for fact on passenger. It's not a frequently used rule. It's really obscure. So much so that the term on pasta is used in other sports to describe little known obscure rules. Oh, wow. So it's become kind of just a catch all. Term chest has really had a huge cultural impact on the world in all sorts of strange ways. Stalemate. So amp assault means impassing. It's pretty tricky. It allows a pond to capture an opponent's pond by doing nothing, though, without landing on the square. No. So from what I understand, this article is a little wrong. Basically, it allows you to capture a pond as if the pond had only moved one square, and it can only be played after a two square advance. That's confusing. Right. So if a pawn moves two squares and happens to pass an opposing pawn yes. Then the pond that moved to squares who made the move is out. Yeah. It's almost like it can attack from the side, I think, but it ultimately is attacking itself. The pond that's just sitting there captures that pond that made the move. Yes. So you basically just made a bonehead move because you just lost your pawn. Yeah. It can only be done, too, if the pond comes from homebase and moves to squares, which can only happen once a game. Right. I think. Man didn't we just say a pawn can only move two squares in one, like, at the beginning of a game, each pond? Yeah. Yeah. That is obscure. Yeah. I've never heard of it, and I think I found that not many people use it. Nice. So those are the rules and sub rules. Yeah. Let's talk strategy, man. Yeah. Protect your king, capture the opponent's pieces. Right. And attack the king. Attack him like you hate him. That's not really strategy. I mean, that's just the basic, like, what you're trying to do. There are, like, real strategies that people have worked out with names. Yeah. They have, like, names. King's Gambit connected shuffle the fork attack or the C H in Italian makes a kiss sound. Vienchetto. Yeah. C. And then a vowel makes a cha sound. Vince. Yeah. And I don't know much about these strategies, but I know if you want to get better at chess, then you would do yourself a favor by trying to learn one or two instead of just being like, well, this guy goes this way, and I don't like horses, so I'm going to attack the night, which is how I play it. It's awesome strategy, but what are some other basic strategies? Like, let's say you're a beginner, like you. Okay. What should you try to do? I would be well served to not rush. Sure. I want to consider what your next move would be after I made my move, but I want to do all this with my arms folded across my chest, in my head, very quietly, so it's not to give away my strategy. I want to castle whenever possible. Castle the king with the rook. Yeah. So that must be, like, a real common thing. Yeah. I feel like I missed out. You didn't cancel that's why your brother beat you? I had no idea. I bet he canceled, and you were like, what did you just do? And he's like, Never mind. Like we said, the center of the board is where you would like to control things. Yeah. You want to use all your pieces, move them around smartly, though. Yeah. Those ponds, like we said, are important. You got to bring them out so you can start attacking. It's not a good strategy. Just be like, all right, I'm just going to surround my king with ponds and just leave them all there. Right. You want to get that clean out. And like we said, you can't jump, so you got to move stuff out of the way so everything can get out there and start warring. Exactly. Like I said, you want to plan three moves ahead. Yeah, as you were saying, like, you want to get your stuff out on the board, but you want to do it strategically. You want to set yourself up, take your time, don't attack too quickly. Right. Because again, that leaves your king overexposed, and you never want to sacrifice a piece of higher value for lesser value. Yeah, that's the big one. I think that's the one even I think I remember trying to employ. Not successfully, but yeah, you don't want to lose a rock to a pawn, right? You're just a sucker. And then probably the most important strategy is to have fun and not get discouraged, which I think that probably makes a lot of sense. I don't think chess is something you just come out and play. Well, the first time ever, no one in the history of the world since 300 Ad. Has ever played chess or chatteringa or anything. Well, the first time, if you're a beginner, I think you should just concentrate your first few games on getting the moves correct, and then you can start worrying about everything else. But, I mean, if you want to get better very quickly, in addition to playing, there's all sorts of websites, books, people you can talk to, and there's a lot of info out there to learn how to play chess. Yes. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know that I've ever won a single game of chess. I always play people better than me. I think my record is like, oh, and 63 and I quit playing. Yeah, I could see that. But I mean, maybe play a little kid if you're not that great. A kid who sucks at chess. I was about to say that's even more. A kid that sucks at chess. Yeah, just don't gloat too much because it's a kid. Now I'd gloat. So that's everything there is to know about chess. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to learn more about chess and see a pretty nifty little flash animation, you can type in C-H-E-S-S into search bar athoustofworks.com and it will bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Maori love. And like we said, the kiwis love a little light shining on them. We have heard back from them in spades. Yeah. Have you ever seen bad taste? No, I don't think so. Is that Peter Jackson's first movie? Yeah. I never saw that one. I saw the other one he did Dead Alive. I saw that one too. Yeah, I didn't see bad taste. I like bad tastes, boys. A hobbit. I like Dead Alive, though, too, in just the sharkiest way. You can like something. Sure. Yeah. I didn't see The Hobbit, but this next hobbit sequel in the never ending parade of hobbit movies yeah, actually looks kind of interesting. Yeah, I didn't see all of the hobbit. I watched some of it the other night and I just couldn't do it. You ever heard of Rob Delaney? The Twitter guy? Yeah. He had this tweet, he was like it was in all Cats. He goes, I'm in the hobbit right now. It's eight and a half hours long. They won't let anybody leave. Please send. And then it just runs out. And Heavenly Creatures. Did you ever see that? No. Man, that was really good. Yeah, that was the first time I had seen Kate Winslett in a movie. Really good movie. Yes. I haven't seen it. All right, enough about Peter Jackson onto the Maori. I thought you guys thought I'd send you a quick email to sincerely congratulate you on how you handled the Maori podcast. Pronunciation of Maori words and phrases uses a style of linguistics that is totally different to most languages. See, I don't feel so bad now. Yeah, like the WA is actually pronounced b. Yes, well, we're getting to that. As a 20 year old kiwi, I often mispronounce Maori words myself. And due to the nature of trying to put a largely oral language into words, spelling and pronunciation often changed through the years. Still, why would you choose w for s sound? I thought I'd give you some words and easy up their pronunciation for you guys. So that white tangy, you said the treaty is pronounced y tangy. So the w sun is the w sun in that one? Yeah, that's what he says. Okay. He said it's as though you're questioning someone's recipe for salsa. That's awesome. People in New Zealand know about salsa. That's weird. The land of the long white cloud is pronounced Altaya roa altaroa. Okay. And that's New Zealand. It's the Maori word for New Zealand, right? I think so. Words that begin with the WH prefects, like you were talking about, are almost always pronounced as an S sound. So Waka papa sounds more like fuck a papa, which sounds weird to us and even dirty, sure, but it's not. It's how it's pronounced. That's how the Maori pronounced the word that we butchered all over our episode, basically. Yeah, exactly. Or the town of Wanganui is pronounced fungunui. Yeah, so weird and hard to get used to. But one of my favorites, guys, is a small town of but hold on, it is weird. It's weird to us. And like the fucker papa word sounds hilarious. Especially if you're in 6th grade or whatever. Exactly. But again, that's how it's pronounced in Maori. And therefore, if you're saying a Maori word, you can't really just change the pronunciation based on your own west cultural hang up. Agreed. So here's the final one is the small town of Waikika. Kamaukao is pronounced Waikikamukau. If you know the correct pronunciation the second time, why do what? Well, I mean, I was just reading it as if I was which I am. Like basically during our Maori episode. Yeah, again, I'm really surprised that we got a lot of praise for this one. Yeah, I think that they're delighted that we talked about them and probably got a good laugh because no one can pronounce these words. Yeah, somebody wrote in and said they faced Palm like 26 times, but they probably laughed about it on the whole though. Guys, I wouldn't worry about offending Kiwis too much. We're a small nation and we're usually just happy if we find out people in other countries know we exist in a separate entity. Plus, Australia, they produce Fly as a Concord, which is a pretty big production. Thanks again. That's from Tom. Thanks Tom. How would you say Tom and Kiwi foam out? No, it's actually T-O-M not the weird. T-H-O-M. Yeah, like Tom Yorke. Yeah. What's he doing? Tom Yorkie? Yeah, that's what I call him. He's good though. He's great. Well, thank you very much, Tom. We appreciate that. And thank you to everybody who wrote in to say way to go on Maori. We were blown away. I'm glad to hear from you guys down there, or up there, depending on what direction you're traveling. If you want to let us know that we did so so, or really great. Or not that great on any episode. Or if you have any great explanations on anything about chess, any tips, any tricks, any strategy, we'd love to share it with everybody. Yeah, basic strategies. Don't get too weird with the King's gambit. Yes, well, but that's like a totally basic strategy. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffysheanow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastdiscovery.com. And as always, you can join us at our home on the webstepyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla by." | ||
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1216234952230sysk-abandoned-city.mp3 | How Abandoned Cities Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-abandoned-cities-work | Cities can become abandoned for a number of reasons, from economic meltdowns to nuclear catastrophes. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast and learn more about modern abandoned cities. | Cities can become abandoned for a number of reasons, from economic meltdowns to nuclear catastrophes. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast and learn more about modern abandoned cities. | Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:25:05 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=20, tm_min=25, tm_sec=5, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=183, tm_isdst=0) | 5476748 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from Housetopworkscom. Brought to you by Consumer Guide Automotive. We make carbine easier. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer. Here@housetuffworks.com with me again after a long absence is my former editor, Chris Paulette. How are you doing, Chris? Doing great. The effects of the cryogenic freeze are starting to wear off fantastic. Yeah. And your hair looks magnificent, too, still. And, Chris, I want to say congratulations on the birth of your second child. Way to do absolutely nothing. Thanks. Yeah. Well, let's get to it, shall we? Speaking of absolutely nothing, we're talking about abandoned cities today. Yes. And specifically modern abandoned cities. There's such a thing as ghost towns, and there's one, a legitimate ghost town out in California called Bodi, California. It was an old gold mining boom town, and they've got the old saloon and that kind of thing. But the thing is, when you go there, you can imagine gun slingers drinking sasparilla at the bar, but you can't really relate to them. I find modern abandoned cities much more fascinating, don't you? Yeah. And in a way, it's even creepier, because you can relate to the people. When you see the things that are left behind by these people, you can relate to it a lot better than you could with the Old West, because we've never lived that lifestyle. Right, exactly. I've been a gunslinger, but it wasn't in the Old West. I mean, give me a break. Right. One of the things when I was researching this article was that there's all sorts of different reasons why cities become abandoned. It can be a disaster. It can be because they've outlived their usefulness. There's all sorts of reasons why, like, take prepia Ukraine, for instance. This is an abandoned city because, well, it was right next to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when Chernobyl melted down the number four reactor in 1986. This is actually the company town for the nuclear power plant. So they were right there. A lot of people died, and they had to evacuate the city, I think, within 60 hours after the meltdown. So everything was just left behind. Yeah. I've seen pictures that were taken by people who had snuck into the government controlled area. And that's sort of what I meant by the creepy. Because you go in and you see all the stuff that people left behind in a hurry. And so you see all these modern artifacts. Pieces of these people's lives that they had to leave behind as they ran as fast as they could away from the radiation. And like you said, it's a lot easier to relate to because these are things in our lives as well. It makes it a lot more haunting, I think. Yeah. And then there are other cases like Detroit. Now, Detroit is not an abandoned city, but there are entire sections of it that are basically abandoned. And a city can become abandoned or partially abandoned just from an economic downturn, which is the case of Detroit. Right, right. So I mean, have you been on forgotten Detroit.com? Yeah, I've been there before. It's pretty fascinating. Especially because these areas are right next to places that are still inhabited, but they're like a world away. Exact natural light coming in. And again, like you said, modern artifacts is kind of scattered throughout. Right. It's amazing to think that a city that I think of is one of the largest cities in North America just has these huge sections where people, the population has receded enough to create little pockets of abandoned city. Right. In Detroit's, hardly alone. I drove to Alabama recently and I can't tell you how many dying towns I drove through. And they have these fantastic ornate downtowns that are all just bored it up and unused. And there was a hay day there and it was fairly recent, say like the but the population is dying off, the economy can't support it any longer. So these towns are slowly becoming abandoned. Oh, sure. And the roads get rerouted when the interstate system change the way people traveled around the country. Yes, that's pretty much like instant death for a town. And that's true. Speaking of a town that no longer has roads leading to it, you're number one that you chose for the article, pennsylvania. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it's a city that was a coal mining, had coal mining as one of its major staples. Well, it was what gave centrally a life. Right. It also killed it too, didn't it? True. Well, they ignited that underground coal fire and of course it's sitting on a massive amount of coal. So this is burning underground, giving off toxic fumes causing sinkholes, people falling in. Yes. Some twelve year old kid almost got sucked into a 150 foot sinkhole that suddenly erupted beneath his feet. That's when people started moving out. But there's still about a dozen people left despite the fact that the government has taken away the roads using eminent domain. Actually the government also took away their land. So these people are now squatting in their homes. So if you haven't caught the drift that abandoned cities are pretty interesting. Look up five modern abandoned cities on howtofworks.com it will creep you out. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housedefworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you." | |
8da7d16a-ba8a-11e8-a624-1f8dc10473c0 | Short Stuff: The Devil's Den | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-devils-den | The Devil's Den is the sight of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Is it haunted? Nope. But still creepy. | The Devil's Den is the sight of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Is it haunted? Nope. But still creepy. | Wed, 09 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=282, tm_isdst=0) | 13034936 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. A k. Lucifer the light bringer. And this is short stuff. The Civil War death edition. That's right, yeah. And it is Halloween time. It is October. For October. So we're going to be peppering in some little spooky content here and there. I am so psyched. This is one of my favorite holidays. I think we have this conversation every year, but let's have it again. We love Christmas and Halloween. Isn't Halloween your favorite of all time, though? No, I mean, they're both up there, like from October on. I'm a pretty happy guy. Sure, same here. I'm so angry the rest of the year. I know, it's kind of freaky. I'm so angry because we're approaching mid September and it's at the high ninety s here in Atlanta still. Yeah, well, I mean, that's Atlanta weather. It's weird, weird weather. And it has been forever. So you want to talk Confederate and Union soldier ghosts? Yeah, I don't want to, but I will. So the Battle of Gettysburg in particular, Chuck, was I guess it was the bloodiest battle of the entire Civil War. I believe so. Maybe the most I don't want to say the bloodiest battle in American history, considering all the other wars we've been in, but it was a bad one. On American soil? I would say certainly. For sure. Yeah, for sure. But over the course of three days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania population at the time, about 2000. So it's actually probably a pretty decent sized town. The Union troops and the Confederate troops, about 165,000 troops total, all gathered there at Gettysburg and said, let's fight. And over three days, something like 7000 people died with 51,112 casualties over three days, chuck, I did the math. Just with death alone, almost two people died every minute. If you count every minute over 72 straight hours. Yeah, it was a blood bath. And of course because of that, a lot of people think Gettysburg is super haunted. There was one, we're going to talk in particular about a place called Devil's Den, which if you are near a computer and not driving, you should look it up. It's a really interesting place. These huge boulders. It's like a maze of boulders between a couple of other rocky hills. Big round top and lil roundtop. Sure. Although it is spelled Little, I like to call it Lil Round Top. They didn't get really fancy with the naming. No, it's a little straightforward, but okay. Unless big round top is actually smaller. Yeah, like Greenland and Iceland. But Devil's Den is this area sort of in between them with, like I said, these huge rocks. And because of the unusual sort of topography of these huge boulders, because you think about the Civil War marching through these wide open fields and kind of shooting at each other. This was a nightmare scenario for a firefight because you've got boulders everywhere. You can't see around the corner. It was a really fierce, bloody fight with tons of deaths and casualties. Yeah. And there was even a place in between, I think, Little Round Top and the Devil's Den that was the worst of all, called the Slaughter pen because so many people died in between this kind of open no man's land. There was a lot of death around Devil's Den. But to make it even more kind of ghostly and freaky like. Even still today. If you walk through Devil's Den. It's a little creepy. It's a little unusual. As this guy named Mark Nesbit. Who is a former park ranger out at Gettysburg. Turned paranormal investigator. As he put it's. Basically like a giant just dropped huge boulders the size of houses onto this one spot on the battlefield. It's really unusual, it's really weird, and it'd be really easy to hide just around the corner if you put yourself in the mindset of this three day battle, the bloodiest battle in American history and American soil going on, and you're having to fight around these boulders. The point is made by people who believe in such things that this kind of horrific emotion endured by this many people collectively at the same time, surely must have led some sort of imprint to the area. And that's kind of given this idea that Gettysburg and the battlefield are one of the most haunted places in America. That's right. So on day two of Gettysburg, which like we said was three days, about 5500 Confederate troops attacked the Union position on Little Round Top. But remember, Devil's Den lies between Big Top and Little Roundtop. So they had to battle it out at Devil's Den. Right. And they were led by the Confederate First Texas. Put a pin in. That very important. Yeah. And Major General John Bellhood was the commander of that unit. And here's what they did. They took three of the Union's four big heavy artillery guns down, flushed the troops out from Devil's Den, and then had Sharpshooters just picking these dudes off on Little Round Top. Yeah, it was a big deal. I mean, the Confederate First Texas saved the day basically by taking the Devil's Den, which is just I mean, that was a big deal. Overall, though, the Union was considered to have won the Battle of Gettysburg because the next day there was Picket's Charge, which was a Confederate full frontal assault on the Union troops. By full frontal assault, they mean that they were all naked when they charged, but it didn't work out for them. It did not work out, and the Union won that won the Battle of Gettysburg overall. But taking the Devil's Den was considered a major Confederate victory. In that larger battle, they said, don't fire until you see the whites of their butts. Terrible. But all in all, in Devil's Den itself, I believe 1800 Confederate soldiers died even though they won, and 800 Union soldiers died. So in this relatively small area, that is 2600 people losing their life, and we'll talk about the ghostly activity that resulted perhaps right after this. Okay, Chuck. So the Devil's Den was a place of massive casualties, and it's a scary place on its own. It's an even scarier place if you're fighting somebody to the death. And then 150 years later, it still remains a very scary place to people who are, say, paranormal investigators, ghost hunters, or tourists who are into ghosts and things like that. Yeah. So here are a few of the stories. Once there was a young woman who was climbing in these boulders with a friend, and she felt someone grab her ankle. That was not her friend. And she looks down, and there's a young man in a civil war uniform. She screams for her friend and looks back down. He's gone. That would be so scary. Tell us about the helpful hippie, because this is a good one. It is a good one. So there was a woman back when Mark Nesbit, the Gettysburg park ranger turned paranormal investigator, who also wrote, like, a multivolume book series called the ghosts of Gettysburg. Yeah, I think he at one point said, you know what, park rangering? There's not a lot of money in that. But you know what? There is a lot of money in ghost tours, right? Possibly double. Yes, I would think so. He did make the leap over, as so many park rangers do, to ghost hunter. But he was saying that while he was a park ranger still at Gettysburg, a woman came in, and this was years and years ago, who basically said, hey, I just saw this guy in the devil's Den. I was turned around. I got kind of lost. And then out of nowhere, this kind of disheveled figure showed up and pointed off in the distance and said, that's the place you're looking for, and then kind of vanished. And the park ranger said, well, what did he look like? And the lady said, get this. Are we taking a break? No, I was setting you up for the best part. We already took our break, didn't we? Yeah. All right. He's wearing a floppy hat. Okay. Shoulder length hair. Right. He's barefoot and has ragged clothing. And the park ranger said, is there a fish concert nearby? And she said, who's fish? And he said, it must have been a civil war ghost. Yeah. Mark Nesbit said she basically just described what a first Texas confederate soldier would have looked like at the battle of Gettysburg. Case closed. The end. Ghosts exist. Right. And he was helpful hippie because he's telling everyone where to go, like, hey, you're lost. Just go over that rock over there. You'll be fine. But he also looked like a hippie. Exactly right. So this is another good one. I think this was about 20 years after that one, another woman comes up to nest, but this guy's got a lot of great stories. Well, sure. He collected a multi volume series called the Ghost of Gettysburg. She said she was in the Devil's Den hiking around, and a raggedy man with a floppy hat appeared pointed. She was a University of Texas graduate, I think. Had a Texas sweatshirt on, at least, and he pointed at it and said, first Texas, and disappeared. He went and disappeared. She was like, surely that was a first Texas Confederate soldier named the Helpful hippie. I think it was, yes. She described it in the same way. Floppy hat, disheveled, barefoot, just by rob. Right. And again, he was really into Texas. That's right. So I really feel like we're testing the boundaries of credibility here at this point. Okay. But that doesn't mean that there are a lot of people that go to Gettysburg every year who do say, I've had a weird experience there. I didn't necessarily see anything, but my camera didn't work on my phone or my straight up camera didn't work. The original ones. The straight up camera. Sure. Or the battery started to fail on my phone. But weirdly, once I left Devil's Den or the battlefield, like, my phone started working. My camera started working. It's like it didn't like to work there in that area. Mark Nesbit, being the author of a multi volume series called the Ghost of Gettysburg, says, I got it. I know exactly what's going on here. That's right. Are you taking a break? No, I'm setting you up again. So he said, there's this famous photo that was taken at Devil's Den of a fallen Confederate soldier lying at where he was positioned as a sharp shooter, but dead. And you can look this picture up. I looked it up. It's fairly creepy looking. Sure, it's very well known image, but it was found out to be staged. Not that this guy wasn't really dead, but this photographer apparently dragged around this same dead soldier to different spots for different photo ops, and this was one of the place he dragged them. So Nesbit's idea here is this whole cameras won't work thing is revenge against the photographer from beyond. He was basically like Jude Law and Road to Perdition or something. I don't remember that movie well enough to get that reference. He was a crime scene photographer, but he murdered people, and there were pictures of them. Yeah. Got you. He was a bad guy. I don't think this guy murdered anybody. But surely dragging a body around, it's just bad karma. I would think so. I guess that's about it. There's plenty of ghosts there. You can walk around, doubles down yourself and figure out if you have camera problems or if you have problems with your phone or if you see the Helpful Hippie or somebody grab your ankle, give it a shot. All you have to do is go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. True. And for the record, we should point out. The American Battlefield Trust, which is in charge of preserving that historic site, says, by the way, no such thing as ghost. Right. No such thing as ghost. I love this quote. We got to read it real quick. Okay, okay. They said that by all means, believe what you want to believe. But please know that if water gets on a camera lens, it's water, not a ghostly orb. If sunshine's into the camera lens, it's called sunlight, not an energy sphere. And they drop their microphone that's right off. Well, we're dropping our microphone, too. You can read a pretty interesting little article on how stuff works about this. And in the meantime, we'll see you around, short stuff. Say adios. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the Iheart Radio app app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
3f31f482-5461-11e8-b6d0-13f1fcef9621 | SYSK Selects: How Ghosts Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-ghosts-work | According to a 2009 poll, more Americans believe in ghosts than don't. But what are ghosts exactly? If they do exist, what are they made of and why are they hanging around? In this classic episode airing for Halloween, Josh and Chuck explore both sides of the divide between belief and skepticism on the topic of ghosts and look at some pretty cool explanations for hauntings. | According to a 2009 poll, more Americans believe in ghosts than don't. But what are ghosts exactly? If they do exist, what are they made of and why are they hanging around? In this classic episode airing for Halloween, Josh and Chuck explore both sides of the divide between belief and skepticism on the topic of ghosts and look at some pretty cool explanations for hauntings. | Sat, 31 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=305, tm_isdst=0) | 41370098 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpaline jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule of their own slaves. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com It automation. So I was in the at and T store for an upgrade. I left with at and T's best deal on a smartphone and a choice of plan. But on my way out, here comes this new guy. A noncarrier phone and a plan that raised eyebrows. I felt for him when I tell you we left the store grinning from ear to ear with the same deal. I love watching people prosper. You feel me? That's when I learned that whether you joined today or have been with at and T for years, they'll have the same best deals for everyone on every smartphone. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See att. Comdealsfordetails hey, everybody, it's your old pal Josh Ghoulish. Clark. And for this week's special Halloween edition of SYSK Selects, I've chosen our classic episode, How Ghost Work? Which, it turns out, we recorded in July. Weirdly enough, but it seems appropriate to release this Saturday, so I hope you enjoy it. And boom. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. Iheartradios How Stuff Works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles, Debbie, chuck Bryant, and this is Stephanie Schneow. Jerry's over there fiddling and fsing around. It's Halloween in June, right? Remember when we had the horror fiction contest last year? Actually, this may be July. Yeah, I think the deadline for submissions was in July, and it was weird to be in that kind of Halloween mindset while it's hot out. Yeah. And I'm sure it was weird to ask the authors or not to ask, but to have them get in that mindset to write something creepy we definitely didn't command. You talked me out of that. Yeah. Those good contests. Yes. Also known as the contest shall never happen again. Well, we also ended up with the one that we're going to read this year, right? Yeah, it's a good one. It is a good one. You guys will have to see in a few months what we're talking about. That's right. So, Chuck, I myself have never officially seen a ghost, but I understand you have a ghost story. I do. I remarked about it and I've said, I'm going to wait till we do our ghost podcast. Well, here we are, pal. Is this it? Should I go now? Yeah. Okay. I'm not saying this is a ghost. What I'm saying is, one night I saw something very strange that I cannot explain. Okay. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah. I feel like she's a music or something. Jerry that could probably be done. Okay. So athens, Georgia college, I would say. I don't remember the exact year, but it was probably 1994. My best friend and I, Brett, had gone out, and we're going back home and driving through Five Points. You know the area? Yes. So we're coming from, like, let's say the direction of campus. And there's a cut through if you take a certain road in Five Points, that cuts you over to Alps Road. Okay. And people are going to be like, what is he talking about? I know what you're talking about. I'm talking to you here. And so there's this one area where you go around the road, curves 90 degrees, and then about, I'd say 200ft. After that, there's a four way stop sign. It's very neighborhoody area. I think that's like, where Ray Golf used to live. Vince Dewey lives over there. Okay. That might be what you're thinking. So we go around this 90 degree curve, and I'm looking, I'm filling with the radio or something, and my buddy Brett starts kind of joke, screaming, like, oh, what is that? But kidding around. And I look up and in the middle of the intersection, and I swear, people, I'm not making this up. And I did not hallucinate it. This is God's honest truth. There was what looked like a 100 year old woman wearing a black robe with a purple sash diagonal across her chest. And she was standing in the middle of the intersection holding a Bible like this kind of placed on her fingertips as you would hold like a waiter would hold a platter. Okay. About chest level. And she was sort of looking in the other direction with kind of a vacant look on her face like you have now, or is it just she was completely vacant, completely still. Didn't move an inch and wasn't like a hazy apparition. I mean, was solid and looked real. So freaky. We pulled right up on her to take that left, and we're both kind of joke screaming. But then as we get closer, we're like, what's going on here? But it all happened in, like, 15 seconds, so it wasn't a lot of time to register. What is this? We were just sort of kidding around. And we pull right by her and take a left, like this is her. We pull within feet of her. And she's on my side at this point because we're turning right by her. She doesn't blink, doesn't move a muscle. And we were going probably 15, 20 miles an hour in this curve. Yeah, he can't drive a stick shift anymore because he's freaking out. The car is like, jerking and sputtering. He pulls over, probably 50ft later, we both turn around out the back window, and there's nothing there. Wow, I'm getting chill bumps. I know. I can see him. And to this day, I have no idea what the heck it was. And it was either a crazy old woman who is really fast, which is really creepy and really fast, or the most believable Madame Tussauds wax dummy I've ever seen. It's also really fast. Someone ran and sat out there and we didn't see it and then ran and took it away. I'm not offering any explanation. I'm not saying it was a ghost, but I have no explanation for what it could have been. And it was the creepiest, weirdest thing I've ever seen. And we both described it to each other immediately, like, what did you see? What did you see? It had gold leafing. I mean, I can't say it was a Bible because I didn't see the cover, but I had that gold leafing around. It looked like a Bible. So you both saw the same thing? Yes. Purple sash, black robe, silver hair. That is one of the pernicious qualities of a ghost sighting, is that frequently people will see the same thing. Two different people will see the same thing. Yeah. Which lends a tremendous amount of credence to something, because if one person just sees it, well, it's a hallucination. Exactly. You were clearly on something we were not. But that's what somebody could say. Sure, both of you saw it. Even if you both were on something, that doesn't mean you're going to see the exact same thing. Yeah, and I wasn't like some big ghost guy. I'd never had look for them or say, oh, I believe in ghost. It would just out of nowhere, boom, there it happened. Right, exactly. You can also go a little further if you're a skeptic and say, well, I mean, Chuck and Brett just kind of were playing off one another's description, and they came to some unconsciously, came to an agreement of this. You guys compiled the story, and you saw the same thing. Impossible. Who knows? However you approach that probably depends on whether you're part of the 45% or the 48% of Americans who don't believe in ghosts or who do believe in ghosts. According to a 2009 CBS News poll. I had never given it much thought. But after that. I was definitely like. Well. If that was a ghost and I just saw one yeah. And I researched a little bit. But this was long ago. Before the Internet was born. And so I couldn't find anything and even looked yesterday just to see if I could find out anything. If there was some sightings or some old lady that had been killed there or anything. And nothing. No, I couldn't find anything. So that was just your own personal ghost, maybe. Or just some creepy old woman who was still in not blinking as the car barrel towards her. Right. Yeah. Either way. That is very unsettling. Either way. And that's a pretty good ghost story. It's a good one. It's not a mask. I can say that for sure. Like, we pulled up within feet of her. Like, I looked in her face and she didn't move a muscle. Didn't move a muscle. Man, that's scary. It was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. And we told that story many times over the years, and everyone's always like, really? And I always say, I swear, why would I make this up? Yeah. So that's my ghost story. That's a good ghost story. You can reach us on Facebook. Right? Is that it? Yeah, it's time for message break. All right. Wait, Jerry, it's not really time for message break. Well, she left pretty quick. So we're talking ghosts. Yeah. And like I said, 48% of Americans believe in ghosts. 45% don't. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, especially after reading this, there's the whole, I really miss my deceased relative. And I go to Seances and I think those things, the mind can play tricks on you. But in my case, it was just like, those are the ones where I'm like, what is going on here? Right. Well, it's pretty much impossible to disprove something or to prove something doesn't exist. Right. Which is one reason why belief in ghosts continues on. But there's also a lot of factors in ghosts that accumulated create this body of ghost belief. What our ghost, ghostly sightings, hauntings, apparitions, all that stuff? Sure. That kind of, over time have taken on a life of their own, or I should say have been around for thousands and thousands of years and have not been dispelled by science. Right. So we're going to kind of approach this from like, here's what people believe ghosts are, and here's some scientific explanations for it. But throughout this, you'll notice that at no point are we ever going to say conclusively science has proven that ghosts don't exist, because it kind of can't. Right. That's not to say that people aren't using the scientific method to study ghosts. Sure. Because some are. And my hat is off to these people most of all. Yeah. So let's hug ghosts then. All right. Well, I just described my encounter, which, like I said, wasn't hazy or weird. Well, it was weird. It wasn't like a hazy apparition. Right, but many times it's an apparition. Sometimes it's lights. It seems to hit every cent. Sometimes it's a smell, like Tracy pointed out in this article. Like the smell of deceased relatives favorite meal being cooked in the other room. Right. Stuff like that. Or the smell of a deceased relative just smell something like rotting. But it was just a squirrel in the wall. Right, exactly. It can be a song, can be flickering lights can be orbs in a picture. We'll talk about that. Or a ghost in a picture. There's plenty of those. Hey, I got you. You got to Google. It's pretty fun to look at those. Yeah. And there's some that are like this one's not quite explained to my full satisfaction. Yeah. If you look up famous ghost pictures. There's a handful that have made the rounds over the years that are pretty good. Like the lady of Brown Hall, I believe. Is that the girl with the fire? No, that's a good one too. There's a woman descending a staircase like a ghostly veil woman. Very famous. Freddie Jackson. The World War I pilot died, killed or mechanic? I'm sorry, he was killed and then he showed up in a group photo two days later. That one was explained as a double exposure, which I mean, just the coincidence behind it is in and of itself staggering, if that is the explanation for it. Of course it also could be a hoax, but it's a pretty good one. Freddie Jackson is my favorite one. I think my favorite is the Old West. Did you see that one? It's like Boot Hill or something. It was in this guy dressed up like a cowboy and had his picture made with his friend. And then in the background you see this guy. Oh yeah, I did see like kind of peeking up maybe behind a tombstone. Yeah, just in the brush. Yeah. And supposedly these things are verified by photo experts and stuff being been untouched. Yeah, because photoshop is making it way easier to screw with photography. But it's also fairly easy to detect too. If you really dig into the individual pixels, you can say, well, this is obviously and especially these old photos when they're examining negatives, those weren't Photoshopped. Right. It could be light playing tricks. But when you see a girl standing by the rail with the fire behind her that one was explained as the girl in the fire. Yes, that was explained as just a sheer chance mixture of smoke and light. And then our programming, like us being hardwired to pick faces out of anything. I don't know, man, it looks pretty much like a girl. It definitely does, isn't it? Yeah. And then of course there's the funny things like the Three men and a baby ghost, which was a cutout of Ted dancing. Or the wizard of Oz, like hanging munchkin, which was a bird, I think. Although I have to say, since you bring it up, one of the greatest short I love short horror fiction. Of course, one of the greatest ones I've ever read was called The Hanging Man of Oz. It's only just a few years old, but it's a good little short story. Really? Yeah, I'm in that one. This guy who gets kind of caught up in looking for it. It's good horror fiction. This doesn't have to do with ghost, but supposedly there's a murder captured on Google Earth. Have you seen that making the rounds? No, it's an aerial shot, obviously, of a dock somewhere in Europe, I think, by the water. And it looks like a guy is like dragging a dead body in a big pool of blood toward the water. But I think they've debunked that it was a dog who had shaken off and got in the ground wet. And people verified later like, yeah, that was me and my dog. Yes. Stop asking questions. It was my dog. Someone posted it on Facebook wall. But, I mean, you bring up that's a really good like you see what you want. Exactly. But again, we say, you can't really prove that ghosts don't exist. So people are like, Prove it. It doesn't prove anything. Right. If you can prove that a photograph has been faked, then you prove that it's been faked, but you can't just look at it and be like, oh, I'm sure it's a fake. Right. That doesn't muster. Yeah. This July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios Doctor Strange and the multiverse of badness new episodes of Marvel Studios ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for Host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb comaircoverforhosts. So we've covered photos to show up in photos. Well, why are they here? There's a lot of explanations. Like they're delivering bad news or good news, right? Yeah. There's a lot of ghost stories where the dead have suddenly appeared to a relative on the other side of the planet at the moment they died. Like, the relative wakes up the next day to find out that the person died at 12:59 a.m. When they just saw them sitting in their room at that same time. Yeah. So sometimes they're coming to say, hey, love you. See you in 15 years. Right. Or they're coming to say, you're about to die. Right. That's another long standing legend. Yes. Or they're about to say, like, it's sell your Yahoo stock. Now, that'd be a good ghost. Right. There's a lot of stuff that people have attributed to ghosts and why they're here. There's also that horrible experience as their last moments. Yes. They are at the point where they died too young or maybe have just gone back to their favorite place in life. Earthbound spirits, I think is what paranormal investigators call those situations. Like they're stuck here, or it's like get off my train type of situation. Right. They're guarding a place. Maybe there's not one, but two ghost women at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Very famous late 19th century built hotel resort. And both of them took their own lives at the hotel when they found out they were pregnant on a wedlock. Or one was married, but her husband had left her. And so they're in two different rooms still. But that's an example of a ghost being tied to a place. Yeah. And we have an article on the site about haunted hotels. A lot of hotels all around the world, but especially in places like New Orleans and, like, old spooky Spanish, I guess the Coronado is probably one of those there's one in, I believe, Colorado Overlook, or the one they use for the Overlook Hotel. No, it's just like a plain old regular cool hotel, but it has, like, a stream running through the lobby. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Which is cool in and of itself. And I don't remember where I saw this, but it was like, on some TV show where it's like a super haunted hotel, supposedly. Is he, like, the ghost waiter? I don't remember. The river. Yeah, he had his pants rolled up and flip flops. The caviar part is awesome. That was the best I could muster right then. I'm sorry. There are mediums out there who if you saw the movie Ghost, Whoopi Goldberg, obviously there's many times huxters trying to take advantage of people, saying they can contact people, put you in touch with your relatives that have passed. Yeah. But I'm sure there are a lot of mediums who really believe what they're doing is for real. Yeah. And what's kind of ironic is there's? This really great article. It's just a little quick editorial, actually, from the Los Angeles Times in 2006 called Science Afraid of Ghosts. It's written by Deborah Bloom. Right. And she basically points out that we used to have psychical research societies like William James, effectively the founder of psychology, investigated the paranormal as well and conducted extensive real scientific experiments. And along the way, debunked a lot of mediums. When was this? Like, the 19th century? The Victorian era. Okay. And so part of this investigation into the paranormal, it wasn't just to prove that ghosts existed. It was just to understand the paranormal on its own terms. And along the way say, this person is a fraud. This person is a huckster. Right. This ectoplasm is cheesecloth that they had, like, stuffed in their cheek, and that was part of it. And over time, I think science has just kind of thrown out the whole thing, the baby with the bathwater. And now it's just up to kind of the more mean spirited section of the skeptical world to just go after and debunk. There's nobody looking for there's very few people looking to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts. It's more just like this photograph was faked. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And on photographs, I guess we should talk about orbs. Very famously, orbs show up in pictures. And some people say that that is a very specific part of the journey of the ghost, is when they are in Orb. I have an Orb picture which I'll post on Facebook. Emily believes it is her grandfather. He had just passed away. And the photograph, he was the biggest dog lover I've ever known. And we had just finished our fencing in our backyard and our house that we bought. So it had been, like, six or eight months that our dogs couldn't go back there. So we finally let them back there. And I had a camera. I was like, I got to take pictures of this. And they start playing around like crazy. And in one of the pictures, there's an Orb boom right there above the dogs playing. And Emily was like that's. Charlie that's my grandfather. That's awesome. He's coming to visit. So I didn't debunk that. But supposedly Skeptics will say that it could be a camera flash. Right. Reflecting off the dust particles. Right. I use no flash. Water spots on the camera lens, bone dry. Okay. Defects and digital camera sensors. I guess it could be that. Although it was a new camera, and it's never done that since, or printing errors. It was not printed or developed. Wow. So who knows? I'm just saying, I've got a great Orb photo that I'll post of my dogs playing. You raise a really good question. What's the value of debunking that? I don't know. Photo it made him really feel nice. Yeah. And still does. So what is the value? I guess we'll cover it later. But that question keeps coming up to me throughout the research in this not hurting anybody. Right. So, Chuck, I guess a really good question, if we're going to talk about how ghosts work, is what would ghosts be made of? Like we said, the Victorians believe that they are made of ectoplasm. Today, if you talk to someone who believes in ghosts and researches ghosts, that's part of their world. Right. The prevailing idea is that they're made of energy somehow. Okay. I can't remember which law of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, just transferred states. Yeah. That would be a pretty good understanding of what ghosts are, if they are real. So a life force that had passed from a live person is now a different kind of energy. Exactly. Sure. Midichlorians. What is that? This is a Star Wars. That was how they explained the Force. Who are the midichlorians? I don't remember. It was very disappointing, though. It sounds really familiar. Was it from the newer three? Yeah. How they explained basically they explain what the Force was and everyone's like, why don't you go and do that? I got you. I remember that now. Yeah. Other theories are that if they are some sort of energy, they could also be some form of matter. Right. So maybe they're made of some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement of quantum particles. Right. Which I find kind of an interesting explanation because think about it, ghosts, they're frequently said to be able to travel through solid matter, right? Yeah. Well, if you go down to the quantum level and you start looking at transistors, there's a big problem in early transistor development, and that individual electrons can pass right through the wall of a transistor. It's called quantum tunneling. Right. And they had to figure out how to use crystals to kind of block electrons in to make them flow the way you wanted, rather than just be like, oh, I'm over here now. So some people say, well, maybe these are some sort of quantum particles or an arrangement of quantum particles that we're able to perceive somehow. Right. And then the question I would have is, is there a consistent explanation on why some people might become a ghost and some others not? And the answer is no. Or are they everywhere and some you just have a stronger energy force or something. Who knows? Yeah. Because if people tend to perceive ghosts more than others, and that typically from studies has been shown to be people who believe in ghosts, tend to see them more often, report hauntings, why wouldn't they see them all the time? Yes. That would indicate that there is something about an individual person that would make them become a ghost. So many questions. Well, the whole unfinished business, like died too young thing, I can wrap my head around that. Like an energy force that was so strong that is now gone. Sure. Still could be around. I'm trying to decide what part I'd lie in. Do I believe in ghosts? I think so. Okay, so there's a dude named Richard Wiseman of University of Hertfordshire. Yeah. And he's done a lot of research in GB, Great Britain, and he has found some pretty consistent results that people have generally reported the same things in the same places, even if they didn't know there was any ghost activity there, even if they did or didn't believe. Actually, if they did believe, they were more, like you said, more apt to see a ghost. Right. But he had consistent results of specific places. Yeah. I mean, he applied the scientific method of researching ghosts, and he documented what areas in a reportedly haunted place sightings were most frequently reported. Basically found that you could map out areas where sightings were. Right. Okay, so that's step one. And then step two, we had people who encountered ghost describe their experiences, and he kind of compiled the data. Right. Then he went back to see what other commonalities there were for an area. Yeah. Like physical conditions there. Yeah, like, how cold is it? Is it humid? Let me measure the light. Let me measure the magnetic field. Right. What he found, though, interestingly, was that there were specific areas where people who had no understanding of the history of the place they were seeing or had heard that the area was haunted had reported seeing something. So there was something to a specific area being, quote, haunted. Right. And people who didn't necessarily believe in ghosts or didn't know that the place was supposed to be haunted had reported not only that they'd seen a sighting or something in this building, but in the specific area of this building. Yeah. What does that mean? It's a consistent study. Right. So Wiseman is part of this kind of long but very small, sparsely populated tradition of paranormal researchers. Like legitimate ones. Yeah, I could get into that, man. When I was a kid, I used to want to go to Duke and study paranormal or parapsychology there. Oh, really? Yeah, they had a parapsychology department. That's awesome. It was led by a guy named Joseph Ryan, who is another legitimate parapsychological researcher. You could have gotten a TV show on Science Channel. Yeah, totally. UCLA used to have one from, I think, 69 to 78. Is Duke still around or no, they shut it down and I think the mid 80s, but it was around from the 50s or 60s up to the it was well respected. William James was another researcher. As of the 90s, James Huron and Renny Lange are still doing research and writing books. Harry Price is a very famous one. Yeah. He was famous for investigating Borderly Rectory, which was supposed to be, like, the most haunted place in England. Oh, really? And then now if you want to get a degree in parapsychology, you can go to the American University or you can go to University of Edinburgh. These are the two places, as far as I know, in the Western world where you can get a parapsychology degree. I could see that the Great Britain has a lot of ghostly activity and paranormal investigators, and they're into it over there. And Edinburgh is supposed to be the most haunted city in all of Europe. Oh, really? Yeah. A bunch of dissatisfied Scotsmen roaming the bog. Right. So we've kind of laid it out, right? Yeah, I feel like we've laid it out. We all understand what ghosts are. I don't think we really said anything that people are like, oh, yeah, sure. I didn't realize that's what a ghost is. Right. What I found interesting is that there's some really good explanations for ghostly activity. Yeah, sometimes. Tracy points out, there are so many explanations. There's such a wide range from this person just hallucinated something. Right. And I want to say with that specifically, we're starting to understand that hallucinations are way more common than anybody has admitted for a very long time because we are afraid of being put away. Sure, our label is crazy, but people hallucinate more than we generally understand. They do. Specifically, grief is supposed to be able to trigger hallucinations pretty early, which would explain visitation, dead relative shortly after they die. Totally. Yeah. We've talked about sleep paralysis before. That's an explanation that you hear a lot about someone laying in bed. They can't move, and they are hallucinating spirits and things. Right. They think they're awake, but they're not. Right? Yeah. And you're incapable of moving. Yeah. There's also the hypnagogic trance, which comes at the onset of sleep and is a sort of trance that supposedly you can hallucinate in. Yeah, I've had that happen before. Like, am I awake? Am I asleep? That? I just hear something. Oh, yeah, sure. And then sometimes it's just the window shut itself because it was loose and the wind blew it, or the door shut because there was a draft, or it's cold in here because there's a draft. A lot of times there's just literally an explanation, a physical explanation for what happened. So you hit upon one of the hallmarks of haunting activity is a change in temperature, an unexplained change in temperature in a haunted room when a ghost is present. And like you said, it's often like a chimney or a drafty window or something like that. But people who investigate this kind of thing also often explain that phenomenon by a lack of humidity. Lower humidity can make a room feel colder. Right. What about an area of a room, though? I don't know. That's a really good question, dude. How can an area of a room be, number one, colder if there isn't a draft? If it's not a draft, it's just like a static area in a room that's cold. If there's just a decrease in humidity, what causes the decrease in humidity that makes it feel colder? Right. And they have found that areas that are supposedly haunted well, I should say Richard Wiseman found in one place that was supposedly haunted. It tended to be less humid than other areas. So that would explain the cold chill. But how is one area just a part of a room less humid than another? Yeah, and I'm curious about what kind of temperature drop. People have seen, like, how drastic it's been. I couldn't find any reputable information on that. Like in the movies, you walk into the corner and you can see your breath all of a sudden and you're freezing. Yeah, like the 6th sense, right? Yeah. That poor kid. But also I wonder then if it's not even necessarily a real change in temperature. Although supposedly ghost hunters can measure changes in temperature in a room, and that means the ghost is present, or if it's just a sensation of a chill running through your body and it's not actually thermal, it's psychological. Yeah. Your central nervous system. Yeah, I just got chill bumps earlier. You did? What about the electrical fields? That's a very common thing, is for a paranormal investigator to measure magnetic fields and electrical fields in an area. They will say that this is kind of proof that there's some sort of presence there because the ghostbusters emeter is going crazy. Right, exactly. What do they call that? I can't believe I can't remember that. I can't remember it either. The one that Egan held up to yeah, I don't remember what it's called. We're going to get in trouble for that. Yeah. Sorry, guys. But sometimes these fields can cause wacky things happening with the brain, can cause hallucinations, can cause dizziness or other neurological symptoms. And they're saying that might play into the fact that you think you have seen a ghost. Right. They're saying investigators are saying, yeah, there actually is something different here with the area's electrical field. Right. Electromagnetic field. There's something going on here, but it's possible that that's what's making you think there's a ghost here rather than there's a ghost here. And it's affecting the field. Yeah. It's hitting your angular gyrus. Right. That's a part of the brain that evidently, if it's stimulated, you can get the sense that someone's behind you mimicking your movements, which is pretty creepy. I mean, we're all familiar with the transcranial magnetic stimulation, the thinking cap. That's a cool episode. And when you apply a magnetic pulse to different parts of the brain, different things happen. And one of them is definitely hallucinations. And then another example of the magnetic field messing with us, I guess, is that a lot of haunting activity is reported at night, supposedly. Right, exactly. That's number one. But number two, the magnetosphere, the part of the Earth's atmosphere that protects us from the charged ions of solar wind. Right. The way that the Earth is arranged to the sun, the part that's in darkness has a larger part of the magnetosphere surrounding it, more warp toward that. So that might explain it then. Right. Looks like a spider. It does. But there's a lot more magnetic field activity going on in the darker side of Earth, so light that one could be a stretch. Yeah. I think my favorite explanation that I had not heard about is infrasound. I think that's pretty cool. This to me. Is it? Yeah, it's low frequency sound waves that you cannot hear with your naked ear. You won't notice it, but it can cause your eyes to vibrate. It can cause you to see things. It can cause a sense of dread. And Cracked actually, one of our favorite websites that tested a concert, didn't they? Well, they reported on it. Okay. They don't do tests. That's right, they report on test. But yeah, there's a great Cracked article on it, and they're talking about in. The guy named Vladimir Gavro, robotics engineer, noticed that one of his lab assistants was bleeding from an ear and traced it to this infrasound. I think it's like seven to 19 can't hear it. Like, you don't realize you're hearing sound, but you're reacting to it. And like you said, it causes all sorts of weird psychological effects, like a sense of dread, a sense that there's somebody else near you. All the classic telltale signs of haunting. So much so that they've traced literal hauntings back to infrasound. Yeah. The Ghost in the Machine is an article by Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence that the same thing was going on there, and they traced it back to a fan, and then they modified the fan's housing. The sound went away, and the supposed haunting went away. Right, exactly. I mean, isn't that weird, though? Like, surely you've been in a room before that you just had to turn around and run out of because you just knew that there was somebody else in there with you. Yeah, you have I have plenty of times, sort of, but I think it's like I've been in Savannah near the Ghost tour. I'm highly suggestible I get what I'm saying, but isn't it strange to think that a sound that you can't hear was responsible for producing that our brains are that malleable just the sound we can't even hear, but the vibrations we can still sense somehow are having an effect on our brain and scaring us and making us turn around and run out of room. Yeah, and potentially twitching your eye and causing hallucinations. Right. So this sound has been shown NASA showed that an infrastount at that frequency can make your eye vibrate, imperceptibly, but then something close to your vision, like, say, the rim of your glasses or something, your brain confuses and thinks that that's moving. So it looks like there's a little dark figure moving out of the corner of your eye. Right. Infrasound can actually cause visual and well, not auditory hallucinations. Psychological yeah, psychological effects and visual hallucinations and the creation of a sense of dread. Yeah. That's spooky. Yeah. I want to get an infrast sound machine. It's, like, played around the office. There may already be one here. Well, I don't even think we said what the guy did, though, at the concert, did we? No. Did he play it under the concert and people were freaking out? Yeah, I think, like, a quarter of the people at the concert reported feeling like, horrible dread and some nausea. Maybe it was a Dr. Jon show. That's the first awful thing I could think of. Dr. John is great. I knew you were going to say that. It really is. You see that guy play two pianos at once? Yeah. He's a legend. What am I talking about? You're thinking of? Maybe Dr. Hook and the medicine show. No. Dr. Demento. I was trying to think of the worst band I could think of and that's the first thing that came to my mind. That's who you thought of? Nickelback is out there? Yeah, it was a Nickelback show. Perfect. We can fix this in editing. Okay. So what else? I think the last thing Tracy has here is that the National Science Board has actually come out and said that if you believe in paranormal, it can be dangerous because that means you have reduced critical thinking skills and you can't make great day to day decisions. Right. That's going to mean that irked me, because on the other end of the spectrum, you can definitely make the case that just poopooing out of hand as nonexistent. Anything that science can explain shows a distinct lack of critical thinking and even more dangerously, a lack of imagination. And that irks me to no end. Yeah. I enjoyed that you sent me The Skeptoid. Brian Dunning. Is that his name? His article. And I kind of appreciated his approach with this. Yeah. Maybe that means there are other cool ways to explain these things. Right. Like, don't poopoo it. Maybe open your mind to other interesting phenomena that can be explained. What he was saying. Don't just assume that if you just stop at it was a ghost yeah. Or it wasn't. Right. Then you're not pursuing any longer one way or another. Yeah. And yeah, you're kind of shutting down these avenues that could be really interesting and eye opening. I appreciate that. I appreciate his approach, too, because he's a huge skeptic, but he didn't take, like, a James Randy esque glee or delight in destroying the illusions of idiots. Yes. And I think that's his deal, period. I think he gets accused of that oftentimes as a funkiller and he's like, that's not what I'm trying to do here. Yeah. I'm trying to apply research and real science to things. I think he likes killing fun a little bit. Yeah, maybe a little bit. So that's ghosts. Yeah. Done. Yeah, for now. If you want to learn more about ghosts and read a ghost story, first hand account of a ghost story from Tracy Wilson, you can type ghosts in the search bar@housetofworks.com. It will bring up this article. And I said hastofworks. So it's time for a message break, I'll bet this July on Disney Plus, don't miss a summer of surprises, superheroes, incredible stories, and a visit from the world's most famous mouse with the epic Marvel Studios doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, the Series, and Zombies. Three plus don't miss National Geographics. America the beautiful. From the awardwinning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody, chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah, which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing you can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation. Or towards your retirement fund. Or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air Cover for Hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting, plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air Cover for Host is completely free every time you host on Airbnb. Free with a capital F. With Air Cover for Host, it makes hosting a no brainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the allinone commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right nowo. Now. Listener mail. Now. Listener mail. All right. Yeah. This is from a teacher. We always like reading these. Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening for over a year now and was never more grateful than about a month ago. I wound up driving three preteen boys to Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. Remember Space Camp? Yeah. Great movie. Not really. I never saw the movie. I just remember you didn't see Space Camp. That was right in the wheelhouse. Yeah. All right. You see, I'm a middle school teacher in Morgantown, North Carolina. Recently relocated from Decatur, Georgia, where I worked at the Brickstore in Squash Blossom. Jerry's old hot. Okay. Every two years, our 6th and 7th grade students go on a trip to the science Academy, and we're a tiny school, just 24 kids in the entire middle school. Wow. Teachers frequently end up driving on field trips themselves, about a seven hour drive. And on the journey, we were plagued with traffic, rain and car sickness. At about our four, when tensions were high, was white and knuckled and began questioning my career choice. And I said, screw it, I'm going to put on your podcast about ninjas. They were mesmerized ninja. During the rest of our trip, we learned about sword swallowing, bigfoot and surfing, just to name a few. So thank you for saving us in our time of need, more pointedly, creating a podcast that appeals to all ages. As a show of my thanks, I'd like to teach you a tried and true car game like your podcast only requires that a person be young at heart called pass around the Ether Rag. As you drive down the road, take note of all the car models you pass in front of the model name. Insert any potty word of your choice with middle school boys, and most likely you two as well. Toilet Puke and Poop worked marvelously, so we ended up with a few gems like the Toilet Avalanche, the Puke Avenger and the Poop Fusion. So many thanks and congratulations on your success. That is Sierra Benton. Thanks a lot. Sierra Benton. It's a great email. I'm glad we could help you out. Keep your sane. The Poop Fusion. That's pretty solid band name. Yeah, we get a lot of email about how, like, we keep people sane during their everyday lives. Yeah, we're helping. If you have a story about how we kept you sane, we like to hear those. Obviously, we want you to tweet to us. Seriously. SYSK podcast. We want you to hang out with us on Facebook because it's fun over there. That's facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leaving leading brands. Find Halo elevate as Pepco Pep supplies plus and select neighborhood Pet stores." | |
How BASE Jumping Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-base-jumping-works | You should never BASE Jump. It is one of the most genuinely dangerous sports on the planet. But with that out of the way, you should definitely learn all about this pastime where people jump from tall structures and outcroppings for fun and thrills. | You should never BASE Jump. It is one of the most genuinely dangerous sports on the planet. But with that out of the way, you should definitely learn all about this pastime where people jump from tall structures and outcroppings for fun and thrills. | Tue, 16 Jun 2015 13:25:16 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=13, tm_min=25, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=167, tm_isdst=0) | 50743244 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today, the world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha's Chard. The Martha Stewart Chardonnay from 19 Crimes? It satisfies the palette with bright notes of citrus and a crisp, clean finish. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowd pleaser the star of your next part of your gathering. Because Martha's Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on. Let's work hard, play hard and drink. Martha's Stard, available at a wine aisle near you and on nineteencrimes.com. Please drink responsibly. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. We are dancing on the ceiling. Whoa, what a feeling. That song holds up, by the way. I heard it recently. Oh, yeah? Well, Richie holds up, my man. Yeah, sure. It's The Commodore. Great stuff. Great stuff. I think, like, two of the most underrated bands of the 70s were Earth, Wind and Fire and The Commodore. I think Earthwind and Fire was underrated. They were super well starred group underrated. As far as like, today, I don't know. You don't hear a lot about that kind of thing. It's all like about the big rock bands. Yeah. Oh, you mean like Bad Finger and Foreigner and Hat? Yeah. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Maybe they weren't underrated. How about this? Two of the best bands from the 70s for The Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. I agree, man. Rated just perfectly. And I don't mean to be argumentative. No, I mean, I've said that before. I wonder if Earth, Wind and Fire is possibly the greatest band that's ever been. They're pretty amazing. They are amazing. And the different sounds that they took on, absolutely. Like it was never just like, we hit it and we're going to stick with it. They were not like AC DC, in other words. And AC DC is great, man. They got their thing, but they figured it out from song one and they're still doing it today. Simple rock riff played over and over and over, right? Yeah, but it works for them. Yeah. Earth went on fire, man. They tried it all. Yeah. And please don't write in about the complexity of AC DC. I love AC DC. But they will even admit that they do one thing well yeah. Which is rock. Yeah, it's a blues riff. I used to think they were heavy metal when I was a kid, which is very funny to think about. Yeah. You know, first heavy metal metal at all. Who was it? I always hear Black Sabbath, but I suspect it goes back before that. Sabbath is usually kind of counted as the first, but it's all sort of variations of the blues still. Right. All comes down to the blues. That's right. Nobody leave here without singing the blues. Can you name that movie? Is it Crossroads? You would think. No, it's the opposite movie of Crossroads. Adventures in Babysitting. The opposite of Crossroads. That's funny. Yes, I remember that part. So Base Jumping has nothing to do with the blues unless you die. Right. Unless you're one of the Base Jumping fatalities. And one of the dudes, which I will touch on later. A big base jumper wrote an article like how to Get started. Tom ILO And one of his frightening things he says is, if you are not ready to die Base Jumping, then you are not ready to Base Jump. Yeah, I ran across that kind of sentiment, too. Like the dangers are so vast that you can anticipate being injured almost certainly at some point if you do a lot of Base Jumping. That's right. That's absolutely true. I mean, it's pretty much the next step in danger is to just jump off a cliff without any parachute at all. Yeah. And I think one of the few, like I don't think a lot of people Base Jump once, then they're like, yeah, that was kind of neat. It becomes one of your driving forces in your life. Base jumpers are all in. Yeah, that's the best way to say it. And I remember it kind of like came up in the 90s, wasn't it? It was like it became a big deal in the 90s. That's when I became aware of it. But it's way older than that. Well, it's a couple of decades older. It's about a decade older than the 90s. It's from the late seventy s, I guess, is another way to point it. Well, before we get into the history, let's at least say what Base Jumping is. Because some people might live under a rock and they don't know what Base Jumping is. It's actually an acronym. It is? What does it stand for? It stands for buildings, antennas, spans, aka. Bridges and earth, aka. Cliffs. Yeah. Buildings are probably quite a rush to jump off of, but they're tough to get in. And you're most certainly doing something illegal. Yeah. There's pretty much not a building in existence you're legally allowed to jump off of. No. Unless you have a special arrangement, I'm sure. Meaning you've lined the mayor's pockets with cash. Yeah, if you're doing, you know, I imagine some of the Red Bull team arranges for a famous jump. Right. And Red Bull lines the mares populated with cash. There you go. The antennas are super popular because they're not as heavily guarded, but they're still really tall and usually out in the middle of nowhere. Right. That's very appealing. Less risky. Right. Not for death, but less risky for being caught. Right. And for causing injury to other people, which is a big thing with buildings. Yeah. And tennis. It's like you're going to injure a cow that you run into. Right. Who cares? Spans. These are very popular, not only because it's fun and gorgeous to leap off of a bridge, like the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. Thing that connects this podcast to bridges. That's right. But because sometimes it is legal. Like the one day of the year that they have bridge day there. Yeah. There's also one in Idaho where it's legal year round. Oh, really? Without a permit, you can just go and jump. There's actually a fatality there. A guy set his parachute on fire as part of a stunt. I pulled that article. That was just a few weeks ago. Was it that recent? Yes, it was in late May. I had the impression it was a couple of years back or whatever. He said his parachute on fire and died. Yes. 73 year old guy. Right. Yeah. Unless it's new. Unless it's but, yeah, he set his parachute on fire with the aim of throwing another parachute out. Right. And it's just not a very smart thing to do. No. His flaming parachute, I think, continued on without him. And I guess his other purse. I think he just came out of his other purse. Never deployed it's on YouTube, which is sad that they have that stuff. There's a lot of Base Jumping and skydiving deaths on YouTube. Yeah, tons of them. Well, you know why? Because they all film each other. Well, yeah, thanks to the GoPro and finally Earth. And that is when you're jumping off, like El Capitan or a cliff or a fjord. Pretty. What? It sounded like the list could have just kept going indefinitely. I do like the word fjord, though. It's a good word. You rarely see an F and a J next to each other. Yeah, that's true. You know, get along historically. All right, do you want to talk about the history? Yeah. I think before we get started, we should say, Chuck, that no one should Base Jump, ever. We certainly aren't saying that you should. We're just talking about base jumping. Well, you should definitely do what we talk about later, which is how to get started in Base Jumping and follow those rules. Get started in Base Jumping, think about Base Jumping and then don't do it. I think it's super cool. I can watch those videos all day long, but not for me. As far as execution, I have to say also, I ran across a video that to me is even scarier than a Base Jumping video, and it was these two dudes. I don't know if they were Ukrainian. They're part of the former Soviet states. I don't remember where they're from. I'm sorry. But they just climb stuff. I've seen it, dude. And they climb the like with their iPhones or look at where we are. Yeah. Like, no ropes, no harnesses, no parachute, no nothing. It makes me want to vomit. I almost fainted. I literally almost fainted watching this video. I've totally seen that, man. They were climbing the world's second tallest building. I can't remember what it was called, but it's in China. And the tops of other skyscrapers are hundreds of feet below them. The cloud line is below them. And they're just standing on this antenna connected to nothing. Yeah. There's no fear going whatsoever. They're not capable of it. You have to be just completely out of your mind. They're broken in some way, shape or form to be able to do that. And not just like I think I'd probably just be like, I just let go because I want the terror to be over one way or another. You know what I mean? And these guys are just like, hey, how's it going? Like giving each other five. Yes. The whole thing just makes me nervous. Have you seen the trailer for the New? They're making a movie about the guy who did the highwire walk between the 2 hours. I did see that before. Mad Max. Yes, which is awesome. Did you like it? I left Mad Max. I was like, I want to go buy all the Mad Max toys now. I want to see all the sequels they're going to make right now. Yes. It was a great movie. Well, you came in wearing the iron face mask. I thought it was interesting. I made it myself. Could you tell out of aluminum foil and rubber bands? Long story short, which is not true, that trailer for the Robert Zemeckis movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt that made me want to vomit when he just he was waiting for it to he didn't hit me like that. Oh, man. It's just a teaser. He just basically, like, walks up to the top and looks and says, in his mind, I want to do this. But he just stands up on the edge. And I can't take that. And it's based on the guy who actually did that in real life. And they made a documentary about it, I think, back in the 70s called man on Wire. Yes. Fantastic. And a dude in the mid 70s who is a high wire artist illegally went up to the top of the World Trade Center and climbed from one tower to the other on a high wire. Yeah. Great documentary. And faith in this movie. I think it's in 3D, isn't it? Or it's going to be. I'm sure. I can't imagine that one, though. In three D. I saw Tintin and 3d is all right. Yeah. I'm not into it. I know what you're saying. Did you see Mad Max and didn't either? I don't see 3D anymore, is what I'm saying. Did you ever see was it Friday 13th, Part Three? Came out in three D. No, that was a good one. That was back when 3D stuck. Yeah. When it was like things look still kind of blue and red at the same time. Yeah. Like now it's supposedly good. I just don't enjoy it. And the cardboard glasses were cutting into the bridge of your nose and you were bleeding on man, we can get sidetracked. Although that wasn't much of a sidetrack because we talked about high wire walking. It's an extreme sport. That's right. Just like base jumping. So we're going to talk about the history of base jumping. Yes. If you talk about the distant history, early 19th century, there were some things going on that is essentially like base jumping. There was a dude named Frederick Rodman Law, and he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge at one point. Yeah. In the Statue of Liberty. Yeah. And the Bankers Trust building on Wall Street. And this is in, like, the yeah. So, I mean, technically he was base jumping, but these were just one off stunts at this point. Yeah, same as in 1975 when Owen Quinn left from the World Trade Center. And there's another guy named Ron Boyle who jumped from the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. So all this is happening, these little one off stunts. And then in 1975, this guy named Carl Banish, there's a documentary about him actually called Sunshine Superman. Did you see the trailer? It looks really good. It does. And I think that is like now that that one's coming in. It's in 2015. Yeah. So he gets this idea, he goes to Yosemite to film some hang gliders. And these hang gliders, there's three dudes on a single hang or glider, I guess you call it. Right. And once they get out over the land, two of them drop off and I think they're flying off of El Capitan, which is like a few thousand feet tall, right? I don't know how tall it is. It's pretty tall. I think it's like 3000ft tall. I mean, I've seen it, but from the bottom. Okay. Very impressive. Yeah. So these two dudes, Rich Picarelli and Brian Johnson, they dropped off, they parachuted into the valley below. And Carl Banish was, like, very interesting. I think we're onto something here, fellas. And so he got Rich Picarelli in 1978. Let's do it, brother. And let's go to El Capitan and jump off of it. Right? Forget the hang glider. Leave that at home. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Apparently when they went scouting the place to see if you could just basically base jump off of it, they lowered Banish over the edge on, like, a rope, and they heard him shout, Eureka. We can jump from here now. Pull me back up, please. Although, from what I gather from this guy, he's probably like, you guys can just go. I'm going to hang out here for a while. Yeah, that's true. So on August 8, 1978, he took this new crew back to that location, and he, I think, was just filming at the time. And one by one they jumped. And if you look at this documentary footage on the trailer of Sunshine Superman, these guys, like, way before the GoPro, the toaster ovens on their head essentially attached to helmets because even back then, they wanted to film stuff. Yeah. Apparently, Carl Baines, for that first jump, he had a number of different cameras going for different angles. And when he was documenting it, he would make people do different takes of walking into frame and stuff like that. He'd be like, okay, get back and do that again. Like a walk again. Yeah. Well, that's why they have all that great old footage, I guess. Thanks to him, sadly, he died. Base jumping. Base jumping. But he was doing it solo, I guess. In 1984, he did a solo jump off a cliff in Norway. And no one saw him die, but they figured that he probably was steered into the cliff that he jumped from, which is called an offheading jump. Right. Which is one of the bigger dangers in base jumping, as we'll see. Oh, sure. Well, that's where he originally I don't think we mentioned that these two guys, michael Pelkie and Brian Schubert, were the first two that he heard of that actually did jump from El Capitan. But they did it with the old school round paratrooper parachutes, and they got slammed into the cliff face again and again and again, breaking bones and foots and legs and things like that. That's another video. There's a woman who Skyed Or, who base jumped, and she went on to an offheading opening. Is that what it's called? I believe it is. And you just see, like, she's getting just directed right into the cliff face again and again. I can't imagine. I mean, it killed her, but I can't imagine how anybody could survive something like that because you're going so fast, and all of that velocity is just being slammed into a cliff face, and then you'll bounce off and float away and then just come back in again. Yeah. You're at the mercy of nature at that point. Right. But that's what happened with those two dudes in the parachute off of El Capitan. Yeah. And Carl Banish was like, I don't think the idea of jumping off of El Capitan with the parachute was wrong. I think their gear was just wrong. Yeah. And that's why Carl Banish is credited as being the father of base jumping, because he applied the techniques that are now the hallmarks of base jumping and the equipment. Yeah. And he was also the guy if you complete all four phases, the B, the A, the S, and the E, then you are assigned a number. And he's the one that started that. But he was based number four, though. He wasn't even number one because he was filming people. I think that's right, because his wife was base three. Right. And so he was a feminist as well. He wasn't, like, good to be in front of you. Yeah. You're a girl. So Base One was Phil Smith from Texas, and as of now, it's hard to get numbers. Then they point out pretty reasonably that a lot of these things happen in the cover of night, and they're not reported necessarily, but as best as we can tell, they're up to, like, base 1800 plus at this point. That's what I saw, too. And that too is those are people who have completed again, all four phases buildings, antennas, spans, and earth. Earth. And originally it wasn't called base, it was called Best. Yeah. It was going to be buildings, earth, span, and tower. Yeah. So they just rearranged his bit. Yeah. Apparently Carl Banish's wife Jean said she liked Best, but Carl liked base particularly because the first definition of the word was a platform on which something stands. Yeah. So it makes sense. And before I knew I've known for a while it was an acronym, but before I knew it was an acronym, I just thought that's what it meant. Like, you go stand on some base and you jump. Oh, yeah. Carl Banish would have been proud. That's right. All right, so let's take a break and then we will talk about some of that gear right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create learn More@ibm.com only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. Stride Career Prep lets students take charge of their education and their future. By combining real world skills training and traditional academics, students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for indemand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K twelve. Compodcast. That's K twelve. Compodcast, and start taking charge of your future today. All right, dude. So if you want a base jump, you just get an old 1960s army parachute. And you go at it. Right? Yes. Add some get a weight vest. Yeah. Scuba diving. Some ankle weights. Pair of sunglasses, maybe. Yeah. Drink a gallon of whiskey. Yeah. And just fall off of the cliff. That's right. No, what you need is the right gear. And what they found out pretty quickly was that something called a Ram air parachute. And these are the ones that you see nowadays. You don't even see the Ram parachutes anymore. I guess you do if you jump from outer space or if you're like a kind of a hipster vintage skydiver. We need to do one on skydiving, I guess. Yeah, I guess we haven't. No, because I was like, this doesn't sound familiar, like we've spoken about it before. So I was like, we're doing base jumping before skydiving. Yeah. I like that. That's the opposite of what you're supposed to do, especially if you're actually base jumping. Well, that is true. So the Ram air parachute is the one that you see a lot now, mostly now, which is the one that is rectangular and they give you a lot more control on where you're going because you want to be able to steer this thing pretty quickly. Right. So you don't slam into the rock. Because that's one of the two dangers, is slamming into the rocks or slamming into whatever the building. Right. The two dangers are slamming into the thing you jumped off of, which is apparently the more frequent danger or other things around, I guess. Right. Or slamming into the ground. Sure. Like your shoot not opening or something like that. Yeah. And I think mostly, though, most injuries occur from slamming into structures and not improper deployment. Right. And the thing about the Ram air parachute is it's this rectangular parachute that allows you to maneuver yourself, guide yourself, increase or decrease your speed. You're much more in control than you are with a round parachute, which basically just slows your acceleration towards Earth. Right. That's right. And with a Ram air parachute, it works so well that when you are base jumping, you're faced with a problem. Because when you're skydiving, you have a lot of time. You're jumping at like, well over 10,000ft, usually. Right. You get to free fall for a while and then, say about 2000ft, you open your chute and your chute can just take all the time in the world to open. Well, ideally, it's pretty directly. Yeah. But it's not like packed and then open. There's a process that does take place over the course of maybe a second, a second and a half. Yeah, I know what you mean. That makes a lot of difference in going from free fall to floating. Right. As far as your body is concerned and as far as changing your velocity and direction. Well, with base jumping, you don't have that amount of time. You need your shoot to open pretty quick. And so when you open a Ram air shoot, all of a sudden it can basically snap your neck. It opens so quickly and jerks you up. Right. And since you have a lot of velocity because you're in freefall when your shoot opens and all of a sudden you're not free falling any longer, you're transferring some of that velocity to the shoot, which can slam you into that cliff side. Yeah. So there's some things that you have to deal with if you're a Base Jumper that a skydiver wouldn't have to deal with. And there's been some clever solutions to those things. Yeah, there's one device called a slider that basically reduces the rate at which those parachute lines spread out. So it's not going to deploy as quickly and snap your neck in half or not your neck, but I'm not sure what would happen. Is it jerky jarred? Are you buying or something? I could tear you clean in half. Okay, but a slider is just like this piece of fabric that slides down the lines and by doing that, it gives you a measure of control over how fast your shoot opens. That's right. You know the little pilot shoots? Yeah. Like, if you've ever seen a skydiver, there's that little shoot that comes out and then that helps deploy the big shoot. Same with funny cars. Do they have a pilot shoot? Really? The good ones, too. So you have a larger pilot shoot if you're a Base Jumper because you talked about velocity. There is some velocity, but not like you're skydiving, so you're actually going a lot slower in most cases unless you're really jumping on something super tall. Right. So you're not going to be at like, terminal velocity, which is what you count on for that shoot to open real fast. So because you're not going as fast, you want a larger pilot shoot so it can gather more air to deploy the real shoot faster. Right. And since you don't have that velocity, you also don't have the same amount of air pressure you would if you were at terminal velocity. So that larger pilot shoot gathers more air even and it balances out the fact that you have less air pressure. Right. So, yeah, it's going to open your shoot faster. And you talked about if you were skydiving, normally if your shoot malfunctions or something not good, but you've got your backup shoot and you have time, which is key to think, well, things aren't going well with my regular shoot. Let me deploy the backup shoot, right. Probably don't even have to make some toast. I'll eat my toast and then I'll deploy my backup shoot and the toaster oven on my head. But a lot of times Space Jumpers don't even have backup shoots because there's just not enough time anyway, right. It's not like they're like, Screw it, man. Although they probably are. They're extreme dudes and ladies, but even if they were like, I don't want to screw it. I really want a backup shoot. They're totally useless. Basically, Josh wants a backup parachute. All right, so let's talk about that shoot and the accessibility. If you've ever seen a Base Jumper jump off with the parachute wadded up in their hand, that is the thing you can do if it's a shorter jump, because you just want to be able to throw that thing out almost right away. Right. Not a lot of free fall going on in that case. No. If it's a little higher than that, they might just pack that pilot shoot, like, in their pocket or something like that, but that leaves their hands free, and then they'll just reach into the pocket and pull out the pilot shoot rather than using a rip cord to deploy it. Yeah. Most of the Base jumping, I think most of the rigs today have, like, a velcro flap type of scene that they use. It's not even a rip cord, necessarily. Got you. Just sort of packed in a pouch, a Velcro pouch, and you just pull the Velcro off. I think so. And just rip that away. Got you. Again. I will never do this. So I'm just going on research alone. Same here. No interest. If you're below 300ft, you might even have to use a static line. And that is when there's a line actually attached, I think, to the thing you're jumping off of. Right. Yeah. And it just immediately opens up. Yeah. It pulls your pilot shoot out. Yeah. And then it disconnects from it, hopefully. Yeah. And that guy, Frederick Rodman Law, who jumped off of the Statue of Liberty, that was a static line jump. Yeah. When you see paratroopers, like, one after the other in a plane, a lot of times those are static line jumps. Yeah. There's a cord that's left behind after they jumped out. That thing just pulled their pilot shoot out. That's right. That's a low altitude jump technique. That's right. I think. Offheading opening. Is that what you were talking about earlier? Yes. That's when you deploy the chute again and you just start going crazy. Yeah. Because, again, especially if you're in freefall, if you have a couple of seconds to go into freefall with no shoot deployed, no resistance other than your body, you can build up a pretty decent amount of velocity. And when your shoot opens, all of a sudden, you transfer that velocity to your shoot, and your shoot can spin you around in another direction, and all of a sudden, you're going back toward the cliff or back toward the building, and you can be in big, big trouble. Yeah. And while you have some control, it's not the kind of control that you're used to, like in a car or something. You can't just be like, oh, let me stop immediately and go in the other direction. Yeah. And even if you are an experienced Base Jumper or Skydiver, it's not like you. Are using the cords on your parachute as often as you are, like, on your car. So it's not necessarily as natural reaction as it is to steer your steering wheel out of the way of an oncoming truck. Sure. So it can be very easy to pull the wrong way or do the wrong thing or not react quite in time. Even though that ram air parachute is giving you more control, you have to think so fast and under such sudden stress that you might not make the right decision. Yeah, well, that's one of the things that Tom ILO says. Think about if it's right for you. He said that it's a good fit or it could be a good fit. If you are intellectually curious, you have good reactions. You respond quickly and correctly without having to think during an emergency. And you're very organized and detail oriented. Like, if you're sloppy, if you're lazy, if you take too much time to suss out an emergency, you're not going to be a good base jumper. Don't even try it. Don't even try it. No. So body positioning is important when you deploy that shoot. And I think the super safe way to Base Jump, if you call it that, would just be to jump off head first in that traditional face down form. Of course, now you see them doing, like, flips and tumbles and joining hands and spinning each other, and those are like the seriously experienced show people. Right. But even when you do jump off and your face toward the earth and your horizontal parallel to the Earth with the chute deploying behind you, you don't want to take necessarily the normal skydiving pose with your arms out and your legs splayed. You want to keep your arms to the side and your legs together and basically turn yourself into a bullet going away from the structure that you just jumped off of. It's called tracking, and it can reduce your chances of an off heading opening. Yeah, that makes sense. You want to get as far away from the thing that you just jumped off of as possible. Exactly. And the best way to do that is to turn your body into a bullet that's being directed in the opposite direction. Yeah. Let me correct something when I said that these people now tumble and flip and do all those things they do, but they still, when they go to deploy, the chute will end up in that traditional position. Right. It's not like they're upside down. They're like, this is a great time to throw out my carriage. There was a pretty cool video that surfaced in the last year or two, I think, of some guys who jumped off the New World Trade Center tower at night. A lot of Base Jumping happens at night for obvious reasons, which seems super scary. So we'll talk about the legalities and the ins and outs of Base Jumping right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo. So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. 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And start taking charge of your future today. All right, so why, my friend, is base jumping a fringe sport? Besides the fact that you could kill yourself? Well, it's kind of a sport of outlaws. That's right. The Grabster wrote this article. And as he puts it, even if the jump itself isn't illegal, gaining access to prime jumping spots often involves trespassing, picking locks, climbing fences, and deceiving security guards. I'm sure that is all part of the rush. Deceiving security guards is a felony offense. What's that from? Or do you just make it up? It's kind of a daisy confused reference. Oh, yeah. Tampering with mailboxes, federal offense. He's just following the offense. And some of the small parts in that movie, I'm pretty convinced we're just regular folks. They weren't actors. Oh, yeah, I'm sure they're just friends of Link Letter who lived in Austin. Yeah, a lot of the adults. Like the convenience store guy he showed up in. I think he's in, boyhood. Yeah, he played the convenience store guy. It's pretty nice. Little call back. Yeah, he's a convenience store dude. So the National Park Service. Obviously, national parks are pretty popular because they have tall things and they don't have many people and they don't have many cops or park rangers. I mean, if you talk about the land mass, you're not going to see a park ranger for days sometimes. Yeah, so the national parks are like, sure, base, jump all you want right now for a little while. Certain parks would allow it with a permit. Yosemite and El Capitan, they let that happen for a few months before they realize it's probably not a good idea to be on the hook. Yeah, well, I mean, the park Service experience with Base Jumping from the start was a bad one. Those two guys who jumped in the 60s had to be rescued and medevac out of there at great cost. Yeah, the National Park Service had to flip that bill. So just from the get go, they were like, yeah, Base Jumping sucks. Please don't do it here. And there was a law already on the books against having a parachute in the national parks, and apparently it was to prevent hunters from resupplying using parachutes. Oh, really? Yeah, it had nothing to do with Base Jumping. Interesting. So, like a supply drop? Yes. So, like no, if you want supplies, you have to go out and then come back. Yeah, I guess so. They're like, I need some more ammo to blow some deer's head off. I want a parachute. So nowadays you're going to get fined a couple of grand or more. You're going to get arrested. You're going to have to pay for any cost of medevacing you out. Yeah. They're going to take your gear. It's an expensive proposition if you get busted in a national park. Base Jumping here. That sounds like such a school. Principal move. Yes. I'm taking your parachute. Your parachute has been confiscated. They put it in the drawer. We can have it back at the end of the semester. Chattering teeth in the right buildings is always illegal. Almost always illegal. I didn't see one single building where it wasn't illegal. I didn't either, but the fact that the article says almost makes me think there might be one. Okay. Or maybe it meant if there's an arrangement. Right. Like, there's a great video of two guys. I think there were Red Bull guys jumping off of the building in Dubai. Yes. Did you see that thing? Yeah, that was nuts, dude. Vince Ruthett and Fred Fugan from 2014. And again, thanks to the GoPro, you can get all of this stuff. Like, the footage is amazing because you always have someone jumping with you, at least one other person with a camera just filming you. And then they have cameras set up for the wide shots. And these dudes flew in a spiral around the building. Yeah, they did some pretty amazing stuff. Yeah, I could watch this stuff all day. It's amazing. Again, not interested in doing it. I would skydive, though. I'm going to do that at some point. That seems less risky. It is much less risky. Yeah. And when you go, they sit you through a class, and it's just much more structured and formalized. One of the things about Base Jumping is that normally if you're a Base Jumper, you're doing it after you've already become an experienced skydiver, and you're probably being taken under the wing of an experienced Base Jumper, ideally. Whereas with skydiving, it's like, this is a business. Come sit down in this airplane hangar and watch this video, and I'm going to teach you exactly what you need to know we're going to go up, and we've already done it 50 times today. Yeah, it's like for a tandem jump, it's like if you've got $75 and find a way, then you can jump out of a plane this afternoon. Exactly. They're still very scary. Yes. Have you ever done that? I did a tandem jump. Yeah. It's very scary, but I just can't imagine a base jump. The one thing I worry about with the tandem jump is I would just want the person to shut up behind me that's attached to me. Yes. I would want to experience it just myself and not have someone in my ear going like, bro, check it out. It's just awesome. I think if that happens, the skydiving company gives you another free one if you're like. The guy was saying bro in my ear. I demand another jump. That's uninterrupted. See, I figured all of them did that. Like, you're having fun, man? In this way? I don't know. I mean, not that I know of, because I would have felt bad saying, I'm very excited, so please keep it down. Can you shut up? I'm experiencing the majesty of this experience. Well, I just don't want to be reminded that someone is attached to my butt. Dude. There's a video of a woman who is doing a tandem jump. First, to start off with, she's holding onto the sides of the plane and is pushing back on the guy who's trying to push her out. She's fighting the jump. He has to grab her wrists and pull them in and then push her out. Is that legal? I wouldn't think so. And then secondly, she's obviously not she's not wearing a suit. She's just wearing her street clothes. So she's got, like, her arms in the harness. Not hooked into the harness, just her arms are. And almost immediately, she starts to slide out. So she's doubled up with her legs and her arms, like, at her face, her feet sticking into the air. Is this in Turkey? Just hanging out? I don't know where it was, but it didn't appear to be in turkey or Dollywood. But Dolly would never allow something like that in her part, and he'd be offended. And she survived. They lived, but it's just like the pilot shoots, just hanging out at first. Wow. You're like, what is going to happen? It is so scary. And to start, the woman obviously didn't want to do this. She gets forced out of the plane and then almost slides out of the harness. Well, it sounds like she was doing her taxes and someone abducted her. Kind of look that way, actually. Send me that video. Yeah. Very interesting. And it's not a movie. You sure? It didn't look like a movie. I'm like, Wait, that's Kathleen O'Hara. That's Romancing the stone. That's Kathleen Turner. I know, and I think it's Catherine OERA. It made me think of Romancing this time. Yeah. I hear you, Catherine. O'Hara. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. I don't know why I thought of her. She just seems like someone who'd be down with that. She was the mom in Home Alone, among many other things. Right? That's right. That's Catherine O'Hare. Right. Okay. She's an SCTV vet. I think so. Jerry just nodded, so at least she knows what SCTV is. It says guarding your spots. What Base Jumpers don't want to do is mess it up for other Base Jumpers. So they say the worst thing you can do is either get hurt or killed, because that's going to be a dead giveaway, literally. Or just being a jerk, getting arrested, drawing attention to this otherwise cool spot to Base Jump. Right. It's a very secretive thing. Yeah, it's among the code. I couldn't find what it referenced, but apparently there was a Base Jumper in Atlanta who got caught trying to jump off of a building. I look for that, too. And some other Base Jumpers, like, went to his house and beat them up. Like bringing heat onto their sport. Locals only. Yeah. Well, the new Point break is our base jumpers. Why can't Hollywood come up with a brand new concept? Like, even if all of the good ideas have been used before, right? Yeah. And everything is still a category, like a spy movie, a bank robber movie, a romantic comedy. Like, all of these things are still just categories. There's still room for creativity still, that you don't have to go, what movie is big in the 80s? Let's remake it. Except worse. It drives me crazy, man. I've not seen one remake, with the exception of Bad Max that was worthwhile. Well, that wasn't a remake at all. Was it supposed to be like a prequel or something like that? No, I guess you would call it a reboot. It's just like a reboot. Here's a new version of a character that's already been established, but it's not like canon, as they say. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, but do you agree? Oh, of course. Okay. Can you think of one thing that was already done from the 80s? Like, a good movie from the was Redone recently, or even added to? That was better. That was even good. I'd have to look. I mean, there's probably a couple, but not many. Yeah, it always seems like a bad idea. For sure. Let's remake Ghostbusters. Or just let Ghostbusters exist as great. I'm reserving judgment on that one. Well, it may be good. They've got a great director. And who is it? I think it's Paul Feig. He directed Bridesmaids, but he did a lot of the Freaks and Geeks back in the day. Okay. He's a very smart and funny guy. For some reason. I thought you were talking about Mike Figis, and I'm like, that'd be very cute. Can I read a little more about how to get started from this guy Tommylo I think this was in. Was this an Apex from the Apex website? Yeah, perhaps. So after checking yourself to see if you're a good fit, like I said, if you have good reaction time and handle emergencies well and all that good stuff, then make the decision to do so. And he said, in my short time in the sport, I've seen two life flight helicopters from the outside, two more from the inside, inside the back of a police car, several broken noses, and a funeral. I've also spent three weeks in intensive care and 18 hours in neurosurgery. Wow. So his contention is if you Base Jump, like, hundreds of times, like most of those people do, you will get hurt at some point. And just know that getting into it. People do die. Yeah. From what I saw, 180 people have died since 1981. But that was as of February 2012. And by the way, I think we should say we're making a lot of jokes about how you can die base Jumping. It's obviously super tragic when someone dies doing anything. Yeah. So I don't want to make it like we're making light of that kind of thing. Yeah. I didn't think we were, were we? No, I just wanted to make sure I'm seeing that kind of thing. Well, sure, yeah. Someone dies is tragedy, especially when they die young. Yeah. Which most space jumpers except for the 73 year old. Right. Who lit his parachute on fire. And again, I giggled. Not funny. This is like an oraboros. I know. I think I get uncomfortable about death and and I make I laugh. Man, have you ever seen that one, King of the Hill, where Khan is giving that eulogy at Buckley's funeral? And he talks about the man who's being chased by a tiger, and the tiger chases them off the cliff, and the man starts to fall, but he stops, and he grabs himself, and he holds on by this root, and it turns out it's a strawberry plant. And he says that he knows at that moment that he is going to die. And he reaches up and he plucks a strawberry from the strawberry plant and eats it. And it's the sweetest strawberry he's ever had. Nice. It's a great scene. They animated it in this Chinese illustration. Oh, wow. It's really great. I remember when he first met Khan, when Khan said he was lay ocean. He's like, you're from the ocean. Right. Good stuff. So where were we? I think five or six have died this year, so more than 180. And Graham Hunt, Dean Potter is, like, one of the biggest, extreme dudes out there. And he passed away yosemite recently. Really? Yeah. He was doing the wingsuit flying, so that's pretty nuts in and of itself. It's amazing. You know, I was looking at some of that stuff you sent me. I was looking at some wingsuit stuff, and I thought, like, why would they not put wingsuits in the top of tall buildings like in office towers, just like you have life vests on a boat, I think because it takes a lot of experience to successfully fly in a wingsuit and deploy your parachute. The thing is, though, like, why not just put parachutes? Yeah, why not? It just seems like a good idea, I would guess. Wingsuits are a lot cheaper. Even if it's a terrible cruddy wingsuit, it's still worth the shot. Well, have you seen some of those videos, the wingsuit flying? It's crazy. It's amazing. Like, humans are flying at this point. There's one I saw, I don't remember if you send it to me or I stumbled across it, but they had a camera set up in, like, this grassy meadow, and this guy comes and flies right overhead. It looks like he's like 20ft off the ground. Yeah. And the grass moves like an airplane just flew over it. It just ripples. It's unbelievable. The guy was going fast. That started in the late ninety s. The modern wingsuit was developed by a guy or squirrel suit because they look they're like little flying squirrels, basically. Patrick de Gayardon in France. He died at 38 from base jumping. Are you guys seeing a pattern here? Yeah, like a lot of base jumpers died. Base Jumping died young. That was based on in an earlier design by this guy, this base pioneer John Carter that they called the Birdman, and he was a Vietnam veteran in the 70s. He was creating these wingsuits that didn't work nearly as well, but he was still jumping off of stuff. Probably work good enough to jump out of an office tower if it's on fire. He died, too, but I don't think based jumping, I think he died, like, in a plane crash. Banana peel probably going to skydive. But I mean, you can fly. I think the record I don't know if it still stands, is like close to 5 miles of flight in a wingsuit. Well, I believe it in four or five minutes. Wow. It's pretty amazing. That's like a mile a minute. That's 60 miles an hour. So the final few things you should think about make sure that you are always prepared to not do anything that doesn't feel right and not be afraid to back down. That's a big one. It's to be able to say, no, this isn't good because I don't want to die. I don't want to base Jump successfully is the goal. Right. And this one is horrifying. Tell your family and write a sealed letter to your friends and family in the event that you die, explaining exactly why you have decided to take up Base Jumping and what you get out of it and why you're willing to risk death. Give sealed copies to your family and your basement, or to open in the event of death. Right. And then make at least 200 skydives as his. And then sort of mimic Base Jumping as much as you can. Like, wait as long as you can to open, do a lot of tracking. We call it max tracking. Find a mentor, get a good base rig, and he suggests spending the money and taking an actual class from a manufacturer they have called First Jump Course Classes. And he said, Even if you have a mentor, even if you've done it a hundred times, just spend the money and make sure you know how to do the rigs and everything correctly. Why is words Ielo? It's danny ILO, base jumping expert. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about Base Jumping, type those words in the search bar athouseoffworks.com look up Paul Iello. Yes. And Paul Feig and Mike Figs. Yeah. And then don't. Base jump. Yeah. Just stay at home and watch Base Jumping videos. You can do that all day long. And since I said search bar, I think somewhere in there it's time for listener mail. I don't think anyone's ever died watching a Base Jumping video, have they? You could, yeah, but it's probably because you've just eaten seven or \u00a38 of Taco Bell, you know what I mean? That's it for me. Yeah. All right. I'm going to call this New Zealand gang the Mongrel Mob. Hey, guys. I'm from Wellington. I thought I'd share some light on one of New Zealand's more prominent gangs, the Mongrel Mob. They began when a group of mainly European youths from Wellington and Hawks Bay in. The mob wears red regalia, often fusing the cultural tattoo work of the Maori people. I feel like we talked about them in the Maori episode. We may have the Mongrel mob. Either. That is it a motorcycle gang? I don't know. I'm sure some of them have motorcycles, so I think we did talk about them in the Maori episode. I think they're a Vespa gang. They're vest the top. There's one driving and then one riding side saddle and back. Yes. As well as portraits of bulldogs with their tattoos and occasionally Nazi symbols that are synonymous with the gangs, such as swastikas and the slanted SS symbol yeah. That are said to be included to provide a contradiction with the British symbol of the bulldog. I don't know. Makes sense. Like most gangs, a Mongrel mob is involved in organized crime and thus has been associated with an aggressive and feared stereotype of how these people live their lives. You just said stereotype like a New Zealander. Did I? Yeah, you went stereotype weird. Maybe it's how he spelled it. No. Stereotype. What I think is overlooked, though, guys, is the communal family roles that gangs or chapters inherit because of the need of an individual. And we did talk about that some. I don't know how you got that as overlooked, buddy. He's a nice fellow, at least in some parts of New Zealand. The mob is seen as an ingrained part of the community in a source of solidarity. And I've thrown a link to a Vice article below about a photographer who spent eight years with the mob documenting and taking portraits, amazing portraits of some of his members. And Vice is awesome, so we'll always book them. So just look up portraits of New Zealand's mightymongrel mob from Vice.com. It's pretty neat. And he said, thanks, guys, love your work. You've killed a lot of potential silence over the years. Professional Silence killers. Band name killer with their bare hands. Regards from the long white cloud. I guess that's New Zealand stereotype. Sam Vanderkolk. Great name. Yeah, excellent name. Throw a little Dutchiness in there. Great name. Dutch Tilt Vander Colk. Thanks a lot, Sam. Also, somebody, I don't know who it was, so I apologize to you if you're listening tweeted to us an article that I have yet to read but looks awesome. It's about Disney gangs. What? Yeah, I will send it to you. Shut up. No, serious. I was looking over it and I'm like, is this just like a hoax? Does that mean gangs that hang out in Disney World and rough people up? Or gangs that wear Mickey Mouse costumes. I don't think they rough people up. They don't wear Mickey Mouse costumes, but they wear like they'll have like, Disney gang stuff tattooed on them. They wear like, Disney biker jackets with their gang symbols, have Mickey Mouse involved, and they're like Disney gang, disney centered gang. So you're talking about Holly from stuff you missed in history class. If she isn't a member, then she at least knows a member. There's no way she doesn't or she just didn't know about it yet. There's no way she's too into Disney. Agreed. So if you want to get in touch with us to let us know about a gang in your area or a Base Jump that you did or whatever, you can tweet to us at Syscap. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffysheno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushoreknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it because we're pet moms too. We make natural, high quality pet foods that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
c3898d40-5460-11e8-b38c-db04383e5106 | SYSK Selects: How Icebergs Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-icebergs-work | Icebergs: floating chunks of ice. True, but whoa there. Scientists are learning that there's a lot more to icebergs. Appropriately enough, we've only come to understand the tip of the iceberg and recent research shows there's plenty more to uncover. | Icebergs: floating chunks of ice. True, but whoa there. Scientists are learning that there's a lot more to icebergs. Appropriately enough, we've only come to understand the tip of the iceberg and recent research shows there's plenty more to uncover. | Sat, 31 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=243, tm_isdst=0) | 33775782 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, friends. You know, dating is a journey with ups and downs, for sure, but all the effort is worth it when you meet someone special, right? 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And for this week's SYSK select it's how icebergs work. It's a good straight ahead Stuff You Should Know, up based on a grabster article, so you know it's quality. At any rate, kickback, enjoy. Maybe put on a sweater, little scarf, get yourself some hot cocoa, maybe a little of those marshmallows. Maybe treat yourself and get the colored marshmallows that are like in the shape of stars and moons and stuff that might actually just be Lucky Charms I'm thinking of. At any rate, enjoy this episode. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. How's it going, everybody? It's a joyous day, Josh. Oh, yeah? How so? I don't know. It just has been a joyous day, don't you think? I'm very glad you think it's been a joyous day. What do you think? You haven't had a computer, so you don't care. I know my laptop has been apparently too full of data to operate, whatever that means. Yeah, he stuffed it up with 250 gigs of shady stuff. That's right. Yeah. It's called research. I guess so. Every single bit of that was Hard facts, buddy. And songs, cheapo videos. Well, there you go. Videos tend to stop stuff up. Yeah, especially high resins. Yeah, that's probably what it was. I would imagine so. On your work computer, no less. Well, what am I going to do? Carry on to computers? Why are we talking about this? I don't know. You started it. Let's hear the intro, Chuck. Yes, I'm quite sure that you'll think I'm kind of stupid for mentioning probably the most famous ship ever to be sunk by an iceberg, but humor me. Of course, we all know the wreck of the William Carson, which in 1977 went down off the coast of the Labrador. It had a number of cars on board. But more importantly, 109 souls. Right. Which is what they call you in your office to see. Yeah. Like, 109 souls lost. I never really have heard that or paid attention. Really? Yes, really. I thought they would say lives lost. They say souls. They say souls lost. Or they used to, old timey wise. Got you before Kennedy and the separation of church and state, I guess, right? Yeah, I guess now they call them lives before they were souls. All souls lost. That's sad. Yeah, it makes it even sadder. It's like the saints crying, right, under certain circumstances. But luckily, 109 sold were not lost. Zero sold were lost on the William Carson, as everybody knows. The cars went down, though, which is a tragedy for the insurance companies covering those cars. But as I said, every school child knows the story of the William Carson. Did you know that there were other ships that have hit icebergs? I was not aware of any. It's true. The lady of the Lake. Okay. Yeah, I didn't know about that one. Went down in the Grand Banks. Didn't make a movie about that. No. You're thinking of excalibur. Okay. The lady of the Lake went down on the Grand Banks on its way to Quebec with 70 people on board. 70 souls. 70 souls. The Ssidtoftoft, okay. Yeah. Off the coast of Greenland in 1959 on her maiden voyage. Can you believe this? That makes it so much worse that it's a maiden voyage. 95 people dead, all because of icebergs. I mean, there's been other ships that have hit icebergs, but all because a chunk of floating ice took out an entire ship. Souls and souls were lost. Yeah. You know, we have a young fan named Shelley Stein right now that is about to throw her ipod through a window. Is that the person who always wants to hear about that other ship Syncing? Yeah, she's been begging for, like, two years leading up to the anniversary. That's right. Anyway, what's crazy is that all of these ships were lost. As a matter of fact, between 1882 and 18, 9014 passenger liners went down in a place called Iceberg Alley. But it was only the last 25 years that we started tracking icebergs. What's even more amazing, though, is that we have learned a tremendous amount in those 25 years, and we're still learning. And we will dispense with the learning forth with that's. Right. This is interesting. Was this a grab, sir? Yeah. Well, he puts together a nice article, didn't he? He does. He knows what he's doing. He's a professional. I never feel bad about his head with his do you feel bad about some of them? Yeah. Like the ones I write. Sure, the ones you write. They're very adventurous. They were for the Adventure Channel, right? Yeah, at one point. So, Chuck, I think people there sitting at home thinking right now, like they're talking about icebergs and it's just a chunk of floating ice. And you're absolutely right. It is just a chunk of floating ice. Not just a chunk. There's so much more to it. Sure. For example, iceberg. Saltwater? No. Freshwater? Yes. Why not? Well, I learned virtually everything I've ever known about icebergs within the past 48 hours, by the way. It is ice, but it is not sea ice or pack ice. Like when you see Deadliest Catch and they're motoring through that sea ice. Those aren't little chunks of iceberg. No, that's saltwater. Right. That's frozen seawater. Frozen sea water. An iceberg is a piece of a glacier that has busted off or calved. Calved? Calved. Like having a calf. Like giving birth to a calf. So it's calving. Calving, yeah. Man, I had it until you threw me off. Well, I thought it would be calving. Yeah. Away from a glacier. I wonder how many times we just said calving and a glacier. Let's talk about glaciers for a second. Glaciers are packed snow, basically. Well, yeah, but, I mean, they're a little more interesting than that. Well, yeah. That's the base route, though, right. In certain latitudes, it never gets warm enough for snow to fully melt all the way in the summertime. Sure. So what you have is an accumulation of that snow that builds up over and over again over the centuries, over the eons as old as 10,000 years old, sometimes. Right. And that's a glacier. But glaciers are also additionally interesting in that they become so heavy that they over this freeze and thaw cycle and the accumulation of layers that all of the air bubbles are pressed out of them. So glaciers are blue. It's the color of frozen water with no air in it. And they also move under the force of their own weight. They move downhill towards sea level because sea level is as downhill as it gets until you hit the sea. That's right. So because of this, they are this ultra dense form of ice. Yeah. So it slips down, floats out into the sea. Tidal motions eventually will cause little cracks and fissures, and then a piece of the glacier will break off, and boom, there's your iceberg. That's an iceberg. It's a freshwater it's a piece of a glacier. Yes. Freshwater glacier chunks. Right. And it's freshwater because it's made of snow, not seawater. And when you said that it floats out into the sea, that's called an ice shelf. And up north and northern latitudes, the biggest ice shelves are found on the western coast of Greenland. Those are arctic or northern icebergs that are formed up there off of those glaciers down south in Antarctica, where there are penguins. But it's not the only place there's penguins. I want to make sure everybody knows. I know. And no polar bears. No. Only a fool would say that. Yes, pretty much. The continent of Antarctica is ringed with ice shelves. Yeah. And there's a lot of open sea, so the icebergs can get really big. Yes, they tend to keep it extending. Extending. But then, like you said, they break off and then you have an iceberg. You want to talk about ice? Yeah. This is fascinating. Like, I went over this again and again and again until I finally got it, and I feel like I got it. It's so easy, though. I was making a lot of it. Ice, as we all know, is the solid phase of water. Liquid. Solid. Gas ice is a solid phase. 32 degrees Fahrenheit for fresh water. Celsius. Yes. Salt water is going to need to be a little bit colder because there are basically salt molecules getting in the way of the ice forming. Well, they move faster, I believe, than water molecules, and it takes a lower temperature to slow them down. And also it's greater density, if you're talking saltwater. Right. Which is important. Very important. But ice also is peculiar, meaning unique, in that it's the only solid phase of any substance, I believe, that is less dense than the liquid phase. So ice is less dense than water, and then sea water is denser than fresh water. Well, and it's easy to remember that ice is less dense because when you put a little ice cube in your little chardonnay this summer, if you're a redneck, it'll float. Yeah, because there's little ice forms in a crystalline shape, so that leaves area for gaps, I guess. And so what is the air in there? Yeah, I'm sure there's areas where it's just less dense. It's less dense. Basically, if you take water and freeze it, you can think of it as spreading out. Sure. So it gets bigger. It has a larger volume, but it'll weigh the same as that lesser amount of water. Right. And when you put something, say, ice in water, it's buoyant in that the amount of water it displaces has to equal the weight of the ice that's displacing it. Yeah, but since there's more ice than an equal weight of water, there's some left over that floats. And that is what we call the tip of the iceberg. No wonder you get confused. Yes. The tip of the iceberg. That is the part that sticks out. And it's about depending on the iceberg, about one 6th to one 9th. And I'm sure everyone has seen those awesome pictures on the interwebs of the top of the water and under the water of the iceberg. It's pretty cool, right? You seen those? I have. Very nice. And the reason there's variation between how much iceberg is showing is because of the variation in the concentration of salt and seawater. Sure. Any particular part of seawater. And also some icebergs are denser than others, as Morris said. Just like people. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned earlier the glacial ice is blue. That is true. During different melting and freezing cycles, though they will turn white because the air gets trapped in there. And then sometimes these really old icebergs that have formed at the bottom of these thick Antarctic ice shelves that have been around for thousands of years might actually have a greenish hue because it's just soaked up organic matter under there over the years. Right. Which is kind of a dirty yellow brown. But icebergs have the tendency to roll over without warning, which is one reason why you wouldn't want to camp on an iceberg. No, they're dangerous to be around. They are. And actually, there was one that floated down to New Zealand, and some helicopter charters were selling flights to go check them out, and one of them landed on the iceberg, and they realized pretty quickly they shouldn't do that anymore. But did they get in trouble? Did it? No, they made it out okay. But when they got back and told people, I'm sure some scientists like, wait, what did you just do? Right? Yeah. Don't ever do that again. TC. But the iceberg will roll over, and so you've got the green part up with the light reflecting up through the blue part, and you get this brilliant emerald green. And that's some old ice right there. Bubbly yeah, it is. Bobby yes. Bubbly. I've never said that before. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. 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So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. The lifecycle of an iceberg is pretty interesting, too. We mentioned they can be as old as 10,000 years before they ever reach the ocean. And this is like centuries of compression. So that's why it's so dense, that's why it's blue. And then once it calves off, though, and from the glacier, you got about three to six years on average. Right. If you're an iceberg, like, say it's up in Iceberg Alley and never strays below the 48th parallel, which is apparently where the water starts to get a lot warmer. 40th parallel goes for Americans through the tip of Minnesota and the upper Peninsula of Michigan. People below that are like, it's still pretty cold. Yeah, I imagine so. Ones that stay up there and never come back down can float around for like 50 years yes. And just kind of melt away slowly and quietly. Right. Ones that make it further south, like one made it to Bermuda once, which I'm sure was quite a surprise. Sure. Those go away fairly quickly. Yeah. And I enjoyed this one account of this expedition. What was the guy's name dr. Gregory Stone witnessed and wrote about in his book Ice Island, which I believe the largest ones are called Ice Island sometimes. Is that right? His quote is in this iceberg basically became destabilized and it sounds like it exploded. Yes. Like right in front of his face. Yeah. He said that there was an ice debris field across 2 miles. Yeah. And he said it was like shards of crystal shattering. Right. But if you think about it, that's what happens when you put an ice cube in water. Yeah. You hear that noise. Right. It's called thermal shock. Yeah. It's pretty cool. And it's also because ice is less dense than water, as it's liquefying, it shrinks. Because think about it, it's contracting. Yeah. And it's pulling apart the outer warmer layer from the inner colder layer, and this cracks form and the ice cube essentially explodes. It sounds like that's the same thing that happened yes. When you pour that twelve year old Scotch on top of your single cube of ice, if you're into that. I don't know if you should be doing that, but okay. I'm not a neat guy. I like it a little cold. Okay. And I'm not so hardcore with the single malt. So to remove that bite just a bit is good for me. So you don't like, take it neat through your nose? No. Is that the way to do it? Yeah. You drink it with ice through your mouth. Yeah, I know. Scotch pure. Scoff at me, but scoff away, whatever, just do what you like. Exactly. That's very supportive. I meant you as like, people in general. Okay, so that wasn't supportive. Let's talk about some factoids. And this is to me, the fact of the show is that there are actually six official classifications for their size. And the first two, it sounds like they were having a lot to drink when they had the naming party. Right. They sobered up. Sobered up a bit. Because the smallest ones about the size of a car, maybe a little smaller, called growlers. And then the next one maybe about the size of your house. Is called a burgie bit. I put the emphasis on bit, like a burgie bit. A burgie bit. Either way, it's pretty cute. It is very cute. And then they got, I guess, sobered up or got bored or ran out of whiskey. And then they said, all right, then. The next ones are small, medium, large and very large, which is really boring compared to burgie bit. It is. But the very large ones are kind of interesting and that they just keep going and going. The largest one ever recorded is the B 15 iceberg. Yeah. Broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf down in Antarctica. Apparently it was about the size of Jamaica. Yeah. I think it's broken apart into smaller pieces since. But I think the original area was about 6800 sq. Mi. That's a big chunk of ice. Yeah, that's the upper limit. Like, it can just be as big as they're going to get. There's no cap or anything like that to call it super extra Large, but Very Large. You have to be about 24 stories tall and a little longer than two football fields. 670ft to be classified as very large. Yeah. That's big, man, if you think about that. Yeah, it's huge. I'm sorry? It's very large. It's huge. Huge. The other two classifications the icebergs can fall in are equally boring as the last four size names. They really could have done better than this, if you ask me. But the two shape classifications are Tabular and Nontabular. And Tabular is basically just like a well, it looks like a table, like a tab tablet, a writing tablet on the back. And it's like tall with steep sides, and a flat top is like a floating plateau. And those tend to come off of the ice sheets down in the Antarctic, I believe. Yeah. I think they have to have a width five times greater than their height to be Tabular and then Non. Tabular have, I think, five different classifications. You got blocky. Okay. Flat top, steep sides. They sound like Dick Tracy characters. They do. Wedged flat with a steep surface on one side and a gradual slope on another. So it's like the high right haircut. Yeah. The gumby. The gumby. The dome, which is round and smooth pinnacle, which means it has at least one big tall spiral sticking up. And then the ones that deteriorate to where they form a big canyon. And it looks like two different icebergs, but it's really connected underneath. Those are dry docks, so that means they have two tips sticking out, but they're connected underwater. It's like mind blowing. It's pretty mind blowing. It was pretty neat, at the very least. Yeah. So we've got northern icebergs, southern icebergs, and there's plenty of icebergs, like elsewhere, but for the most part, northern icebergs, like we said, form off the western coast of Greenland, because Greenland, apparently I read this, that Greenland and Antarctica are the only place where there's ice sheets. Oh, really? Glacial. True. Glacial sheets. Glacial sheets. Boy, that's a tough one. That was. It surprised me, too. I wasn't expecting that. And in Greenland, there's about 20 glaciers that cap the majority of the icebergs. Yeah. That was, I thought, pretty cool. I thought it was cool, too. Roughly 40,000 medium to large cav from Greenland glaciers each year. Is that right? And they are about 10% as strong as concrete, which I thought sounded not super strong, but apparently that's like way harder than your freezer ice. Oh, yeah. Like this ice is different than the ice you put in your Scotch. Right. Which is why when icebergs run into one another, it tends to break it up into smaller icebergs. Yeah. They're very much subject to wave motion storms, other icebergs land, when they run into things, like they break up. And it's one of the things that has a big delete effect on their lifespan, but it's part of the iceberg lifecycle. Are we still going to delete? Yeah. Okay, good. They are pretty slow. But to give you an idea, like, a fast moving iceberg goes about 2.2. That's Holland. Oh, I'm glad you bring this up, because that raises a very important point, because we see the tip of the iceberg and because we're so anthropocentric sure. We assume that wind drives icebergs. You'd be dead wrong in assuming that since most of the iceberg is underwater, it's currents that drive iceberg. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. And so that's how icebergs can be trapped, like in the Antarctic, because they're trapped in that current, or up north in the Labrador Current, they kind of stay trapped up there, but it also makes them subject to wave motion currents from other far, far off storms. Yeah. And I guess get hung up on things underwater. Yes. As well. It's another good point, is they apparently strike the bottom of land a lot. Yeah. And they can wreck the sea floor, can't they? Yeah. But if you think about it, like, there's plenty of parts of North America where glacial movement carved geological features out of the land, the icebergs do the same thing. When they're dragged along by the current and say, one's 1000ft tall underwater and it hits a patch of sea that's less than 1000ft, it's going to strike hard. New York City and fast. Go to Central Park and look at the rocks there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They got all those little grooves cut out. That's ice, baby. No, that was not nice. The ecology. This was sort of surprising to me because I just figured they're just floating along, maybe they melt a little bit. What's the big whoop? But I didn't really consider the fact that it's melting this glacial freshwater, a lot of it at times, depending on the size of the iceberg all around in the sea water. And that's got to have some sort of ecological effect. Yeah. I couldn't find anything anywhere that said, like, there's a lot of life that's adapted to living in freshwater, even though it's home in seawater and they live around icebergs. I couldn't find anything like that. But apparently it has little effect on these animals because icebergs are basically like floating, time release nutrient capsules. Yeah, it's, like, teeming with life around it. So they must love it, these little krill and plankton. It's, like, a lot of small stuff, generally. Well, there's a definite what's that chain called? Food chain that iceberg support. They bring a lot of iron rich nutrients from the land sure. As a gift to the sea. And as they melt, they slowly release this stuff. This supports algae, right? So there's a lot of algae that grows on there. Krill, these little tiny shrimp like things, eat the algae, and then all these other animals eat the krill, and then the birds prey on the other fish that are eating the krill. So this whole food chain develops around this iceberg? Yeah, it's pretty cool. But even something that I think they've only recently begun to figure out is that icebergs are a sign of climate change. Like, everybody's worried about all the icebergs melting and the sea levels rising, and for good reason. But they're also figuring out that they also aid in carbon sequestration in the ocean. That makes sense. So this algae and all this stuff, as they're eating this iron, there's a transfer of carbon from the land to this life that eventually will die, fall down to the bottom of the sea, and keep the carbon trapped with it. So algae that wouldn't be there is soaking up carbon and then being eaten and passed along in this undersea food chain. And they found that the carbon absorption around an iceberg is twice what it is elsewhere, because this algae wouldn't be there if it weren't for the iceberg. Wow. So it's soaking up the CO2. That's crazy. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. 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IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. They also taketh away what icebergs giveth and not just boats and chips like the Titanic. There. I said it okay. They can actually like I said, they can clog up shipping lanes. In the case of B 15, I think it actually had a pretty deleterious effect on emperor penguins. Yeah. In March of the penguins. What happens in that sad movie? I guess. What, do they have to walk around it? Yeah, they really have a tight schedule when they hit an iceberg that's taller than them. Penguins don't fly, remember, and is really wide. They have to go around it. Boy, they should learn to fly. Yes. That would just solve a lot of problems. I really would. So, yeah, it can have negative effects on the little penguins, the cute little penguins. And it can rake the sea floor and just destroy it, basically over the course of many years. Yes. No good. Another cool thing. Okay. And I don't know, I couldn't find if they're actually moving on this, but the United States military called up the Ran Corporation and said, hey, boy, these things are huge chunks of awesome drinking water. Totally safe to drink because it's like from the water boy. Yeah, like a little glacier. Oh, really? I never saw that all the way through. That's pretty good. They called the Rain Corporation and said, hey, can we study these things? And how viable is it to I know it sounds crazy, but how viable is it to get one of these icebergs over here and provide fresh drinking water for people who need it? Right. And it sounds like it's not the most ridiculous idea in the world. Their study said that a system allowing a 10% yield could provide water for 500 million people at a cost of $8 per 1000 m\u00b3, which is not too bad. I mean, it's way more expensive than it should be. I think we pay for water now. Right, but our water is artificially cheap. Yeah. So as water becomes more expensive, if there's any icebergs left, we may want to go do that. And they say, I guess they just nudge it through the water closer and closer. And this is where it gets a little hanky. It says in the article, using massive insulating sheets to slow the melting. I don't know what that looks like, but it looks like my Lara. Like you used to reflect the sun on your real car. That's what they would use. Sure, that's all it'll take. Like those sun blankets or whatever. Yeah, just something to reflect the radiation. Well, it's also moving into. Warmer water, though. It's not going to melt it from below. Yeah, it will melt it from below, for sure. But I mean, protect what you can, I guess. I guess if you're harvesting icebergs, you're right. They're not the only ones looking at this. I ran across an MIT proposal of building a pipeline from Alaska where there's plenty of glaciers that western US. Makes sense. But the author concluded it's like $487,000,000,000 to build the pipeline, keep it going, and that just wouldn't be worth it in canals, too. Another group studied that and suggested a canal. Well, in the United States have exactly hurting for water. It'd be nice if they did some of these studies and, like, pushed it to where they don't have fresh water right now at all. Right. You know, it's been a little money for them, like life straws. Well, I guess we already went over. Well, iceberg alley is actually a little more interesting. They started studying it. They formed the international ice Patrol way later than they should have, I guess, but they probably didn't have the equipment they needed back in the day to do what they do now. The coast Guard, us. Coast Guard administers it, and they warn ships. They kind of run it through their little program and say, we think this is where it's headed. This is how big it is. If you're in this area, you might want to watch out for this guy floating your way. Well, they basically say, like, there's ice up here. Don't go above these coordinates. It's called the limit of all known ice. Wow. And the coast guard also does some other stuff for the I should say the ice patrol. They do other things like bomb icebergs. Yeah. Did you find out more about that? No, I looked it up on YouTube because I was like, surely somebody's video could somebody dropping a bomb on an iceberg. I couldn't find anything. Plenty of calving stuff. Oh, yeah. And they also spray paint them with very bright paint, which it seems wrong to me. Just so you can see them. Yeah, that's like tagging like a new car or something. Yeah, but a beautiful new car made by nature. Yeah, that was a good good analogy. Or putting, like, radio transmitters on them. It makes sense. But then when they start to break up, it's like, well, there's a little chunk that has the radio transmitter 3ft big. Right? Yeah. So I got nothing else. I don't either. I've got something else. Right. What you got? So I became interested in the idea of this article mentions a nautical mile. Sure. Why is there a nautical mile in a mile? And I found out why. So a nautical mile is 1.5 miles. And the reason why is because a nautical mile, when going around the equator, takes into account the curvature of the Earth. A regular mile or a statute mile is what it's called. Go from one point on the map to another through a straight line, which means that it's not taking into account the curvature of the Earth, which means that the nautical mile is more accurate and thus a little longer than the regular mile. Interesting. From minute to minute along a degree. So a mile is really not a mile is what you're saying on land. No, no, it's not. Because it's like if you take the Earth, cut it in half of the equator and turn it over, you've got the two halves and you're looking in the molten center and you divide it into 360 degrees, divide those degrees into minutes and then measure a minute to a minute. If you do a straight line, it's not as accurate. If you do the curved line, it will be accurate and the kilometer is just way out there. In 1791, the French Academy of Sciences said, okay, we're going to designate a kilometers the distance from the North Pole to the equator through Paris. Yeah, sure. Divided by 10,000. Pretty clever. So there you have it, nautical miles. I love it. Thanks, man. I really went all out on this. I think so, too. Kudos sir, if you want to learn more about icebergs, you can type in that word, I-C-E-B-E-R-G-S in the search bar Howstep works.com. I'll bring up this fine article by Edgarbanowski and I said, Search bar How Stuff Works, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one good email from Chicago guy. It's a terrible title. Just yesterday, guys, I was finished reading a book Robin Dunbar wrote called Grooming gossip and the Evolution of language. Her argument is that language evolved out of a need to keep up social relationships with group members put in its most basic form. Over time, our brains evolved to be larger, which made our average group size increase at the same time once our group size became large enough. Today our average group size is about 150. We didn't have enough time in the day to groom one on one with that many group members to keep up our social bonds with them. So we evolved language so we could use language as a way to verbally groom with more members at a time to keep the group strong. That's interesting. It was my understanding that our brains have actually decreased in size over the last like 20,000 years. Oh, really? Because of group size? Because it's increased and we have to rely less on our instincts and run from thunder and stuff like that. I smell a cage match. Another interesting experiment I read about is this two scientists were studying vervet monkeys in their natural habitat. They started recording the sounds of the vervettes and make notes about what they were doing when they made the noise. After examining a large sample of noises, they found a correlation between the sound they made and what was happening when they made it. I believe the noises were difficult to distinguish by the naked human ear, but the pattern was obvious when they compared large numbers of them together. The verb it made a different noise for when an air predator was spotted, when a ground predator was spotted, when approaching a dominant mail, et cetera. It's not quite language or lack syntax, but it's still more advanced than I thought they were, and that's pretty much it. I hope it wasn't too dense, but if it was and that is revenge for the sun podcast. That's a listener right there. That's right. And that is from Matt Shinka from Chicago. Thanks, Matt. Shunke. Goberz. Yeah. Go Bears. I guess I always like to hear about new books that I should be reading. Oh, sure, like we have any time for that anymore. Yeah. Did you hear that? That was limits. It was. Send us your book recommendations, suckers. You can turn it into syscapcast on Twitter. You can send it to facebook. Comstuffyjunknow. Don't send it. I guess you posted on that. Or you can send us an email. Good old fashioned electronic mail. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's Housetaffworks. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out. 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How Gene Editing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-gene-editing-works | With the discovery of a surprising immune response in E coli bacteria, we are facing a new era of freedom from genetic mutations that lead to disease by simply and precisely editing our genes. But there is also a potential dark side to gene editing. | With the discovery of a surprising immune response in E coli bacteria, we are facing a new era of freedom from genetic mutations that lead to disease by simply and precisely editing our genes. But there is also a potential dark side to gene editing. | Thu, 02 Jun 2016 17:32:11 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=17, tm_min=32, tm_sec=11, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=154, tm_isdst=0) | 32903910 | audio/mpeg | "This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog or an online store, it's all possible with a Squarespace website. And right now, listeners to Stuff You Should Know can start a free trial today. Just go to Squarespace.com and enter the offer code Stuff and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseoffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. Did you see that squirrel w Chuck Bryant picture? Yeah, it's pretty great. Big thanks to Sally Ridge. Illustrator drawer of things. Who made this one? We used to get a lot of fan art. Have you noticed we don't get that much anymore? Yeah, everybody takes us for granted, maybe. No, we get jingles now. Yeah. We get all kinds of cool stuff, but we just used to get a ton of fan art. And this is like one of the more delightful pieces of fan art we've ever gotten. We posted it on our Instagram, actually. Yeah. And Facebook. So thank you, Sally, for that and go to Sallyridge.net to see her work. I'm a little squirrel. I'm a weasel, which I don't know what to make of. Yeah, I'm just going with it. It's cute. I first saw that, too, and I was like, huh? Right. It was like if it was a weasel and a skunk, it'd be like, I really have to think it through. But as a squirrel, you have a little beard even, too. It's pretty cute and it's very cute. So, Chuck, we say all that to say, have you ever seen a gene, a grown gene, naked? Can you keep up with genes and DNA and all that nucleotides? Do you remember this stuff? A little bit. I had to go back and brush up on a little. If you have a primer, feel free. I have a bit of a primer. I'll probably screw it up royally. Well, I was going to say an alternate title for this show could be called how the CRISPR Jean Editing Works, aka what's Chuck Going to Mess Up? Yeah, it's sort of simple, but it also is a little mind pending. It's simple if you are a geneticist. Right. It's almost like laughably scarily simple. Yeah. But to people like us, it's like home. Sure. All right, well, let's go back. Let's talk a little bit about genes first. Right. So a little weasel and a squirrels. So if you go into one of those squirrels cells and you go into the nucleus of the cell, you're going to find a pair of chromosomes, right. And these chromosomes are made up of DNA, and the DNA itself is made up of nucleotide pairs. What is it? Ga to TC. Is that right? Ed. Nine goes to Thiamine and Guanine goes to Cytosine. Right. Okay. So you got gattaca. Yes. And when you put these amino acids together, you have what are called nucleotide based pairs, and they make up DNA. Now, if you take a strand of DNA, this thing from, it's like a Stanford site for dummies. So it really spoke to me, but it said that if you could stretch out your DNA, it would be like 6ft long. Did you know that that's all in the nucleus of a cell? I thought you were about to say it would be the exact height that you are. That'd be pretty neat. Yeah, my mind would have been blown. Yeah, that would be something else. Sure. Well, maybe it is because I'm about 6ft, because supposedly your wingspan is fingertip to finger tip is the same as your height. I've heard that before. That's not true, though, because some people have larger wing spans than others than their height, like proportionally. I got you. Anyway, go ahead. So it's just a dirty lie. I think so. Well, if you take this DNA, right, and you look at it, you can see that there's different sequences. And along this very long six foot strand of DNA, these sequences are broken down into what are called genes. Right. And so a gene is really just a string of nucleotide base pairs that create or lead to the production of a specific protein. And you say, okay, well, great. Protein we eat that. It's steak. Done. Yeah. No, proteins do way more than that. They're involved in just about every part of your body, from, like, the building blocks of cells to chewing, to blinking, to thinking. Like, proteins are very important, and your proteins are expressed through your genes. Okay, yeah, I think I got that fairly right. Every once in a while, this code, especially when a cell divides and the DNA that was in the original cell is copied to the new cell, that translation can go a little bit wrong. And so all of a sudden, along these billions of base pairs, there was a mistranslation. And what you have then is a mutation. For the most part, mutations are not problems, right? As a matter of fact, any one of us has something like an estimated five to ten deadly mutations in our genes right now. Crazy. But we only have one copy, and there are very few diseases that you only need one copy of a genetic defect for. Right, so we're basically fine. If you get two pairs of mutated, problematic genes, then you can have a disease. And there's a lot of diseases that are genetic in origin. Everything from cystic fibrosis to cancer is the result of a gene that's mutated and gone haywire. The whole point of everything I just said is that we, from the dawn of humanity, even before then, ever since we were little, amoeba, have been subject to the whims and vagaries of genetic mutations. Sometimes they help us, sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they create disease. But as of 2012, we are technically leaving the thumb of genetic mutations tyranny potentially. Yeah. Through CRISPR gene editing. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. It really is very tough I know I say this a lot. I think I said it's tough to underestimate the craze of super balls or something stupid like that. It's really tough to overstate how much the CRISPR gene editing technique could change humanity. Yeah. The world. If everything goes well, hopefully within the next decade, we'll see real human trials for some of these applications. That's the hope. Yeah. And it may happen, because this is one of the most heavily funded arms of scientific health medicinal research out there right now. It's also one of the newest, too. And it's already one of the most heavily funded because it's showing that much promise. Like, everybody keeps looking into it more and more and more, and they're like, every time they look at it, where they're like, we just unlocked a secret of life. We just figured it out. Yeah. And we can make so much money on it. So let's start a company and invest a lot of money in its research. All right, so CRISPR, C-R-I-S-P-R all Capitalized stands for clustered, regularly interspaced short Palindromic repeats, which is why they called it CRISPR, because that is a mouthful. And unless you're a geneticist, like you said, those string of words together probably just make your head spin. Right. But if you take them and separate them I watch this video. I can't remember who did it, but I'll post it on the podcast page. Was it a Ted Talk? No, it wasn't a Ted Talk. It was by a dude. What's? Bozeman Science. It was a Bosmann science video. It was really good bozeman Montana. It was just bozeman science. Okay, so now there's a Bozeman, Montana and a Boseman Science. But anyway, the guy on the video said just kind of take it separately. And it's actually two parts. You've got the short palindromic repeats are the thing, and the clustered, regularly interspaced, and kind of describes what that thing is. Right? Yeah. So the short palindromic repeats is what you need to focus on to start. Sure. But let's back up a little bit. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about genetically modifying things. We've been doing this for a while. Everyone knows about Dolly the sheep and cloning and genetically modified fruits and vegetables. Even selective breeding is a type of genetic modification. Sure. So it's nothing new. It's been going on for a while. But in the early 2000s, there was a discovery of an enzyme well, not a discovery of the enzyme, but a discovery of how to use an enzyme called the zinc finger nuclease. And what that would do is replace it would delete and replace very specific bad genes that would make you get a disease, let's say. Right. And it was a huge finding, but really expensive. Yes, they were about $5,000 a piece. And they didn't work every time, for sure. No. And they were just difficult to manufacture, difficult to understand, difficult to implement. But they did do something pretty amazing, which was they went in, removed a gene from a strip of DNA, and could replace it with another gene that you wanted. The thing is, it was just tough to use, basically. So it was a big breakthrough, but it wasn't a sweeping breakthrough because it was fragile and difficult and expensive. That's right. Fast forward to, I guess, go back in time. Rather than sophomore in high school, george Brett was the man. Yeah, sure. He was. John Quezc started to say anything in 87. Maybe something around there. I think that was 89. No, singles is like 89, 90. No, singles is definitely in the 90s, because I was but I think it was like 90. I'm going to go with 91. Please continue. All right, while you look that up. So 1987 is when the word CRISPR first appears in a journal article, because the scientists said, you know what? We found this thing in E. Coli. These short repeats. What year was it? 89. These short repeats and the E. Coli bacteria of DNA. And that's weird. There should not be repeats of DNA in this bacteria. So it was noteworthy. Yeah. What is that? Right? It's a little weird. So they took note and I guess just saying, he came out and they decided to watch Cameron Crow movies for the next decade. As of so they got bad. They started watching singles. And in 2012 is when CRISPR and this is just a few short years ago is when CRISPR really came on the scene. And that's when all this money started pouring into the research. And it's like advanced light years in the last four years. Right. And the big difference between what happened in 19 eight, seven and what happened in 2012 is that they figured out what these short palindromic repeats were. Right. You had these little strips of DNA in E. Coli, and then they found out later on. You can find it in most bacteria, if not at all. These short little strips seem to be separating out these random strings of DNA, but they separated them out in a regular interspersed manner. Right. So they looked at the little bits of random DNA and they realized that it matched viral DNA. Totally weird. Yeah. Because they're like, oh, wait, this is a bacteria. What is viral DNA doing in here? And someone I'm not exactly sure who. Princess Eugene Kunan. Kunan was a paradigm changing giant who is the untung hero in this coonan, said, you know what I think is going on? I think what we're seeing here is essentially a database that a bacteria houses in its own DNA, where when it's invaded by a virus, it captures that virus'dna or RNA, snips up some of it and stores it in this genetic database so that when it sees that again, it will recognize the virus and can attack it. Yeah. It's a genetic adaptation present, and it is not all bacteria, but in many bacteria cells to help it survive because the bacteria has, like, a few minutes once it starts to get attacked by a virus to live. Right. Okay. So it's part of its immune system. Right. This database of what's called CRISPR. Yeah. Then there's another thing that they figured out about bacteria that's associated with the CRISPR database in any given bacteria and a bacteria that has it. It's called CAS Nine. Crisper associated enzymes, I think. Yes. CAS nine. It's a protein. It's an RNA guided enzyme and protein. Right. And it has this really neat function. It goes to a virus or viral DNA or viral RNA, and it captures it, it unzips it, which is not everything can do that. And then it also precisely snips it and then delivers that snip to the bacteria's CRISPR database for storage. Yeah. So what you have is an edit, as opposed to, like, we've been working with genetic addition and transfer for years, like treating people with transferring into, like, bone marrow. But this is an actual edit. They liken it in this article, even though our own article never mentioned Cast Nine, which is like, I can't even believe. Yeah, you can't really have one with the other. No, it was weird. But this CAS Nine is literally they'd liken it to an assassin. Like, that comes in very surgically with a pair of scissors. Right. Very specifically removes, ideally, just that part, yet the bad part. So we'll talk a little more about this. We got to take a break, though, everybody. We're getting a little work done. So, Chuck, you were calling the CRISPR CAS Nine system, which is basically what it is, an assassin for bacteria. Right. It goes after the viruses, cuts them up. Somebody figured out along the line that you can take this natural bacterial immune response and sick it on not just viruses, but other stuff, not just somebody. Cal Berkeley scientist Jennifer Dudina. Yeah, she's going to win a Nobel Prize one day. She's totally up for it. And I would advise, if anyone is into Ted Talks, to watch her Ted Talk on this. Yes. It's really good. Yeah. So she is it dudna or daoudna? Well, I said dudna, but we'll go with daudna. Okay. One of those. Yes. She was the first to suggest that you can use this natural system to edit genes and other things. And I think they started out in very simple organisms, but what they found over time is that this seems to be universal, that as long as something has DNA, you can use the CRISPR CAS Nine system on it to edit genes. Yeah. She likened it to fixing a typo or she said it was like a genetic vaccination card that your cell can have. Yeah. So it goes in and sniffs out the bad part and sometimes it just joins from there and just repairs it. But other times it sticks something else in and joins it, right? Yeah. It depends on the system that you're using. You can just stick a Crisprcas Nine thing. So you basically give this bacterial immune response a little piece of the gene that you want edited, and it says it examines it just like it would if it were in a bacteria and it was being invaded by a virus. So it examines this gene and says, okay, this is what I need to go find. And it goes and finds it on a strand of DNA. And this thing doesn't care what DNA it's looking at. It's just doing its thing. Right. So if you stick it on any DNA, it's going to go find that sequence, that genetic sequence on whatever DNA it's exposed to yeah. The bad guy. And then it's going to unzip it, it's going to cut it out. And then one thing you can do is just say done and done, and then the DNA is going to repair itself. But what you've just done is remove that whole sequence of nucleotide base pairs that makes up a gene. And so when it fuses back together, it's going to be missing that gene. So you can delete a gene is what that's called, or you can add a third component, too, and say, here's what you're looking for, here's the guide RNA that you want to go find. Use the cast nine system to go cut it out, unzip it and cut it out, and then replace it with this. Here's some blueprints for what you should install in the place of the gene you just edited out. So you can delete and then now add whatever gene you want. And what they found is incredibly mind boggling, Chuck, is that you can take a gene from a different organism and put it into another organism. Yeah. You can basically just copy and paste and cut and paste DNA. And that's what the system is allowing people to do. So what does all this mean? It means you could potentially remove a gene for blindness. You could remove a gene for cystic fibrosis and repair. Well, we'll talk about HIV a little bit more in a minute. You could create more disease resistant crops. You could create a bioweapon that could wipe out a species. I mean, there are bad applications as well. Well, people have talked about that. Remember with Zika virus, like, people are saying, well, let's just get mosquitoes to stop reproducing and then that will stop the spread of Zika virus. What they're talking about is using gene editing. Yeah. And if you watch that Ted Talk from Jennifer Dowdna, she says we need to slow it down. I don't know if she was partnered. She said she co invented I don't know if it was Kunin or not, but whoever. Her partner in crime here is a French researcher, emmanuel something, I can't remember her last name. So she said they basically called for a moratorium for now and said everyone will just stop for a minute. Yeah, and everybody's like, how much money is going? There's a lot of money at stake, so we'll see where that goes. But she did call for a pause is what she called it, so they could kind of set up some guidelines on how to use and not misuse this technology. Yeah. And the reason why I salute her for that, that's a big deal. But that's a big problem that we're facing in this world, is that our technology is starting to outpace our understanding of all of the things it can do. And then in addition to that, it's becoming much more democratized to where people can get their hands on incredibly advanced technology in the comforts of their own home. And this is a really good example of that because the CRISPR system you can send off for on the Internet for anywhere from like thirty dollars to seventy five dollars, and you will have a bacteria that you can introduce your guide RNA to, or your host RNA to, and basically aerosolize it and expose it to a mouse. And that bacteria will go in and edit that mouse's genes. And you can do this if you know what you're doing with a relatively clunky setup in your home. It can be scary. Yeah. So, like the idea that we need to stop and talk about what direction we should go with this or what restrictions we should place on it, I think that's a fantastic idea. Well, yeah, because we did a show on designer children. Was it before 2012? I don't know. I would guess it came out of this because I don't remember hype over this. I don't remember talking about the CRISPR gene in that episode. But that's potentially one of the applications. I don't want my child to have Huntington's disease and it's in there, so let's take it out. Great. I also want my kid to be tall and have blue eyes. Right. Yeah. It gets a little dicey. It does, for sure. Designer humans. Well, just go back and listen to that episode. It's fraught with complications. You start to run into the idea of genetic or eugenics. Yeah, the have and the have nots. Because obviously not everyone could afford to do something like that. Sure. So then you have the wealthy Uber races even taller and blonder than ever. Right, exactly. But then they've also decided that tall and blonde is the ideal. So then they start editing people's genes who aren't tall and blonde. Right. And then all of a sudden you have nothing but tall and blonde people attica. Right. Like you said. I've never even seen that movie. It's a good one. Is it really? Yeah. Man. Like a thinking person's. Reindeer game scifi. You bring that movie up way too much. Just a thinking person's. Sci-fi. Future movie. Have you seen equilibrium with Christian Bale? No. I haven't either. It's got like three stars on Netflix and it's not enough for me to pull the trigger on. I've never heard of that, which is a bad sign. It seems like it's from about the same time as Gadda, maybe a little earlier. So it's older, but it's Christian Bale. He's good. Yeah, it's a little crazy. So good. We're done, you and me. He's never going to live that down. What a great tirade. All time great. He did it right before we shot our TV show, too. So we walked around on set. Like, seeing that all the time, that was a running joke. It was fine. You want to take another break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk about kind of where we are right now and what some people think about in the future. All right, Chuck. So obviously we're on the verge of great designer children, like, probably next week, right? Maybe. I don't think it's that quick. No. But I did read this article because this sounded too good to be true when I was reading it. I was like, man, the CRISPR gene that's going to solve everything from food shortage to every disease known to man. Well, like cancer, right? Cancer is basically the result of something called the P 53 protein not being expressed by a gene. And the P 53 protein goes in and says, hey, I think you're a tumor. You stop multiplying. And if that protein is not there to tell the cell to stop multiplying, it keeps multiplying, and all of a sudden you got a tumor, aka cancer. Right? So you could go in and just edit that gene to make sure the P 53 protein is expressed. Bam. You just cured cancer on the genetic level. So, yes, it could just improve the world. Correct, sir. So I read this article, I was all excited, and you should still be excited. This isn't a complete poopoo, right? But this is just like this week, the gene editor CRISPR won't fully fix sick people anytime soon, and here's why. So this lady, Jocelyn Kaiser, sort of throws a bit of a wet blanket on it, but not completely. She's just sort of like, there's still a ways to go. So here's one of the things, most diseases apparently, like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, where gene correction is already kind of a thing, like where they require gene correction. Basically, what she's saying is it has to be done in a living person. Like, you can't extract the cells and do it and then put the cells back in like they currently do with gene transfer. Oh, really? Because not enough of the cells will survive, apparently. Okay, so that's one of the roadblocks right now. You need to treat the cells inside the body. Well, one thing I have a big challenge. One thing I wonder, maybe this lady talks about it, but how do you direct the Crisprcas Nine system to the right cell? In her Ted talk, she doesn't get super specific. She says it's an RNA guided protein. Yeah, that's what I ran across, too. I didn't run across anybody said, oh, well, this is how yeah, I look for that too. I think we'll just call it the magic of science. Okay. Yeah, but I mean, it's very precise, though. It's not like they just throw it in there and see what happens. Right, so there's something guiding it. Yeah, it's a safety risk right now because when this CRISPR cleaves it off with the scissors, it is in a very specific location, but they don't know yet if it could potentially because once you've created these things, you deliver it through a viral vector, it's in there. And this Cast Nine is going to keep replicating itself for forever. Right. So they don't know if 15 years down the line if the thing starts cleaving causing cancer, basically. Right. But what they think now is they haven't seen that yet. So it's just like, let's keep an eye out for this. Yeah. So it's not like the worst news ever, but so far these mice are doing well, and that's not happening. Well, this is like, a very hot topic in bioethics as well. And one of the things that people, I'm sure like Dubner are pressing for is figuring out how to reverse engineer or reverse the effects of it, to engineer it so it stops after a while, so that if you did introduce it into a wild population, it wouldn't just wipe that population off the face of the Earth, it would eventually slow. Well, that's exactly what they're hoping to do, is that Cast Nine will eventually stop doing its thing. You can hope in one hand and then figure it out scientifically. No, they're trying to figure it out. Okay. Yeah. I thought you were saying, like yeah, they just oh, no, they know that's an issue and that's one of the roadblocks are trying to overcome. Got you. One of the other things is the cast line. It's a process that can only be active when the cells are actively dividing. Right. And apparently that's just not the liver, your stem cells, your eyes, your blood. It's not always actively dividing. So they're trying to work around that. Basically every limitation they found so far. They're saying it's not a it's not a deal breaker. It's not a deal breaker. It's a game changer. Yeah. We think we can figure something out to work around it. I'm sure they will. So that's the good news. It seems to be working too well and it's just too easy to do. They're not just going to leave it on the table. No way. Couldn't get around the liver cells not replicating and then we mentioned HIV earlier. This article needs updating on our site because it said that it kind of overcame HIV, but that's not true. Now, apparently, HIV defeated the efforts of the crisis right now. But again, they said that this doesn't mean it's over. We think we can overcome this as well. And that eventually could be a cure for HIV right now. And they said they weren't too surprised because HIV, if you go back and listen to our episode on that, it is a tough cookie and has a knack for mutating and replicating in the face of all kinds of drugs. But they think if they use those drugs along with this, maybe that could be an alternative. Yes. I mean, the future is bright. I think it's so early in the game, is the deal. But that's why I think a pause is a good idea. I don't know if I've gotten that across, but I feel like a pause is a good idea. Yes. There's one other thing I ran across. In researching something called the DNA drive, you can take this CRISPR gene, CRISPR CAS nine system, and you can add this other component called the DNA drive. Right. Okay. This DNA drive is basically like it has the ability to, during reproduction, to not only take the edited gene or not only to edit a gene in, say, a mosquito, but when that mosquito reproduces, the chromosomes that are contributed with the edited gene basically break the corresponding spot on the other parents chromosome. And then when it repairs itself, inserts the blueprint so that the edited gene is copied. So then the offspring has both one pair of the edited gene, which means when they reproduce and they reproduce with somebody else that has both pairs of the same gene, their offspring has a 100% chance of inheriting that gene. Wow. And so it can spread through a population of mosquitoes at once, and then it fixes it for your family. Fixes it or keeps you from reproducing or whatever the gene is. Yes. And in a large population, say, like a big mosquito population, that means you can spread the edited gene in, like, a single growing season. But that's one reason why people are like, we need to figure out how to be able to turn this off because maybe we need mosquitoes. It turns out we shouldn't just wipe them off the face of the Earth. Although, remember we did a show on that, and some scientists think, no, we don't need them. Yeah, I remember that. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I'm sure we can do a follow up on this if we want. Sure. If you want to know more about the CRISPR gene editing suite, you can type that word into the search barhouseofworks.com. Is insisted. Search bar. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this LSD. I got a lot of great emails from just read this. From people who use it and like it. Hey guys, love the show. It's been great to learn so much about a variety of topics to and from work. I recently listened to LSD. Now to share my story. Three years ago, my father died unexpectedly with stroke and it took my whole family by surprise and became very depressed for months and felt like I was diving into an autopilot and wasn't finding any enjoyment in my day to day life. One night I was hanging out with my friends. I was offered some LSD I had taken some years ago and had a wonderful experience with it, so I thought maybe this could be helpful. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made. Wow. I had several powerful revelations about life and developed a deeper appreciation for my friends and family and for the love that binds us all together. I also gained a fresh perspective on how much beauty there is in the world and how I am a part of it. This experience really helped set me back on the right path and there's a moment in my life that can point to as life changing. I believe the drug has a lot of potential for psychiatric use, can be immensely beneficial with helping people work through serious psychological and emotional issues. I truly hope that it is reclassified from schedule one so it can be further studied, seen as a medicinal aid and not a harmful chemical. And that, I'm going to just say, is from Anonymous because I didn't hear back whether or not this dude wanted his name right on the air. Thanks a lot, Anonymous. Anonymous, man. And thanks to everybody who sent in emails like that. We heard from a lot of people who are like, yeah, I really love acid. They weren't stories from people that are like, oh, you got to hear this, man. Yes. I was like, hey, I enjoy taking LSD sometimes and I'm a responsible grown up adult and nothing that helps me out. I don't think we got a single one that was just a jackass taking LSD. Like, all of them were very thoughtful because that's our audience, buddy. Yeah. Drug users. If you want to get in touch with us to let us know just about anything, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Instagram, that's s yskpodcast as well. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks or, if you're brave enough, late nights with so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder. You'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." |
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